Please join us for our next Socratic Seminar!

The event will be held in English and is free. After the event we will head to dinner & drinks, all are welcome! We would like to thank Programize for hosting us.

Thursday, November 9th 2023 @ 7PM

As a reminder, the ground rules of BitDevs are as follows:

1. No photos, videos, or recordings.
2. Chatham House Rule, you may reiterate the contents of the meeting without attribution.

These rules are in place so that BitDevs participants can speak freely within the event.

How should I prepare? Read the material.

Agenda (WIP)

1. News (in brief!)
2. RGB presentation
3. Taproot Assets presentation

Taproot assets

Taproot Assets (formerly Taro) is a new Taproot-powered protocol developed by Lightning Labs for issuing assets on the bitcoin blockchain that can be transferred over the Lightning Network.

• https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/taproot-assets
• Draft BIP
• Taproot Assets on Mainnet

RGB

RGB is a system of private & scalable client-validated smart contracts on Bitcoin & Lightning developed by LNP/BP Association

• https://rgb.info/
• https://diba.io/blog/understanding-rgb-protocol/
• simple explanation tweet
• First presentation of RGB by Giacomo Zucco, Alekos Filini in 2018

News

* Indicates item briefly mentioned in the seminar

Notice: This seminar’s news section is long as it covers period 14Jun - 09Nov 2023.

Security/CVEs/InfoSec/Research

• Covenants: Examining ScriptPubkeys in Bitcoin Script
• Covenants: Dealing with Amounts in Bitcoin Script
• *The Environmental Footprint of Bitcoin Mining Across the Globe: Call for Urgent Action
• *Bitcoin Rollups Research (new content)
• *PHD thesis: Evolving Bitcoin Custody
• Mixing Solutions in Bitcoin and Ethereum Ecosystems: A Review and Tutorial
• The Centralizing Effects of Private Order Flow on Proposer-Builder Separation
• *Durabit: A Bitcoin-native Incentive Mechanism for Data Distribution
• *Drivechains: A Detailed Analysis
  • Rebutal
• One-time and Revocable Ring Signature with Logarithmic Size in Blockchain
• Naysayer proofs
• *ZeroSync demo
• *Runes
• *An Introduction to Spiderchain
• Electrum CVE: sending with Lightning: payment_preimage validation is skipped on Android
• Electrum CVE: receiving with Lightning: partial MPP might be accepted
• Don’t overextend your Oblivious Transfer
• Undetectable Selfish Mining
• Our Data Driven Approach to Fixing Payment Reliability
• *BitVM
  • Proof of concept implementation
  • tapleaf-circuits, example transaction, functional encryption improvement, build nand gate
• River Lightning Report 2023
• *Evicting and filling attack for linking multiple network addresses of Bitcoin nodes
• Understanding BRC-20: Hope or Hype?
• StaticWire: Rent Internet Protocol Subnets Using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
• NUCLEUS: Capital-efficient multipeer Lightning payment channels
• *DoS: Fake Lightning Channels
• *A Review of the Lightning Network’s Evolution: Unraveling Its Present State and the Emergence of Disruptive Digital Business Models
• revised: Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments
• simln
• The Illumination of Money: An Ethnography of Bitcoin in El Salvador
• *FROSTDAO: Collective Ownership of wealth using FROST
• *CHAUSSETTE: A Symbolic Verification of Bitcoin Scripts
• *Bitcoin electricity consumption: an improved assessment
• LN Metrics - Open Source LN data collection initiative
• Manually (on paper) calculating a public key from a private key
• Waiting for confirmation: a series about mempool and relay policy
• *Anatomy of a Bitcoin Heist: The Electrum Atom Malware Saga
• Lightning Creation Games
• *Towards a Formal Verification of the Lightning Network with TLA+
• How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic
• Covenants in Bitcoin: A Useful Review Taxonomy
• *Towards a trustless bitcoin wallet with miniscript
• *PHD thesis about new watchtower FPPW and new payment channel Daric
• TeleBTC: Trustless Wrapped Bitcoin
• Temporal and Geographical Analysis of Real Economic Activities in the Bitcoin Blockchain
• *Entropy bug in Libbitcoin Explorer: Milk Sad
• Bitcoin as a Nonviolent Tool Against State Financial Censorship
• *A Dive Into the Math Behind Bitcoin Schnorr Signatures
• Apple to Remove Nostr Damus from App Store for Bitcoin Tipping Feature
• The many faces of Schnorr

