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.

Presentation

• Stephen DeLorme and Bitcoin Design Community Members - Design Thinking for Bitcoin Developers

Mailing Lists Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• TXHASH + CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY in lieu of CTV and ANYPREVOUT
• Improving RBF Policy
• CTV Meeting Notes - #2, #3
• CTV Signet Parameters
• OP_EVICT: An Alternative to OP_TAPLEAFUPDATEVERIFY

lightning-dev

• [RFC] Lightning gossip alternative
• Channel Eviction From Channel Factories By New Covenant Operations

dlc-dev

• SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT allows significant improvement in DLC transferability

Optech

• Newsletter #185
• Newsletter #186
• Newsletter #187
• Newsletter #188

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • Libsecp256k1 #748 Add usage examples (math and cryptography)
  • 24152 CPFP fee bumping within packages (tx fees and policy, validation)
  • 23542 Open p2p connections to nodes that listen on non-default ports (p2p)
  • 24098 Use query parameters to control resource loading (build system, rpc/rest/zmq)
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • January 27th
  • February 3rd
  • February 10th
  • February 17th
• Bitcoin Core wallet meetings
  • January 28th
  • February 11th
• dlc-specs meetings
  • February 8th
• Lightning specification meetings
  • January 31st
  • February 14th

Network Data

• Analyzing Bitcoin mining’s energy and carbon impact
• ASIC price comparison tool
• Bitcoin Address Re-use Statistics
• Bitcoin’s Lowest Block Hash Values
• Chainalysis - The 2022 Crypto Crime Report
• Is the Bitcoin Network Slowing Down?
• Lightning Payment Speed 2022, discussion, more discussion
• Lightning Probing Data
• median value of payments routed through LNBIG
• Mempool depth reaches 60 blocks
• Stale block at height 723102
• submarine swap data
• zero fee routing node routes 6 BTC in one day

Research

• Attack Cost and Profit from Manipulating Constant Product Market Maker TWAP Oracles in DeFi Protocols
• AuxChannel: Enabling Efficient Bi-Directional Channels for Scriptless Blockchains
• CoinPool: efficient off-chain payment pools for Bitcoin
• CryptoMaze: Privacy-Preserving Splitting of Off-Chain Payments
• GMHL: Generalized Multi-Hop Locks for Privacy-Preserving Payment Channel Networks
• Hiding payments in lightning network with approximate differentially private payment channels
• Hours of Horus: Keyless Cryptocurrency Wallets
• Insightful Mining Equilibria
• LightPIR. Privacy-Preserving Route Discovery for Lightning (paper summary and analysis), twitter
• One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Transaction DoS in MimbleWimble Blockchains
• Speeding up block propagation in Bitcoin network: Uncoded and coded designs
• The impact of hardware specifications on reaching quantum advantage in the fault tolerant regime
• The Weighted Bitcoin Lightning Network
• Tree Representation, Growth Rate of Blockchain and Reward Allocation in Ethereum with Multiple Mining Pools
• Trust Dies in Darkness: Shedding Light on Samsung’s TrustZone Keymaster Design
• Twilight: A Differentially Private Payment Channel Network

InfoSec

• Austrian Programmer And Ex Crypto CEO Likely Stole $11 Billion Of Ether
• Bitfinex hack - the seizure, complaint, funds flow1, funds flow2, clues
• DEGO Finance drained of $10m
• Elsevier tracking pdf downloads
• highly targeted phishing attack
• IRAFinancial Gemini Accounts drained of $36 million, more info
• Meter drained of $4.25m
• Optimisum Rollup money printing bug
• PwnKit: Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Discovered in polkit’s pkexec (CVE-2021-4034)
• Retrospective: Recent Coinbase Bug Bounty Award, more info
• Superfluid drained of $8.7m
• Qubit Finance drained of $80m
• Wormhole brige drained of $300m

