Announcements

Please join us for our next Socratic Seminar. A special thank you to our sponsors CardCoins, Chaincode Labs and ZEBEDEE for food, refreshments and event space. There will be a demo of Mercury Wallet’s coinswap facility at the event.

Mailing Lists, Meetings and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• Neutrino, Taproot, and The Evolution of BiPs 157/158
• Taproot activates - A time/block line
• A fee-bumping model

lightning-dev

• Route reliability<->fee trade-off control parameter
• Lightning over taproot with PTLCs
• LN Summit 2021 Notes & Summary/Commentary

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • 23173 - Add ChainstateManager::ProcessTransaction
  • 23280 - Coalesce Chainstate loading sequence between {,non-}unittest codepaths
  • 23319 - Return fee and prevout (utxos) to getrawtransaction
  • 23512 - policy: Treat taproot as always active
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • October 28th
  • November 4th
  • November 11th
  • November 18th
  • November 25th
• Bitcoin Core wallet meetings
  • November 19th
• c-lightning meetings
  • November 1st
  • November 15th
• dlc-specs meetings
  • November 9th
• Lightning specification meetings
  • November 8th
  • November 22nd

Optech

• Newsletter #173
• Newsletter #174
• Newsletter #175
• Newsletter #176

Network Data

• Alex Bosworth’s routing fee stats by type (ytd 2021)
• Asus EEE 900 IBD stats
• Bitcoin Network Monitor
• Discussion of Ethereum blockchain size
• Explore, sort and filter Bitcoin outputs
• New plots on transactionfee.info - feerates in blocks, taproot spending transactions
• Percentage of pruned nodes, discussion
• Some experiments with mempool visualizations in Bitcoin Core
• taproot.watch will remain available even though taproot has activated
• Taproot activated, but delayed taproot spend inclusions in two pools - antpool, f2pool
• The 140k (remaining) Mt Gox Coins
• Visualizing ~16k Lightning nodes with HoloView and bokeh
• Whale Alerts falsely triggering on FTX change outputs

Research

• Analysis and Patterns of Unknown Transactions in Bitcoin
• Analysis of Decentralized Mixing Services in the Greater Bitcoin Ecosystem
• Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market
• Comparative Analysis of Lightning’s Routing Clients
• Estimation of Ransomware Payments in Bitcoin Ecosystem
• Flexible Anonymous Transactions (FLAX): Towards Privacy-Preserving and Composable Decentralized Finance
• Impermanent Loss in Uniswap v3
• On Cryptocurrency Wallet Design
• Route Discovery in Private Payment Channel Networks
• The Weighted Bitcoin Lightning Network
• Where is the Light(ning) in the Taproot Dawn? Unveiling the Bitcoin Lightning (IP) Network

InfoSec

• Analysis of Conti Ransomeware group, discussion
• BLACKSMITH: Scalable Rowhammering in the Frequency Domain
• BbZx developer phished, $55 million stolen
• Creamed Cream – Learn the Secret Recipe (Cream Hack Analysis)
• Deep-fakes being used in social media account takeovers
• Deep reorgs on Polygon
• How to manipulate Uniswap’s time-weighted average price oracles
• lntxbot exploit
• On the security of Booba’s music video and NFTs
• NPM fixes private package names leak, serious authorization bug
• Some Umbrel users lightning nodes drained
• Robinhood data breach effects 7 million customers
• To Swat a Swatter

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• Make AddrMan support multiple ports per IP
• Add verification to Sign, SignCompact and SignSchnorr
• Full CJDNS support
• Let validateaddress locate error in Bech32 address
• wallet: Make a tr() descriptor by default

rust-bitcoin

• P2TR address from untweaked key

lnd

• channeldb+invoices: enable repeated payments to AMP invoices via new HTLC key prefix storage
• etcd: enable full remote database support
• Increasing LND reliablity by clustering
• peer: always send latest block header as part of ping messages

eclair

• Preparing for onion messages

c-lightning

• wallet/db_sqlite3.c: Support direct replication of SQLITE3 backends
• v0.10.2: Bitcoin Dust Consensus Rule Latest

rust-lightning

• Implement channel_type negotiation
• Penalize failed channels

BIPs

• Minor Updates to BIP-119
• BIP341 test vectors

BOLTs

• BOLT 7: Onion message support (features 38/39)

