Announcements

Please join us for our next Socratic Seminar. A special thank you to our sponsors 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 The Perfect Pint East around 9:30PM. This bar is very close to Chaincode Labs: 203 East 45th Street New York, NY 10017

Mailing Lists, Meetings and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• Scaling Lightning Safely With Feerate-Dependent Timelocks, lightning-dev post
• Addressing the possibility of profitable fee manipulation attacks
• BIP: output descriptors for PSBT
• Lamport scheme (not signature) to economize on L1
• Kerckhoffian protocol for coercion-resistance in non-shared custody
• Swift Activation - CTV
• V3 Transactions are still vulnerable to significant tx pinning griefing attacks
• libsecp256k1 v0.4.1 released
• Compressed Bitcoin Transactions
• Introducing a version field to BIP39 mnemonic phrases
• MuSig2 derivation, descriptor, and PSBT field BIPs
• BitBlend Proposal for 2106
• BIP process friction
• One-Shot Replace-By-Fee-Rate
• Full-RBF Peering Bitcoin Core v26.0 Released

lightning-dev

• SCIDADDRESS - a new address format?

Delving Bitcoin

• Aggregate delegated exit for L2 pools
• B’SST: Bitcoin-like Script Symbolic Tracer v0.1.2 released
• CPU usage of peers
• Games in the head (and fraud proofs for the plebs)
• BIPBounty.org is Open for Your BIPs
• OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY ECDSA useful?
• Lightning transactions with v3 and ephemeral anchors
• Stratum v2 Noise Protocol: BIP324 nuggets?
• Deploying new taproot leaf versions
• 64 bit arithmetic soft fork
• An overview of the cluster mempool proposal
• DoS disclosure: Channel open race in CLN
• Ephemeral Anchors and MEVil
• LNHANCE bips and implementation
• Emulating curve point scalar multiplication with OP_CAT
• LN-Symmetry Project Recap
• V3 transaction policy for anti-pinning
• On consensus changes in bitcoin 2024
• Package aware Fee estimator post cluster mempool
• Unspendable keys in descriptors
• How to linearize your cluster
• Warnet + Increase Tx Relay Rate

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • #28956 Nuke adjusted time (attempt 2)
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • December 14
  • December 21
  • January 4
  • January 11
  • January 18
• Lightning Specification meeting
  • December 18th
  • January 15th

Optech

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #281 Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #282: 2023 Year-in-Review Special
  • Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #282: 2023 Year-in-Review Special Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #283
  • Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #283 Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #284
  • Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #284 Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #285
  • Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #285 Recap Podcast

Network Data

• 2023 Bitcoin Node Performance Tests
• 53M inscriptions stored in the Bitcoin blockchain in 2023 (5,327BTC in fees)
• High fees in December driven by BRC-20 mints
• Magic Eden Marketplace accidental fee burn
• Ocean pool data feed
• Ordinal / Inscription / BRC Data
  • Ordinal-style PSBT trades consuming blockspace
  • ARC20 “QUARK” token
  • hgp rune token flooding mempool

CVEs and Research

Research

• Bitcoin Clique: Channel-free Off-chain Payments using Two-Shot Adaptor Signatures
• EROR: Efficient Repliable Onion Routing with Strong Provable Privacy
• FlexHi: A Flexible Hierarchical Threshold
• Bitcoin Layer Two Scaling Solutions:Lightening Payment Channels Network Comprehensive Review, Mechanisms, Challenges, Open Issues and Future Research Directions
• Maypoles: Lightning Striking Twice
• Non-Intrusive Balance Tomography Using Reinforcement Learning in the Lightning Network
• Rational Economic Behaviours in the Bitcoin Lightning Network
• Self-Balancing Semi-Hierarchical PCNs for CBDCs
• Statistical and clustering analysis of attributes of Bitcoin backbone nodes

InfoSec

• Denial-of-service bugs in LND’s channel update gossip handling
• Disclosure: Btcd consensus bugs due to usage of signed transaction version
• Hacker spins up 1 million virtual servers to illegally mine crypto
• Here’s Some Bitcoin: Oh, and You’ve Been Served!
• Ex-Amazon engineer pleads guilty to hacking crypto exchanges
• Kroll reveals FTX customer info exposed in August data breach
• Ledger Connect Kit Exploit
• LNBank Vulnerability, prior hack
• Playing with Fire – How We Executed a Critical Supply Chain Attack on PyTorch

