Announcements

Please join us for our next Socratic Seminar. A special thank you to our sponsors BNY Mellon, CardCoins, Chaincode Labs and ZEBEDEE for food, refreshments and event space.

This meetup is scheduled for September and contains material from August.

Mailing Lists, Meetings and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• Removing the Dust Limit
• Announcing bip174.org, a web-based PSBT viewer and editor
• Proposal for a few IANA mime-types related to Bitcoin
• Braidpool: Proposal for a decentralised mining pool
• TAPLEAF_UPDATE_VERIFY covenant opcode
• Reorgs on SigNet - Looking for feedback on approach and parameters
• BIP extensions
• Proposal: Package Mempool Accept and Package RBF

lightning-dev

• Turbo channels specification
• #zerobasefee
• Do we really want users to solve an NP-hard problem when they wish to find a cheap way of paying each other on the Lightning Network?
• Stateless invoices with proof-of-payment
• Ask First, Shoot (PTLC/HTLC) Later
• DNS records for LN nodes
• Dropping Tor v2 onion services from node_announcement

dlc-specs

• Breaking Changes Discussion

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • 22340 - Use legacy relaying to download blocks in blocks-only mode
  • 20295 - rpc: getblockfrompeer
  • Testing Bitcoin Core 22.0 Release Candidates
  • 22665 - Don’t return incorrect replaceability status
  • Extract RBF logic into policy/rbf
  • Decide which coin selection solution to use based on waste metric
  • Cut the validation <-> txmempool circular dependency
  • Discourage CSV as NOP when locktime disable is set & discourage unknown nSequence
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • August 5th
  • August 12th
  • August 19th
  • August 26th
  • September 2nd
  • September 9th
  • September 16th
  • September 23rd
• Bitcoin Core wallet meetings
  • August 13th
  • August 27th
  • September 10th
  • September 24th
• c-lightning meetings
  • August 9th
  • August 23rd
  • September 6th
• dlcspecs
  • September 15th
• Lightning Specification Meetings
  • August 16th - August 30th - September 13th - September 27th

Optech

• Newsletter #160
• Newsletter #161
• Newsletter #162
• Newsletter #163
• Newsletter #164
• Newsletter #165
• Newsletter #166
• Newsletter #167
• Newsletter #168

Network Data

• Average vsize of inputs has diminished 14.4% YTD
• bech32m adoption (wallets, explorers, exchanges)
• Bitfinex sends accidental $23.7 fee
• bos+lnmarkets routing traffic volume
• Comparing the traffic and bandwidth usage of an erlay-node to a master-branch node
• Decrease in total P2PKH and P2SH UTXOs, increase in native segwit UTXOs
• First native segwit address added to OFAC list
  • ~600 UTXOs totaling 65.5BTC on the 80 OFAC sanctioned addresses
• Gas price volatility reduction after deployment of EIP-1559
• Global speedups in Bitcoin with hashmaps
• Hashrate recovers to 90% of ATH
• Lightning network capacity increases to 2,900 BTC
• LNBIG - 24 hour node states, closing small channels with nodes it wumbos with, consolidation, inbound liquidity stream data
• LN propagation tests
• LN routing traffic growing
• nix-bitcoin joinmarket orderbook-watcher now displays fidelity bonds
• Profiling Bitcoin Core with Prodfiler
• Stale block at 697008
• Taproot readiness: 55% of nodes upgraded
• UTXO set reduction
• WabiSabi Testnet transaction
• 220,999 total bitcoin mixed with Wasabi Wallet

Research

• A Privacy Protection Method of Lightweight Nodes in Blockchain
• Clover: an Anonymous Transaction Relay Protocol for the Bitcoin P2P Network
• C.R.E.A.M Finance drained of $18.8m
• Darlin: Recursive Proofs using Marlin
• Differential Privacy in Constant Function Market Makers
• eltoo with Anyprevout and Taproot
• Estimating the Node Degree of Public Peers and Detecting Sybil Peers Based on Address Messages in the Bitcoin P2P Network
• Extracting multiple uniform numbers from a hash
• Generalizing Weighted Trees: A Bridge from Bitcoin to GHOST
• MProve+: Privacy Enhancing Proof of Reserves Protocol for Monero
• On the Claims of Weak Block Synchronization in Bitcoin
• Onion Routing with Replies
• Pinpointing and Measuring Wasabi and Samourai CoinJoins in the Bitcoin Ecosystem
• Summarizing and Analyzing the Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies
• Simplicity: Taproot and Universal Sighashes
• The Exact Security of BIP32 Wallets
• Zerojoin: Combining Zerocoin and CoinJoin
• 3-of-3 Multisignature Approach for Enabling Lightning Network Micro-payments on IoT Devices

InfoSec

• Bitcoin stolen in failed COMIT network BTC <-> Monero Atomic Swap
• Bitcoin.org DNS Hijacked?
• Cloudflare thwarts 17.2M rps DDoS attack — the second largest ever reported
• Coinbase sends accidental 2FA reset notification to customers
• Correlation attack on visits to tor v2 onion addresses
• DAO Maker drained of $7m
• DDoS attacks against various Lightning and Bitcoin services
• Ethereum netsplit, bug explained
• Hacker returns funds in $612 million Poly Network hack
  • Poly Network hacker receives $500k bounty
• Jay Peg Auto Mart front-end compromised, $3.1m stolen
• Kraken Security Labs Identifies Vulnerabilities In Commonly Used Bitcoin ATM
• Leaked Slides Show How Chainalysis Flags Crypto Suspects for Cops
  • Tracing the WannaCry 2.0 Monero Transactions
• Maris botnet DDoS breaks DDoS record with 21.8M rps
• Misconfigured T-Mobile gateway GPRS support node leads to theft of 50 million customer records
• NSO Group iMessage Zero-Click Exploit Captured in the Wild
• Punk Protocol drained of $8.9m, ~$5m returned by front-running bot
• Secure env vars of all public Travis CI repositories were injected into PR builds, context
• Solana DDoS
• VEE Finance drained of $34m
• XToken drained of $4.5m
• $90 Million stolen from Liquid exchange, funds flowing through tornado.cash, wasabi and defi protocols, more info

