Announcements

Until our community can meet again in person, we’ll continue to share all the latest research and developments through our monthly newsletter.

Mailing Lists and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• BIP proposal: Anti-fee-sniping protection with nSequence in taproot transactions to improve privacy for off-chain protocols
• BIP proposal: Taproot Fields for PSBT
• BIP proposal: Output Script Descriptors
• Proposal: Full-RBF in Bitcoin Core 24.0

lightning-dev

• bLIPs: A proposal for community-driven app layer and protocol extension standardization
• Second IRC workshop on L2 onchain support and wrap up
• Interactive tx construction and UTXO privacy, some thoughts

Optech

• Newsletter #151
• Newsletter #152
• Newsletter #153
• Newsletter #154

Network Data

• Taproot locks in as 5th fastest soft fork deployment
• Three consecutive downward difficulty adjustments following Chinese mining crackdown
• Mempool clears for the first time since December 2020
• Segwit spends reach 70%
• Lightning nodes, channels and BTC capacity at all time highs
• ACINQ lightning node data
• Net outflow of BTC across exchanges

Research

• Practical Settlement Bounds for Proof-of-Work Blockchains
• An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Throughput Bottlenecks, Potential Solutions, and Future Prospects
• Optimal Mining: Maximizing Bitcoin Miners’ Revenues
• Elmo: Recursive Virtual Payment Channels for Bitcoin

InfoSec

• oss-fuzz finds bugs in Bitcoin Core
• Victims of Ledger Hack are receiving fake hardware wallets
• Wasabi Wallet DDoS attack
• Binance helps take down Cl0p ransomware crew
• Intel patches 73 security vulnerabilities
• Apple announced iCloud Private Relay
• Polygon Bridge vulnerability
• Nano nodes fall out of sync following spam attack
• Titan Token collapse
• Eleven Finance drained of $4.5 million
• Stablemagnet rugpulls $27 million
• SafeDollar stablecoin drained, values drop to $0
• Merlin Labs shutters following third exploit
• THORChain exploit
• FBI turned encrypted messaging app into honeypot
• Colonial Pipeline compromised by single VPN password
  • Colonial Pipeline and DarkSide Ransomware on-chain flows, info on seizure
• Malicious PyPI packages hijack devices to mine cryptocurrency
• Norton antivirus can now mine Ethereum while GPU is idle
• Microsoft’s Halo dev site breached using dependency hijacking
• Microsoft admits to signing rootkit malware in supply-chain fiasco

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• Enable packages through testmempoolaccept
• Update Windows code signing certificate
• Increase OUTPUT_GROUP_MAX_ENTRIES to 100
• Basic Taproot derivation support for descriptors
• Remove tor v2 support
• Additional BIP32 test vector for hardened derivation with leading zeros
• UI external signer support (e.g. hardware wallet)
• Update libsecp256k1 subtree to latest master
• Basic Taproot signing support for descriptor wallets
• Randomize message processing peer order
• Update inbound eviction protection for multiple networks, add I2P peers

c-lightning

• invoice: allow creation of giant invoices
• Bech32m support
• EXPERIMENTAL: Wumbo htlc support
• rfc-proposal: relax closing fee requirements

lnd

• lnd v0.13.0-beta
• loop v0.14.1-beta
• lnwallet: prevent anchor reserve enforcement on legacy inbound channel
• kvdb: add postgres
• RPC/CLI: Allow abandonchannel to be used in regular build
• lnd: only set payment address if not empty in PaymentRequest

BOLTs

• Remove HTLC amount restriction

eclair

• Reject 0-value trampoline payments
• Update to Bitcoin Core 0.21.1

New Releases

• rust-lightning 0.0.98
• lndmanage merges support for batched/coin-controlled channel opening
• PeerSim - transaction relay simulator
• joinmarket 0.8.3
• Electrum 4.1.3
• specter-diy 1.5.5
• sparrow 1.4.2
• samourai-dojo 1.10.1
• bisq v1.7.0

Events and Podcasts

• Bitcoin 2021 - Day 1, Day 2
• Compass Podcast - Bitcoin Mining News
• Matt Corallo, Rusty Russel and AJ Towns on soft fork activation methods
• Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing - Signature Half Aggregation in C
• Wasabikas 14.0 Simply Beautiful Cryptography - Lloyd Fournier
• Wasabikas 16.0 - Improving the Bitcoin Lightning Network - Rusty Russell
• Wasabikas 19.0 Chaincase: Next Generation Bitcoin CoinJoin on iOS Mobile - Dan Gould
• SLP287 Danny Scott and Zakk Lakin – Hoffline wallets & Lightning adoption
• The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado - How the Bitcoin Improvement Process Works
• The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado - Taproot Lock-in
• LN Junkies - Ruben Somsen - ANYPREVOUT & Eltoo

Mining

• Bitcoin hashrate drops by nearly 50% following China’s mining crackdown
• North American Bitcoin Mining Index
• Global Suspension Announcement of Antminer Spot Sales

Miscellaneous

• History of Taproot
  • Taproot - what it is, and what it isn’t
• RBF Batching at CardCoins: Diving into the Mempool’s Dark Reorg Forest
• DLCs vs Multisig: Censorship Resistance
• Lightning Mints - Blind eCash Federation
• Announcing lnd 0.13-beta: Get Amped on Lightning!
• Soft fork sentiment survey
• Bitcoin UI Kit
• Announcing the Bitcoin Design Guide
• BitMEX renews Gelb Naumenko’s Bitcoin developer grant
• Gemini sponsors Dhruv Mehta and Jarol Rodriguez
• Strike grant for jonatack
• BlockFi donates $150k to Brink
• A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
• Lightning Ubiquity and the United Nations of Bitcoin
• Sideswap Protocol
• This Month in Bitcoin Privacy - May