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• rpc: Make v2transport default for addnode RPC when enabled
• snapshots: don’t core dump when running -checkblockindex after loadtxoutset
• doc, test: test and explain service flag handling
• log mempool loading progress
• net, cli: use v2transport for manual/addrfetch connections, add to -netinfo
• Update libsecp256k1 subtree to current master
• mempool / rpc: followup to getprioritisedtransactions and delete a mapDeltas entry when delta==0
• Fix -netinfo backward compat with getpeerinfo pre-v26
• net: create I2P sessions using both ECIES-X25519 and ElGamal encryption
• wallettool: Always be able to dump a wallet’s database
• rpc: Remove deprecated -rpcserialversion
• Make bitcoin-tx replaceable value optional

BDK

• Introduce block-by-block API to bdk::Wallet and add RPC wallet example
• ref(hwi): Move hwi out of bdk

HWI

• fix(trezor): enable support for Trezor Safe 3

rust-bitcoin

• Add effective value calculation
• Implement ArbitaryOrd for absolute::LockTime

Core Lightning

• hsmd: Implement hsmd_forget_channel for Channel Deletion in HSMD
• Add and use support for pulling tx without PSBT wrappers
• Force cltv field inclusion in BOLT 11 invoice
• Custom msg as notification

eclair

• Variable size for trampoline onion
• Add a funding fee budget
• Send batch_size on commit_sig retransmit
• Fixes for quiescence back ported from lightning-kmp
• Relay HTLC failure when inactive revoked commit confirms
• FIX eclair-cli error code in case of HTTP problem

LDK

• Avoid retrying over previously failed blinded paths
• Move cryptographic algorithms and utilities to a new crypto mod
• Use consistent cltv_expiry_delta in ForwardTlvs
• Complete route blinding support
• Move channel -> peer tracking to OutPoints from Channel IDs
• Multi-hop BlindedPath creation interface
• Stop decaying liquidity information during scoring
• Fixes bug that causes incorrect conversion of JsonValue to Txid.
• cfg-gate async signing logic

lnd

• Fix case where Opening Channels get stuck forever.
• watchtower: support taproot channel commitments
• htlcswitch: update fuzzPayload for route blinding
• multi: make legacy feature bits compulsory
• sweep: use p2tr output as change weight
• Minor improvements in the lncli api regarding channel closures.
• wtclient: handle un-acked updates for exhausted sessions
• lnwallet: Introduce a fee buffer.
• tlv: various enhancements to the new RecordT type
• routing: Add Validation for Decoding Blinded Paths
• missioncontrol: add invalid onion blinding handling for blinded paths
• zpay32: Change min_final_cltv_expiry_delta.
• Enable multiple outgoing channel ids in payments

New Releases

• Full RBF Peering v26.0
• lampo

Events and Podcasts

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Mining

• [2023 Reviews] State of the Network, ASIC Market, Mining Pools
• Stratum v1 Illustration

Miscellaneous

• Arithmetic Opcodes: What Could They Look Like?
• BitVM transaction graph diagram
• Brink Receives $150,000 from Tim Draper
• Comparing the Lightning Network to validia chains and validity rollups
• CTV use case thread
• Economically Unspendable Bitcoin UTXOs
• Ghost Addresses
• Human Rights Foundation Grants $500,000 To 18 Bitcoin Projects
• MercuryLayer initial release
• One-Shot Replace-by-Fee-Rate, problem
• OpenSats Announces Long-Term Support For René Pickhardt
• OpenSats to Receive Recurring Donations from Bitwise Bitcoin ETF Profits
• OP_SEGMENT: Allowing Introspection to Check Partial Scripts
• Pay-to-Tapscript: Keyless Entry For Better Future Scripting
• Spiral Grants - bitgould, joschisan
• The Challenges of Developing Non-Custodial Lightning on Mobile
• The Genesis Book: The Story of the People and Projects That Inspired Bitcoin
• The Past, Present, and Future of Offline Payments
• Transaction Stacking for Covenant Fee Minimization
• VanEck pledges 5% of its profits to support Bitcoin Core development
• Vinteum renews grants for Bruno Garcia and Davidson Lucas De Souza
• V3 Transactions Review
  • V3 Transactions Are Still Vulnerable To Transaction Pinning