Brink engineer Michael Ford (fanquake) presented an update on his
multi-year effort to ship fully static bitcoind binaries,
along with an overview of an experimental LLVM-only release toolchain.
In his presentation, he discussed:
- Static versus dynamic linking and trade-offs
- The previous musl libc approach
- Splitting the Guix builds into separate
bitcoindand GUI containers - Running the same binary on older glibc systems, musl-based distributions, and scratch Docker containers
- Dead code elimination and merging duplicate code
- Open questions on release strategy and CI coverage
- An experimental LLVM-only toolchain
- Why fully static macOS and Windows binaries are out of scope
- Q&A with the audience
This discussion was recorded on September 11, 2026.
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