Citadel Dispatch CD185: ROB AND ANDREAS - BETTER BITCOIN WALLETS
Dec 2, 2025
Rob, the developer behind Kyoto, and Andreas, the creator of Bitcoin Safe, delve into the world of Bitcoin wallets. They discuss compact block filters and their potential to enhance privacy and streamline wallet synchronization. Rob shares the origins of Kyoto, emphasizing its focus on lightweight, private nodes. Andreas highlights the importance of hardware-only wallets for secure cold storage. The duo also explores multisig coordination over Nostr, addressing the challenges and future of user experience in Bitcoin wallet development.
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BDK As The Wallet Foundation
- BDK is a reusable, well-tested toolkit that removes wallet implementation risks and UX pitfalls for developers.
- Rob and Andreas stress that BDK enables safe, cross-language wallet building with fewer mistakes and clearer user feedback.
Origin Story: Vision From A Talk
- Rob recounts seeing a talk on compact block filters and imagining lightweight private nodes everywhere like home routers.
- That vision motivated him to implement Kyoto in Rust because Go implementations were less accessible to many devs.
CBF As The Privacy-Resource Tradeoff
- Compact block filters offer a middle ground: high privacy with low resource needs, without running a full node.
- They prevent address bucketing by servers, reducing long-term privacy leaks from centralized lookups.