BTCPay Server

• LNURL Payment Method Support

New Releases

• btcpayserver v1.3.2 - critical security patch
• c-lightning v0.10.2 - CVE-2021-4159 patch, payment retry improvements, more
• fork-explorer - see the status of a BIP9 deployment
• FullyNoded v0.2.30 - taproot support, more
• IMMORTAN v0.4.6 - PSBT and UR support, v0.5.6 - coin control
• ledger-live-desktop v2.35.0 - taproot support
• lnd 0.14.1 - fix of cross-implementation channel open failures, hybrid tor connectivity, in-memory path finding, explicit channel negotiation, more
• lnvault - LN support for Minecraft
• mako - full node implementation in C
• rust-lightning v0.0.103 - payment retrires
• seedsigner v0.4.5 - custom XPUB derivation paths
• secp256k1-py v0.14.0 - schnorr interface changed, new maintainer, latest libsecp256k1, more
• SimpleBitcoinWallet v2.3.18 - watch-only and hardware wallet support, v2.4.18 - coin control
• spark-wallet v0.3.0 - BOLT 12 offers
• tor v0.4.5.11 - v2 hidden services disabled
• umbrel v0.4.8 - security update
• WalletWasabi v1.1.13.0 - tor updates

Events and Podcasts

• Chaincode Podcast: Sanket Kanjalkar and Miniscript
• Covenants panel at TABConf
• Citadel Dispatch e42 - security focused bitcoin nodes with @nixbitcoinorg, @n1ckler, and @seardsalmon
• Citadel Dispatch e44 – using secure random number generators to generate bitcoin keys with waxwing and @raw_avocado
• Citadel Dispatch e45 – the future of mobile lightning wallets with @ericsirion, @akumaigorodski, and @fiatjaf
• LNbits: Extending the Lightning Stack with Ben Arc - LNJ051
• Sydney Socratic Seminar - Go Up Number (Bitcoin Betting on Twitter)
• SLP319 T-Bast Lightning Protocol Privacy Exploration
• SLP320 Statechains and Mercury Wallet: A New Privacy Technique?
• TABConf 2021
• Taproot activation livestream
• The Bitcoin Development Podcast Episode 1 - Mempool Policy with John Newbery and Gloria Zhao
• The Bitcoin Development Podcast Episode 2 - Mempool Ancestors and Descendants with John Newbery and Gloria Zhao

Mining

• Compass Mining announces 140 MW facility powered by nuclear and hydro
• Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

Miscellaneous

• 1000sat payment tests
• @Benma bug bounty donated to Brink
• A story of the double spend during the March 2013 fork
• Coinjoin done right
• Covenant-style vaults with ANYPREVOUT
• Bitcoin’s Carbon Footprint
• Bitcoin vs Ethereum – Blockchain Size
• Blockspace supply is inelastic
• BSC validators angry with node performance, discussion
• Compact Block Filters Deep Dive
• Default btcpayserver instance too small for lnd in pruned mode
• Designing a foolproof script upgrading mechanism
• Discussion of pruning Ethereum nodes
• Gemini Sponsors Bitcoin Core Maintainer, Fanquake
• History of BIP32
• How to setup Lightning message channels in Joinmarket
• How will lightning announcements work post taproot?
• Introducing tbDEX
• Jeremy Rubin on ANYPREVOUT
• Ledger will support PSBTs and Descriptors in v2.0 app
• Neutrino/taproot issues
• Mercury wallet statechain torch
• Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Test (Round V)
• MEV affecting p2p/networking layer of Avalanche
• PeerSwap - Decentralized P2P LN Balancing Protocol
• Preventing Channel Jamming
• Response to AJ Towns’ Blog Post about Liquid Consensus Changes
• Square Crypto awards grant to @Bosch
• Tor Project sees decline in server numbers, will offer rewards for new bridge operators
• The first BDK Taproot TX: a look at the code (Part 1)
• Verifying dice seed generation on seedsigner
• Virtual load-balancing for lightning nodes: how to do it at home
• Wasabi Wallet 1BTC Lightning Network privacy grant
• Why is bitcoin inherently volatile?