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, December 14th 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

1. Review of technical Bitcoin news
2. Blind cryptographic signatures and Chaumian ecash

Blind cryptographic signatures and Chaumian ecash

Blind signatures were proposed in 1983 by David Chaum and implemented by Digicash in the 1990s and are now coming back as building blocks in Bitcoin Layer 2s such as Fedimint and Cashu.

Reading material:

• The short Wikipedia article on blind signatures
• A series of very short videos explaining blind signatures
• A 2-hour video starting from blind signatures, building Chaumian ecash mints and using them in Bitcoin. (use the Table of Contents to skip to the sections of interest).
  • text notes of this video

News [WIP]

💬 Indicates item to be explored further during the meetup

CVEs and Research

Research

• BitStream: Decentralized File Hosting Incentivised via Bitcoin Payments
• Heuristics for Detecting CoinJoin Transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain

InfoSec

• Armed Bitcoin Robberies Surge In Sweden Due to Open Data on Citizens
• BitcoinJS flag leaves $1B in cryptocurrency exposed

Mailing-lists

bitcoin-dev

• Future of the bitcoin-dev mailing list

Delving Bitcoin

• wg-cluster-mempool
  • Bitcoin Optech Topics: Cluster mempool

Pull Requests and repo updates

…

New Releases

• 💬 Bitcoin Core 26.0 (testing guide)
  • selection of notable changes:
    • V2 Transport - BIP 324 (PR#28196)
    • TapMiniscript descriptors (PR#27255)
    • assumeutxo (PR#27596)
    • The createwallet RPC will no longer create legacy (BDB) wallets (PR#28597)

Events and Podcasts

• SLP528 - Bitcoin Mining Decentralisation with Ocean - Bitcoin Mechanic

Mining

• New mining pool–DEMAND–will use Stratumv2
• Meet the MDK Hashboard
• Nigerian Bitcoin Miner, Trojan Mining, Launch 500KW Hydro Mining Site

Miscellaneous

• 💬 Payjoin for a Better Bitcoin Future
• bitcoinrollups.io: an educational resource covering Bitcoin rollups
• BitVM
  • Deep dive into BitVM: Computing paradigm to express Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts
  • BitVM Primer
  • sha256 function for BitVM
• Stakwork 6.5MM bounty claimed by Steven Roose for BitVM script interpreter
• Opcodes Explained - encyclopedia of all current opcodes
• Wallet of Satoshi stops service US customers
• 💬 Why mempool.space block templates are not matching production blocks
• Bitkey pre-orders
• Bitcoin Transcripts Reviews: review technical bitcoin transcripts and earn sats