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

• Tom & David - Bitcoin Core v27 Testing Guide

Mailing Lists, Meetings and Bitcoin Optech

Mailing Lists

bitcoin-dev

• 51% Attack via Difficulty Increase with a Small Quantum Miner
• Great Consensus Cleanup Revival
• A Free-Relay Attack Exploiting RBF Rule #6
• Anyone can boost - a more efficient alternative to anchor outputs

Delving Bitcoin

• Great Consensus Cleanup Revival
• Mempool Based Fee Estimation on Bitcoin Core
• Leaf Version as Flags
• Improving transaction sponsor blockspace efficiency
• BTC Lisp as an alternative to Script
• BIP324 Proxy: easy integration of v2 transport protocol for light clients (PoC)
• Unilateral Exit
• Property-based testing for Bitcoin Core
• Chia Lisp For Bitcoiners
• Economic-Majority Signaling for OP_CTV Activation
• Revisiting BIP21
• State minimization in MuSig2 signing sessions
• GitLab Backups for Bitcoin Core repository

Meetings

• Bitcoin PR Review Club
  • Testing Bitcoin Core 27.0 Release Candidates
  • #29221 Implement 64 bit arithmetic op codes in the Script interpreter
  • bitcoin-inquisition #45: LNHANCE inquisition (CSFS, INTERNALKEY)
  • bitcoin-inquisition #39: Re enable OP_CAT
• Bitcoin Core general developer meetings
  • February 29
  • March 7
  • March 14
  • March 21
  • March 28

Optech

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #295
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #294
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #293
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #292
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #294 Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #293 Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #292 Recap Podcast
• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #291 Recap Podcast

Network Data

• 95% of mining pools using full-rbf
• Bitfinex falls victim to Magic Eden UTXO consolidation exploit
• Following Flows V: Pool Cross-Pollination, summary
• Marathon creates block template that produces graphic on mempool.space
• MEV Activity
  • f2pool misses mispriced NFT flip
  • PSBT sniping revenue significant
  • Quantum Catnapping
• Record block size, produced by Marathon’s Slipstream service
• Spiderpool resurfaces
• Update on LinkingLion: Reduced activity and a statement by LionLink Networks
• ViaBTC’s mutated blocks without witness data
• Weird transaction creates non-standard op-return outputs

CVEs and Research

Research

• ABC-Channel: An Advanced Blockchain-based Covert Channel
• Arctic: Lightweight and Stateless Threshold Schnorr Signatures
• BitVM 2: Permissionless Verification on Bitcoin
• Breaking BFT: Quantifying the Cost to Attack Bitcoin and Ethereum, Summary
• Insecurity of MuSig and BN Multi-Signatures with Delayed Message Selection
• New Records in Collision Attacks on SHA-2
• Re-Randomized FROST

InfoSec

• Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility xz
• First practical SHA-256 collision for 31 steps
• GoFetch: Breaking Constant-Time Cryptographic Implementations Using Data Memory-Dependent Prefetchers in Apple CPUs
• Vulnerability Disclosure: Wasting ViaBTC’s 60 EH/s hashrate by sending a P2P message
• ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms

Pull Requests and repo updates

Bitcoin Core

• wallet: track mempool conflicts with wallet transactions
• Mempool util: Add RBF diagram checks for single chunks against clusters of size 2
• validation: Make translations of fatal errors consistent
• rpc: “addpeeraddress tried” return error on failure
• test: make p2p_handshake robust against timeoffset warnings
• Avoid divide-by-zero in header sync logs when NodeClock is behind
• index: avoid “failed to commit” errors on initialization
• assumeutxo: Get rid of faked nTx and nChainTx values
• blockstorage: do not flush block to disk if it is already there
• index: block filters sync, reduce disk read operations by caching last header
• RPC: Add maxfeerate and maxburnamount args to submitpackage
• test: Test new header sync behavior in loadtxoutset
• net: support unix domain sockets for -proxy and -onion
• rpc,rest,zmq: faster getblock, NotifyBlock and rest_block by reading raw block
• p2p: Allow whitelisting manual connections
• policy: enable sibling eviction for v3 transactions
• wallet: default wallet migration, modify inconvenient backup filename
• p2p: make block download logic aware of limited peers threshold
• Update functional test runner to return error code when no tests are found to run
• kernel: chainparams updates for 27.x
• doc: update signet faucet link in offline-signing-tutorial.md
• p2p: Don’t consider blocks mutated if they don’t connect to known prev block
• wallet: getrawchangeaddress and getnewaddress failures should not affect keypools for descriptor wallets