Miscellaneous

• Project Spartacus
• *Meet the MDK Hashboard
• *Opentimestamps used in elections in Guatemala
• Lightspark Universal Money Address
• *LinuxFoundation will stop hosting mailing lists
• *BitcoinDev.org
• Doppler - A lightning DSL
• *Taproot Assets on Mainnet
• ANNOUNCING THE $12K NIST ELLIPTIC CURVES SEEDS BOUNTY
• GPUtopia
• warnet
• Lexe Wallet
• OP_VAULT Demo Video
• *Coinjoins.org
• Delving Bitcoin Forum
• Covenant Tools Softfork Discussion
• SimLN
• What are MATT opcodes?
• Open-Sourcing Liquid’s Functionary Code
• *Thoughts on scaling and consensus changes (2023)
• Tether stops support for Bitcoin / OmniLayer
• Simp-lang - Simplicity DSL POC
• Tell Congress: Stop The Use Of Chainalysis Services
• Coinbase to integrate Lightning
• *HRF Bitcoin Bounty Challenge
• Chris Belcher health situation
• Royllo.org - Taproot Assets Explorer
• ChatBTC
• Frostsnap
• *War and Lightning Network
• *Mutiny Wallet beta release
• Matador: A Bitcoin-Powered Passthrough Server
• Bitmex: Drivechains
• Galaxy Mining: 2023 Bitcoin Mining Mid-Year Report
• Putting the B in BTC
• Block’s Bitkey “Hardware Wallet” will Violate your Privacy and Security
• Supertestnet MuSig Playground
• Greenlight API goes live
• Nodeless: Accept Bitcoin Payments (Lightning API)
• BIP39 Colors
• PDK: A Payjoin SDK
• CivKit Node
• *Phoenix update

Network data

• Bitcoin price estimation from on-chain data
• Invalid Marathon Block
• Invalid MARAPool block 809478
• *Hunting the Real Bitcoin Network Hashrate
• Mempool processing 1 sat/vB transactions after 6 months
• Revisiting Bitcoin Network Bandwidth Issues

Europe / Greece

• Eurosystem proceeds to next phase of digital euro project
• Κρυπτονομίσματα: Μετέωρη η φορολόγησή τους στην Ελλάδα

Mailing-lists

bitcoin-dev

• Ordinals BIP PR
• Proposed BIP for OP_CAT
• Examining ScriptPubkeys in Bitcoin Script
• Solving CoinPool high-interactivity issue with cut-through update of Taproot leaves
• Actuarial System To Reduce Interactivity In N-of-N (N > 2) Multiparticipant Offchain Mechanisms
• Draft BIP: OP_TXHASH and OP_CHECKTXHASHVERIFY
• BIP-????: The Taproot Assets Protocol
• BIP for Serverless Payjoin
• Scaling Lightning With Simple Covenants
• Pull-req to enable Full-RBF by default
• Blinded 2-party Musig2
• BIP-352 Silent Payments addresses should have an expiration time
• Some Day Peg: A crazy two-way peg bridging BTC to other chains Raw

  lightning-dev

• *Full Disclosure: CVE-2023-40231 / CVE-2023-40232 / CVE-2023-40233 / CVE-2023-40234 “All your mempool are belong to us”
  • Visual explanation
• Batch exchange withdrawal to lightning requires covenants
• Removing channel reserve for mobile wallet users
• Sidepools For Improving Payment Reliability At Scale
• Practical PTLCs, a little more concretely
• Payment Splitting & Switching and its impact on Balance Discovery Attacks (preprint)
• Resumable channels using OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK
• Disclosure: Fake channel DoS vector
• Remotely control your lightning node from your favorite HSM
• faster NIKE Sphinx or more secure KEM Sphinx
• Jamming Mitigation Dry Run
• Proposal: Bundled payments
• Security: BOLT-11 “payment hash” does not commit to payment!

