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.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024 @ 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. Validity Proofs a.k.a. Zero-knowledge proofs

Validity Proofs a.k.a. Zero-knowledge proofs

Reading material:

• Generic Zero Knowledge Proofs explanation
• Validity proofs (using Fraud proofs as comparison) by StarkWare
• ZK proofs vs Fraud proofs by Alchemy
• Intro to Polynomial Commitments
• A written intro to ZKP and ZK-SNARKS
• Podcast with prominent ZK-proofs actors (1h30m)

USECASES / applications

zk-sync:

• Robin Linus zk-sync announcement
• seen in Bitcoin OpTech
• zk-sync whitepaper

Rollups:

• John Light’s HRF report
• Summary version of HRF report

News

CVEs and Research

Research

• Bitcoin research price by Chaincode Labs (2023 prize winner)
• Breaking BFT: Quantifying the Cost to Attack Bitcoin and Ethereum
• A Bitcoin Transaction Analyzing and Tracking Mechanism in Specified Network Zone
• Topology Discovery within the Bitcoin Network
• Modular Indexer: Fully User-Verified Execution Layer for Meta-Protocols on Bitcoin
• HARTS: High-Threshold, Adaptively Secure, and Robust Threshold Schnorr Signatures
• High-Bandwidth Node Selection in Compact Block Relay

InfoSec

• 9 BTC stolen with fake Exodus wallet in Ubuntu appstore
• EU anti-privacy nonsense by Sjors
  • twitter thread by Director, EU Strategy & Policy @circle

Mailing-lists

bitcoin-dev

• Adding New BIP Editors
• Bitcoin Core 27.0 release candidate 1 available (review-club)

Delving Bitcoin

• State minimization in MuSig2 signing sessions
• Basic vault prototype using OP_CAT
• An Onchain Implementation Of Mining Feerate Futures
• GitLab Backups for Bitcoin Core repository
• Revisiting BIP21
• ASMap creation process

Pull Requests and repo updates

BIPs, BOLTs and Proposals

• OP_VAULT BIP merged

Bitcoin Core

• wallet: Add CoinGrinder coin selection algorithm
• rpc: Drop migratewallet experimental warning

Mining

• T.I.D.E.S. - A Fair Bitcoin Mining Pool Reward System
  • Bitcoin Stack Exchange Explainer
• Introducing SRI 1.0.0
• Braiins introducing Lightning payouts

  Lightning

• Swaproot: cheaper and more private on-chain deposits on Phoenix
• Phoenix for server (announcement)

Miscellaneous

• COPA court win against CSW
  • Wladimir van der Laan’s reaction
• CoreDev Retro Survey 2023
• Scaling Bitcoin Apps with NWC (NIP-47)
• New version of http://learnmeabitcoin.com is now online
• Introducing Portal: the hardware wallet for mobile users (source code)
• Sharing the Code Behind Bitkey
• Schnorr (Incremental) Half Aggregation #261
• BitVM2 (tweet)
• Some statistics on the current UTXO set
• Mercury Layer
• Marathon Digital Holdings Introduces Anduro, a New Multi-Chain Bitcoin Layer-Two Network
• L2 Watch

Funding, Grants

• OpenSats: Fourth Wave of Bitcoin Grants
• OpenSats: Long-term Support for Nostr Developers
• Spiral grant for StratumV2 dev

Articles

• Vulnerability Disclosure: Wasting ViaBTC’s 60 EH/s hashrate by sending a P2P message