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 Stone Soup for hosting us.

Tuesday, May 28, 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. Taproot & Tapscript

Taproot & Tapscript

We will talk about:

• Address formats and descriptors
• Tagged hashing and key tweaking
• Equations derivation
• Spending options
• Witness stack and serialization
• Tapscript and the opcodes

Reading material:

• BIP 341 & BIP 342
• Taproot demonstration by BitMex
• Bitcoin Stack Exchange examples of P2TR transactions on Mainnet
• Spending coins with Taproot and some more examples
• Overview of the Taproot & Tapscript proposed BIPs

In the News

• Craig Wright is not Satoshi
• Tornado Cash
  • Ruling breakdown
  • “Developing Financial Privacy Tools Was Today Criminalized By the Dutch Court”
  • “Tornado Cash Is Not Free Speech. It’s a Golem”
  • “Tornado Cash is no “golem.” It’s a tool for privacy and free speech”
• Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested & Charged with Money Laundering, Unlicensed Money Transmitting Offenses
• Defense fund - p2prights.org by Bitcoin Policy Institute (src)
• Wasabi shuts down coordinator
• Phoenix withdraws from US app store
• IBEX Pay Suspends Services in the United States
• FBI probed bitcoin core developer event linked to Luke Dashjr’s BTC hack

Bitcoin

• The Great Script Restoration - A Path Forward For Bitcoin
  • Bitcoin Magazine article by Shinobi
• Emessbee - Construct Coinjoin Transactions Without a Coordinator
  • related: https://joinstr.xyz/

Bitcoin Core Dev Tech Recap

• Topics and transcripts
  • cisaresearch.org
  • Weak blocks
  • Great Consensus Cleanup
  • Impacts of cluster mempool on 2023 data
  • Silent payments descriptors, Kernel updates, GUI discussions, and more

BIPs

• New BIP editors
• BIP-352 - Silent Payments
  • silentpayments.xyz - a less technical explainer
  • Cake Wallet adds silent payments in public beta
  • Silentium - Progressive Web App with Silent Payments
• BIP-388: Wallet Policies for Descriptor Wallets
• BIP 347: OP_CAT in Tapscript

Lightning

• LDK: BOLT12 Has Arrived
• Taproot Assets on LN

Research

• An integrated landfill-gas-to-energy and Bitcoin mining model (src)
• Cryptocurrency mining as a novel virtual energy storage system in islanded and grid-connected microgrids (src)

Miscellaneous

• bitcoin++ ATX script edition
• Sandshrew, the Bitcoin RPC for builders
• The first satoshi of Bitcoin’s fourth halving block auctioned off for 33.3BTC
• Roger Ver Charged with $50M Tax Fraud by DOJ
• Binance’s Founder CZ Sentenced to 4 Months in Prison
• An impromptu interview with a social engineering hacker
• National Bitcoin Office of El Salvador

Articles

• Stop Calling It MEV by Matt Corallo
• Team slow and steady by AJ Towns
• How to verify ZK proofs on Bitcoin?
• Orange Pilling Has Stopped Working
• Bitcoin first steps: A short article for self-custody

Funding, Grants

• Opensats: Aditional donation of $21M from #startsmall, Jack Dorsey’s philanthropic initiative
• Cornell’s BTPI announced a $1M project to research the relationship between Bitcoin and financial freedom