Announcements

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

If you can’t make it to the main event please join us at PUBKEY around 9:30PM. Learn about this awesome new establishment here.

Presentation

• Sergi Delgado - Watchtowers: From Zero to Hero

Mailing Lists, Meetings and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• At least 17% of Bitcoin Core 24.x listening nodes are running full-rbf
• SIGHASH_GROUP vs Ephemeral anchors
• Why Full-RBF Makes DoS Attacks on Multiparty Protocols Significantly More Expensive
• Serverless Payjoin
• Wallet vaults with pre-signed transactions but no ephemeral keys

lightning-dev

• Possible Attack IF we add BOTH upfront AND negative routing fees to the Lightning Network
• Swap-in-Potentiam: Moving Onchain Funds “Instantly” To Lightning
• Async payments proof-of-payment: a wishlist for researchers
• Reputation Credentials renaming and iteration: the Staking Credentials architecture
• Efficient Factories For Lightning Channels
• A security review of Validating Lightning Signer architecture and code

dlc-dev

• Using OP_VAULT to improve DLCs

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • 26695 bench BlockAssembler on a mempool with packages (bench)
  • 26742 Track active requests and wait for last to finish (rpc/rest/zmq)
  • 26697 logging: use std::bitset for categories (utils/log/libs)
  • 26347 wallet: ensure the wallet is unlocked when needed for rescanning (wallet)
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • December 15th
  • December 22nd
  • January 5th
  • January 12th
  • January 19th
  • January 26th
• Bitcoin Core wallet meetings
  • December 16th
  • January 13th
• Lightning Specification meeting
  • December 19th
  • January 2nd
  • January 16th

Optech

• Newsletter #231: 2022 Year-in-Review Special, audio recap
• Newsletter #232, audio recap
• Newsletter #233, audio recap
• Newsletter #234, audio recap
• Newsletter #235, audio recap

Network Data

• 24hr taproot spending stats reach 1%
• Alameda funds on the move
• Bitocin 2022 Annual Review
• Bitcoin tied to Quadriga on the move
• first on-chain taprooty channel
• full-rbf doublespend mined
• Lazarus group moving $63.5m from Harmony bridge hack through tornado cash and railgun
• Lightning Network capacity reaches new all time BTC high
• new light bitcoin block explorer
• patches of old utxos on the move
• Robosats passes 100 BTC of all-time volume
• top 2022 tor ln routing nodes according to bos
• tracking Binance outflows
• Wallet of Satoshi exceeds 6 million payments,20k payments / day
• yalls.org LN revenues
• zcash spammer increased blockchain 6x in 2022

CVEs and Research

Research

• (Concurrently Secure) Blind Schnorr from Schnorr
• A framework for live host-based Bitcoin wallet forensics and triage
• An analysis of the decentralization and effectiveness of Lightning Network
• COVID-bit: Keep a Distance of (at least) 2m From My Air-Gap Computer!
• BlindHub: Bitcoin-Compatible Privacy-Preserving Payment Channel Hubs Supporting Variable Amounts Diversification Across Mining Pools: Optimal Mining Strategies under PoW
• CoinJoin protocols and implementations analysis
• Daric: A Storage Efficient Payment Channel With Penalization Mechanism
• DensePose From WiFi
• Glimpse: On-Demand, Cross-Chain Communication for Efficient DeFi Applications on Bitcoin-based Blockchains
• HotGate : trustless cross-chain settlement protocol
• OP_VAULT, discussion
• LightSwap: An Atomic Swap Does Not Require Timeouts At Both Blockchains
• Ping-Pong Swaps
• PMFault: Faulting and Bricking Server CPUs through Management Interfaces
• SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks
• Strategic Analysis of Griefing Attack in Lightning Network
• Three Birds with One Stone: Efficient Partitioning Attacks on Interdependent Cryptocurrency Networks
• Topological Evolution Analysis of Payment Channels in the Lightning Network

InfoSec

• 3Commas compromised, API keys stolen, later published
• BitKeep APKs hijacked
• BTC.com mining pool hacked for $3M
• CircleCI security alert: Rotate any secrets stored in CircleCI
• Lastpass security incident
• Midas Capital suffers flash loan attack, $660k stolen
• Raydium liquidity pools drained of $4.4m
• RoeFinance suffers flash loan attack, $80k stolen
• Threema messaging app’s cryptographic protocols broken
• Two Git CVEs published

Pull Requests and repo updates

BIPs

• Add BIP324: v2 P2P Transport Protocol
• Wallet Labels Export Format

BLIPs

• Inbound routing fees using channel_update by Joost Jager
• Backwards-compatible inbound fees using inbound_fees_update by Matt Corallo