Pull requests

BIPs, BOLTs and Proposals

• BOLT4: Specify max HTLC nLocktime for expiry_too_far #1086
• bip324: Remove garbage authentication packet (breaking change) #1498
• Add James O’Beirne to 119 Author List
• BIP 300: Various improvements #1485
• BIP300
• BIP300 Whiteboard Video
• ANYPREVOUT without ANYONECANPAY

  Bitcoin Core

• coinstats, assumeutxo: fix hash_serialized2 calculation #28685
• Make miniscript GetWitnessSize accurate for tapscript #28651
• v26.0 Testing #28718
• Download
• BIP324 integration #28331
• assumeutxo (2) #27596
• validation: fix coins disappearing mid-package evaluation #28251
• rpc: allow submitpackage to be called outside of regtest #27609
• MiniTapscript: port Miniscript to Tapscript #27255
• Gathering Priorities for 27.0 #28599
• Covenant tools softfork
• WIP: BIP300 (Drivechains) consensus-level logic
• BIP324 ciphersuite #28008
• p2p: Diversify automatic outbound connections with respect to networks #27213
• rpc: Add importmempool RPC #27460
• Fix potential network stalling bug #27981
• p2p: Restrict self-advertisements with privacy networks to avoid fingerprinting #27411
• bumpfee: Allow the user to choose which output is change #26467
• Rework validation logic for assumeutxo #27746
• mempool / rpc: add getprioritisedtransactions, delete a mapDeltas entry when delta==0 #27501
• wallet: Load database records in a particular order #24914

  LND

• multi: pong enforcement #7828
• routing: Support Pathfinding to Blinded Routes #7267
• multi: merge simple taproot channels staging branch into master #7904
• funding: fund channel with selected utxos
• LND fix for memory leak

  Eclair

• Delegate Bitcoin Core’s private key management to Eclair #2613
• Adapt max HTLC amount to balance #2703
• Additional changes to delegate bitcoin core keys to eclair #2726
• Add quiescence negotiation #2680
• Record begin and end timestamps for relays #2701

  BDK & LDK

• Add bitcoind_rpc chain source module. #1041
• More flexible fee rate estimates #2660
• Route blinding MVP #2413
• BOLT 12 Invoice payments #2371
• Batch funding for v1 channel establishments #2486
• Add an option to make the success probability estimation nonlinear #2547
• Add API for constructing blinded payment paths #2412
• Support third-party watchtowers in persistence pipeline #2337
• Work around LND bug 6039 #2507
• Add BumpTransaction event handler #2089
• BOLT 12 Offers message handling support #2294
• Routing to blinded payment paths #2120
• Allow forwarding less than the amount in the onion #2319
• Support MPP Keysend #2156

  Core Lightning

• Feat/unified invoices #6421
• Remove developer configuration option / DEVELOPER, use –developer runtime flag #6311
• 0.4.0 release
• renepay: an experimental payment plugin
• splicing: Adds the features needed to enable collaborative splicing & resizing of active channels.
• Taproot wallet support #6035
• Self-pay support. #6399
• Runes migration from commando to lightning #6403
• setconfig: new command to set (a few!) config parameters dynamically #6303

  Secp256k1

• ci: Test on development snapshots of GCC and Clang #1313
• ElligatorSwift + integrated x-only DH

  BTCPayServer

• Add reporting feature #5155

  Rust-bitcoin

• script: Add method count_sigops #1890