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• Tracing: first tracepoints and documentation on User-Space, Statically Defined Tracing (USDT)
• Reduce addr blackholes
• Release with separate SHA256SUMS and sig files
• Mempool ancestor/descendant limits for packages
• Add an option to list private descriptors
• Add a new RPC command: restorewallet
• Decide which coin selection solution to use based on waste metric

BIPS

• BIPs 380-386 Output Script Descriptors

lnd

• Atomic batch channel funding
• Support remote signing over RPC
• In-memory graph cache for faster pathfinding
• etcd: enable full remote database support
• Refresh peer IP during reconnect
• Add new delpayments command line option
• Support pruned bitcoind backends
• Bake and validate macaroons with external permissions
• kvdb: add postgres
• Eliminating the need for certificates with the grpc / automating validation of certificates

BOLTs

• Bolt12 Offers (updated with C-Lightning 0.10.1)
• Websocket address type: allow transport over RFC6455

eclair

• Tor support for blockchain watchdogs
• Make Tor optional for blockchain watchdogs
• Pathfinding AB testing
• Implement anchor outputs zero fee htlc txs

c-lightning

• experimental-websocket: option to accept websocket connections on lightning port
• Improve connectd to try non-tor connection first and filter duplicates
• Offers: make decode command available even without experimental-offers

New Releases

• agora
• Bitcoin Core v0.21.2 release candidate
• Bitcoin Core v22.0
• blind-xpub
• BlueWallet v6.2.4
• bridgeaddr
• BTCPay Server v1.2.0, context
• c-lightning v0.10.1
• circuitbreaker v0.3.0
• coldcard v4.1.3
• ecli
• fiat-crypto
• green-qt, context
• lightning-terminal v0.5.1-alpha
• lndmanage v0.13.0
• LNURLPoS, context
• joininbox v0.6.0
• joinmarket v0.9.1
• mempool v2.2.1
• nix-bitcoin v0.0.49
• p2plnbot
• rust-lightning v0.0.100
• sparrow v1.5.0
• satdress
• seedsigner v0.4.4
• Simple Bitcoin Wallet v2.0, v2.1.12
• specter-desktop
• ThunderCloud
• umbrel v0.4.1

Events and Podcasts

• Lightning Friday - Lisa Neigut on Liquidity Ads / Lightning MEV
• Lightning Friday - Bolt12/Offers for Content Creators with Rusty Russell and Stephan Livera
• LNJ048 - Lightning Network on Meshnets with Richard Myers
• SLP298 Rusty Russell – Lightning Offers / BOLT12
• SLP301 Bitcoin Mining Pools Decentralised? A Discussion with Pavel Moravec of SlushPool & Ryan Ellis of Laurentia Pool
• Sydney Socratic Semninar - Bitcoin/Monero Atomic Swaps
• Sydney Socratic Semninar - Differentially Private Payment Channels
• Sydney Socratic Semninar - Donner: UTXO-Based Virtual Channels Across Multiple Hops
• Van Wirdum Sjorsnado 44 - BOLT 12
• WBD - Mastering Lightning with Andreas M. Antonopoulos & René Pickhardt

Mining

• Bitcoin Mining in Canada is Thriving Despite Stringent Regulations
• Blockstream acquires Spondoolies, raises $210M
• Prototype for home mining sound and weatherproof enclosure
• TSMC increasing wafer prices

Miscellaneous

• Accounts, Strict Access Lists, and UTXOs
• ACINQ Strike launched on mainnet
• BitcoinBinary - tracking reproducibility of hardware signer firmwares and wallet software
• Bitcoin Core 22.0 rc testing guide
• BitGo migrating to native segwit change outputs
• BitMEX announces developer grant fo Sjors Provoost
• Committee-driven MEV smoothing
• Compass commits to sponsor Bitcoin Core developer Jon Atack
• eltoo with Anyprevout and Taproot
• Federal Reserve - What is programmable money?
• Federated Lightning Address Servers - payaddress.co, paymentlink.xyz, tinytip.me
• Fixing The Privacy Gap In Proof Of Liability Protocols
• FTX Donates $450K to Brink
• HRF distributes 3.75 Bitcoin to 10 projects
• Interesting updates to lightning network under development
• Lightning Address, Docs Repository, context
• Lightning Liquidity Management Guide
• Lightning’s Missing Piece: A Decentralized Liquidity Market
• LNRouter Lookups - Help node operators make informed decisions
• Mercury Wallet: on-chain coinjoin belnded with off-chain coinswaps
• Onion Messaging in Depth
• PUSH_ANNEX_ITEMS
• Setting Up Liquidity Ads in c-lightning
• Scaling Lightning Network at River
• Signet faucet now supports bech32m
• Sigagg Case Study: LN Channel Announcements
• STARKS added as a new tapscript leaf version
• Square Crypto Grants - BTCPayServer, adibitcoin, Lightning Signer, John Cantrell, Stephen DeLorme
• Summer of Bitcoin - Liftoff!
• This Month in Bitcoin Privacy - August
• Unchained Capital sponsors mempool.space
• US sanctions cryptocurrency exchange used by ransomware gangs
• Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support for Bitcoin Core
• Why Cross input signature aggregation requires a new segwit version