Bitcoin Core

• I2P: Limit transient addresses
• rpc: Enable wallet import on pruned nodes and add test
• rpc: add minconf/maxconf options to sendall and fund transaction calls
• Reduce default mempool size in -blocksonly mode
• validation, bugfix: provide more info in *MempoolAcceptResult
• wallet: For feebump, ignore abandoned descendant spends

Core Lightning

• cln-plugin: make available the configuration in plugin
• Deprecate newaddress p2sh
• ipdiscovery: adds custom port parameter
• channeld: remove dead HTLCs from htable and free them (eventually)
• gossip: Do not send warnings if we fail to parse a channel_update

rust-lightning

• Store channels per-peer
• Router Optimizations
• Parameterize ChannelManager by a Router
• Allow configurable min_final_cltv_expiry_delta
• Support opening anchor channels and test end-to-end unilateral close
• BOLT 12 invoice encoding and building, #1927
• Allow specifying an error when failing back HTLC

eclair

• Add tlv stream to onion failures
• Send payments to blinded routes
• Dual funding latest changes
• Rework data model for splices
• Wait for tx to be published for zero-conf
• Allow keysend payments without a payment secret

libsecp

• Switch to exhaustive groups with small B coefficient

lnd

• watchtower: reduce AckedUpdate storage footprint
• multi: Add ability to handle protocol-range messages in Custom Message APIs
• Sign/Verify messages and signatures for single addresses
• discovery: ensure we prioritize sending out our own local announcements
• kvdb: add sqlite

New Releases

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Events and Podcasts

• Bitcoin Explained 70: Bitcoin Core v24 Bug
• Bitcoin, Explained 71: Timelocks
• CD86: Miniscript with Rob, Vivek, and NVK
• Kevin Rooke E89 - Ben Carman on Lightning Privacy, Building Mutiny, and Browser-Based Lightning Wallets
• Kevin Rooke E90 - Evan Kaloudis on Building Zeus, Lightning Self Custody, Open Source Funding, Tor, and Taro
• Kevin Rooke E91 - Calle on Open Source Software, Lightning Development, LNBits, Cashu, & More
• Kevin Rooke E92 - John Carvalho on Synonym, Blocktank, Bitkit, Pear Credit, Slashtags, and Hyper-Bitcoinization
• Kevin Rooke E93 - Drivechain and the Side Effects of Bitcoin’s Blocksize War, Crypto Voice 142
• SLP449 James O’Beirne OP_Vault - A New Way to HODL?, TFTC 388
• SLP450 Bitcoin Developer Education Overview with Josibake
• SLP452 Bitcoin Miniscript and what it enables - with Antoine Poinsot & Salvatore Ingala
• TABConf 2022
• TFTC #387: Building Lightning Network Infrastructure with Graham Krizek from Voltage
• The Summer of Bitcoin Experience - EP1 - Anmol Sharma
• Vancouver BitDevs Socratic Seminar 008

Mining

• Bitcon Mining Around the World - Sweden, Norway
• Canada Has Declared A Local War On Bitcoin Mining
• Debt Capital Markets in Bitcoin Mining (Part 1)
• First nuclear-powered data centre at Susquehanna completed
• Gorillas, militias, and Bitcoin: Why Congo’s most famous national park is betting big on crypto, podcast
• Hashrate Index 2022 Year In Review
• Japan’s Largest Power Company Will Mine Bitcoin With Excess Energy
• Mining in Paraguay
• The State of the ASIC market
• The worst of Bitcoin mining in 2022
• What Could Bitcoin Mining Look Like at One Zettahash?
• Which Public Bitcoin Miners Owe the Most Money?

Miscellaneous

• 0xB10C 2022 Review and 2023 Outlook
• Always Look On The Bright Side of the Annex
• An incomplete guide to stealth addresses
• Announcing Liana
• Choosing a Hardware Manufacturer
• First multiparty-S6 N party adaptor swap with musig
• Finally, a Fast Algorithm for Shortest Paths on Negative Graphs
• How 10101 is bringing CFDs to Lightning
• HRF Bitcoin Development Fund Awards $325,000 In New Grants
• “limited show “ credentials for FSS rbf
• List of upcoming Bitcoin conferences
• MAD Transactions: Mutual Assured Destruction Transactions
• MEV: The First Five Years
• Murch’s stackexchange posts viewed over 5m times
• SHA256 Visualizer
• SimpleBitcoinWallet shutting down
• Stratumv2 close to shipping MVP2
• Streamchain
• The architecture behind eclair
• Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip
• Understanding The COLDCARD Mk4 Security Model and Secure Element Use
• Why bitcoin needs covenants