BDK

• fix: define and document stop_gap
• Remove extra taproot fields when finalizing PSBT
• Migrate to bitcoin::FeeRate
• Fix KeychainTxOutIndex::lookahead_to_target

rust-bitcoin

• Run fuzzer daily
• Add a validation variant to ParseError
• Improve base58 crate
• improve relative locktime API
• Document how to write commits
• hash_types: add unit tests for display of all hash types in the library
• merkle_block: add resource limit check during deserialization
• Add a consensus::deserialize_hex function
• Support signing taproot in psbt
• Return error when constructing pubkey from slice
• Removes txid prefix in transaction IDs
• Add support for SHA384
• Improve leaf errors
• Add ServiceFlags::P2P_V2
• Fix CJDNS marker byte check

libsecp

• ci: Add workaround for ASLR bug in sanitizers

secp256k1-zkp

• Schnorr (Incremental) Half Aggregation

Core Lightning

• Rune invoice inspect
• repro: multifundchannel and all amount
• Rune handling cleanups, new DEBUG_LIGHTNINGD option
• Part pay support
• RPC Documents Consolidation
• Faster block sync
• renepay: bugfix situation with htlcmax=htlcmin
• renepay: refuse to pay BOLT12 invoice
• Fix routing infinite loop, bad scoring
• pay: Prevent duplicate preapproveinvoice calls

eclair

• Fixup quiescence timeout when initiating splice
• Allow relaying messages to self

LDK

• Trampoline onion construction vectors
• Signal GossipQuery support when using IgnoringMessagHandler
• Serialize Trampoline payloads in outbound onions.
• Tx-Sync: Track spent WatchedOutputs and re-add if unconfirmed
• Support keysend to blinded paths
• Interactive Transaction Construction
• Fix sender is the introduction node onion messages
• Avoid writing ChannelManager when hitting lnd bug 6039
• Avoid new “out of disk space” issues in CI
• Fail request_refund_payment for unsupported chain
• Test blinded forwarding
• Offers builders for C-bindings
• Order blinded paths by reliability criteria

lnd

• channeldb: check return value of ReadWriteBucket
• lnwallet: use new errors returned from rpcclient
• lnwire: fix deprecated usage
• chainfee: introduce filterManager and use it for fee floor
• lnd: ensure that LND won’t start in native SQL mode if it has any KV invoices
• routerrpc: Add detailed info logging during a rescan
• Limit FeeRate change for the UpdateFee msg to prevent sharp changes
• lnconfig: Support utilizing Environment Variables in lnd.conf for rpcuser and rpcpass fields.
• Feature: generate man pages
• lnd/healthcheck: add checks after initialization + success/failure callbacks
• cli: add confirmation prompt to closeallchannels
• sqldb: InvoiceDB implementation
• lnwallet: skip testmempoolaccept when the backend version is too low
• Probing for more reliable route fee estimation
• multi: upgrade new taproot TLVs to use tlv.OptionalRecordT

BOLTs

• Fix broken link in BOLT-2
• clarification: strict validation of scid for blinded payments

New Releases

• bitvm-zk-verifier
• Teleport Transactions, summary

Mining

• Bitdeer Announces New 4nm Bitcoin Mining Chip SEAL01
• Introducing SRI 1.0.0 - the most important milestone in our Stratum V2 journey!

Miscellaneous

• Bitcoin Fog Operator Convicted of Money Laundering Conspiracy
• Bitcoin Research Day - Fall 2024
• Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi, Didn’t Author Bitcoin Whitepaper, Judge Rules
• HRF grants $500k to 14 Bitcoin projects
• Introduction of isStandard() (2010)
• KuCoin charged with AML violations that let cybercriminals launder billions
• Lightning Network Onion Routing: Preliminaries
• Liquidity on Lightning: Moving from UX to Economix
• Mercury Layer’s Lightning Latch Swap Protocol -Multinuteral payments – Pay a single Lightning invoice from Ecash balances on multiple Cashu mints
• OpenSats Announces Long-Term Support For Bruno Garcia
• The Spectre of MEV on Bitcoin
• Winternitz signatures reduce BitVM transaction fees by >50%