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• Boost removal - std::filesystem, header-only Boost, libmultiprocess
• release: support cross-compiling for arm64-apple-darwin
• Add CBlockIndex lock annotations, guard nStatus/nFile/nDataPos/nUndoPos by cs_main
• Add getdeploymentinfo RPC
• ARMv8 SHA2 Intrinsics

eclair

• Eclair 0.7.0
• Database migration Sqlite->Postgres

c-lightning

• cln-rpc: Oxidizing c-lightning
• Database librarization

lnd

• lnd v0.14.2-beta
• loop v0.17.0-beta
• channeldb+invoices: create native SQL schema for invoice storage
• Taproot/tapscript support improvements: sending to and receiving from P2TR addresses, signing RPCs to expose new tapscript+taproot sig types, update PSBT handling code to support new taproot-specific fields
• lncli addholdinvoice –> invoice is too large
• invoicesrpc: limit first pass of hop hint selection
• htlcswitch: add an always on mode to htlc interceptor
• htlcswitch: add htlc interceptor failure control
• adds fundmax flag to openchannel
• lndinit: add tool for automated wallet creation
• lnrpc+sweep: properly remove any unconfirmed descendant chains a to-be-swept input is spent
• lnd’s development priorities (as it relates to BOLT12)

rust-lightning

• Add support for phantom node payments
• Support invoice expiry over a year
• Probabilistic channel scoring

BOLTS

• Add payment metadata to payment request (feature 48)
• BOLT 1: adds remote address to optional init_tlvs (IP discovery)
• Removed requirement to broadcast an outdated commitment transaction

New Releases

• btcpayserver v1.4.5 - CPFP support
• eclair v0.7.0 - anchor outputs and onion messages
• gun.fun v0.6.0 - xpub + PSBT support
• joinmarket-clientserver v0.9.5 - taproot support, more
• lightning-jet v1.4.1 - updates to rebalancer logic
• lnbits-legend v0.7.0 - support AES-encrypted macaroons
• lnd v0.14.2-beta - remote signing improvements, important bug fixes
• musig-py - experimental musig2 python implementation
• sparrow v1.5.6 - remove AOPP support
• specter-desktop v1.8.0 - descriptor improvements

Events and Podcasts

• Bitcoin Explained - Discreet Log Contracts
• Bitcoin Sydney Socratic - CoBloX presents their layer-2 Bitcoin CFD protocol
• CD54 – pruned nodes, utreexo, and validation with seardsalmon, mario_gibney, kcalvinalvinn, SomsenRuben, and sanket1729
• CD55 - signing devices and open source with @seedsigner and tony
• SLP349 Chris Stewart Bitcoin DLCs & Stablechannels
• The Chaincode Podcast - Block Building with Clara and Murch
• The Chaincode Podcast - Sergei Tikhomirov and Lightning privacy
• The Kevin Rooke Show Episode 19 - How LNURL and Lightning Addresses Work with Andre Neves
• The Unhashed Podcast Episode 172 - OP_TOETEREN!
• This Week in Lightning - #3 with Bastien Teinturier, #4

Mining

• Bitcoin miners generate $1.17B in January
• Home mining reduced natural gas usage by 75%
• Intel Details Its Bitcoin-Mining ‘Bonanza Mine’ Chips and 3,600-Watt Miner
• Solo miner mines block
• Texas Bitcoin Miners Shutting Down to Help Power Grid Survive Winter Storm

Miscellaneous

• Address Ownership Proof Protocol (AOPP)
• Ben’s Bytes - Hello World
• Bitcoin Design Guide v2 Launches With Focus on Lightning
• BitMEX Supports Sending To Taproot Addresses
• Canadian RCMP Bitcoin address blacklist
• Cash App Supports Lightning Network
• Extracting the Private Key from Schnorr Signatures that reuse a Nonce
• How To Get The Most From In-Person Bitcoin Events
• Introducing Sensei LN Implementation by L2 Technology
• Kraken Funds Full-Time Bitcoin Rust Maintainer
• Kraken Proof of Reserves Protocol
• Lightning Address for Service Providers
• LNbank Lightning Wallet for BTCPay Server
• Thoughts on CashApp’s Lightning user flows
• Thoughts on onion messages in lightning
• Thoughts on SNARKs for UTXO proofs in lightning
• Thresh Metr MuSig