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.

Mailing Lists, Meetings and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• Announcing B’SST: Bitcoin-like Script Symbolic Tracer
• Compressed Bitcoin Transactions
• BIP-????: The Taproot Assets Protocol
• Parameters in BIP21 URIs
• Actuarial System To Reduce Interactivity In N-of-N (N > 2) Multiparticipant Offchain Mechanisms
• Formosa - Expansion on BIP39 as proposed BIP
• New BIP to align descriptors, xpub derivation and miniscript
• Bitcoin Fusion Protocol (BFP)
• Trustless 2-way-peg without softfork
• Bitcoin Research Day 2023
• Solving CoinPool high-interactivity issue with cut-through update of Taproot leaves

lightning-dev

• faster NIKE Sphinx or more secure KEM Sphinx
• Remotely control your lightning node from your favorite HSM
• Practical PTLCs, a little more concretely
• blip-0029: Taproot Asset Protocol Channels
• Scaling Lightning With Simple Covenants
• Sidepools For Improving Payment Reliability At Scale
• Announcing the Lightning Network Interoperability Initiative
• Payment Splitting & Switching and its impact on Balance Discovery Attacks (preprint)

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • #28165 transport abstraction
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • August 31
  • September 7
  • September 14
  • September 21 – no meeting
• Lightning Specification meeting
  • September 11
  • September 25

Optech

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #269, audio recap
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #268, audio recap
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #267, audio recap
• Bitcoin Optech Podcast Special: Waiting for confirmation

Network Data

• Accidental 20BTC tx fee
  • f2pool offers to return funds, paxos claims funds, funds returned
• Alby reaches 1M monthly payments
• BRC-20 minters using fullrbf
  • Mints omitting signature check
  • Mints requiring users to grind specific txid prefix
• LNBig 60 node stats, explainer
• MARAPool mines invalid block on mainnet after mining multiple invalid blocks on testnet
• UTXOracle.py - generate historical price data by analyzing UTXO amounts

CVEs and Research

Research

• Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance: Towards a Practical Equilibrium
• CHAUSSETTE: A Symbolic Verification of Bitcoin Scripts
• Undetectable Selfish Mining

InfoSec

• Coinkite Evil Maid extracts seed (DeepCover DS28C36: A Hardware Vulnerability Identification and Exploitation Using T-Test and Double Laser Fault Injection)
• Don’t overextend your Oblivious Transfer
• Electrum Lightning vulnerabilities
  • payment_preimage validation is skipped on Android
  • partial MPP might be accepted
• Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach
• NSO Group iPhone Zero-Click, Zero-Day Exploit Captured in the Wild
• Results of Major Technical Investigations for Storm-0558 Key Acquisition

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• Fix virtual size limit enforcement in transaction package context
• Bump unconfirmed ancestor transactions to target feerate
• validation: fix coins disappearing mid-package evaluation
• index: coinstats reorg, fail when block cannot be reversed
• BIP324 connection support
• Wallet: estimate the size of signed inputs using descriptors
• blockstorage: Drop legacy -txindex check
• Update libsecp256k1 subtree to release 0.4.0

BDK

• Remove TransactionDetails from Wallet API

rust-bitcoin

• Add Witness::p2wpkh constructor
• Add transaction::Version data type
• Feature: Count sigops for Transaction
• Use newly released bech32 API
• Script helper to classify bare multisig
• Feature: Instruction can read the script number
• Use weight for block size function

Core Lightning

• Add restriction per for lightningd runes
• Update to match BOLT master
• plugin/clnrest: security improvements
• Update for PR 6657: fix fundchannel infinite loop with tiny UTXOs

eclair

• Splice with pending committed htlcs
• Improve startup resource usage
• Allow splicing on non dual-funded channels
• Fix tests that expect network minimum feerate to be less than other rates
• Use bumpforceclose RPC to also bump remote commit fees
• Fix tx_signatures retransmission
• Limit how far we look into the blockchain
• Allow specifying a bitcoin wallet with an empty name
• Delegate Bitcoin Core’s private key management to Eclair
• Add RPC to bump local commit fees

LDK

• BOLT 12 Invoice payments
• Route blinding MVP
• Add config option to set maximum total routing fee
• Batch funding for v1 channel establishments

lnd

• watchtower: handle rogue updates
• multi: add ability to specify local nonces for musig2 signer rpc, add itest for remote signer taproot chans
• lnwallet+contractcourt: gracefully handle auto force close post data …
• contractcourt: make sure we force sweep outgoing htlcs

New Releases

• opvault-demo
• StaticWire: Rent Internet Protocol Subnets Using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network

Events and Podcasts

• Anchor Outputs with LDK
• Baltic Honeybadger
• James O’Beirne on OP_VAULT

Mining

• Antpool celebrates KYC
• Bitmain reveals Antminer S21
• Flared Gas Bitcoin Mining: When it Does (and Doesn’t) Make Sense
• Riot Responds to Recent Inquiries Regarding Its Power Strategy (ERCOT power buybacks)

Miscellaneous

• An introduction to Spiderchain
• Codex32: A Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme
• Drivechains Introduce New Incentive Dynamics To Bitcoin
• OpenSats Grants - Josie Baker, Sjors Provoost
• Private Collaborative Custody with FROST
• Spiral grant for Yuval Kogman
• Zerosync produces STARK proof of Bitocoin’s header chain