Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bob McElrath and moonsettler to discuss ⁠Newsletter #317⁠.

News

• Simple (but imperfect) anti-exfiltration protocol (0:53)

Changes to services and client software

• Proton Wallet announced (23:33)
• CPUNet testnet announced (25:38)
• Lightning.Pub launches (38:52)
• Taproot Assets v0.4.0-alpha released (39:45)
• Stratum v2 benchmarking tool released (41:31)
• STARK verification PoC on signet (42:52)
• SeedSigner 0.8.0 released (48:48)
• Floresta 0.6.0 released (50:25)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning 24.08rc2 (51:52)
• LND v0.18.3-beta.rc1 (52:33)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28553 (53:18)
• Bitcoin Core #30246 (56:39)
• Bitcoin Core GUI #824 (1:02:10)
• Core Lightning #7540 (1:04:20)
• Core Lightning #7403 (1:05:20)
• LND #8943 (1:06:13)
• BDK #1478 (1:07:26)
• BDK #1533 (1:08:12)
• BOLTs #1182 (1:11:49)
• BLIPs #39 (1:12:55)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier and Hennadii Stepanov to discuss Newsletter #316.

News

• New time warp vulnerability in testnet4 (1:05)
• Onion message DoS risk discussion (14:20)
• Optional identification and authentication of LN payers (28:04)
• Bitcoin Core switch to CMake build system (36:15)

Releases and release candidates

• BDK 1.0.0-beta.1 (53:55)
• Core Lightning 24.08rc2 (54:10)
• LND v0.18.3-beta.rc1 (54:29)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29519 (55:01)
• Bitcoin Core #30598 (59:29)
• Bitcoin Core #28280 (1:02:18)
• Bitcoin Core #28052 (1:04:47)
• Core Lightning #7528 (1:08:01)
• Core Lightning #7533 (1:10:11)
• Core Lightning #7517 (1:11:19)
• LND #8955 (1:13:08)
• LND #8886 (1:14:39)
• LND #8967 (1:19:45)
• LDK #3215 (1:22:13)
• BLIPs #27 (1:26:27)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Hunter Beast and TheCharlatan to discuss Newsletter #307.

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Larry Ruane to discuss Newsletter #217.

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Reduce bandwidth during initial headers sync when a block is found (4:58)

Releases and release candidates

• LDK 0.0.111 (25:09)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #25614 (26:20)
• Bitcoin Core #25768 (30:41)
• Bitcoin Core #19602 (34:44)
• Eclair #2406 (39:27)
• Eclair #2190 (44:26)
• Rust Bitcoin #1196 (46:51)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Daniela Brozzoni to discuss Newsletter #216.

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #25717 (2:34)
• Bitcoin Core #25355 (22:41)
• BDK #689 (31:45)
• BDK #682 (39:07)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Craig Raw to discuss Newsletter #215.

News

• Wallet label export format (1:00)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Why isn't it possible to add an OP_RETURN commitment (or some arbitrary script) inside a taproot script path with a descriptor? (23:12)
• Why does Bitcoin Core rebroadcast transactions? (24:56)
• When did Bitcoin Core deprecate the mining function? (33:27)
• UTXO spendable by me or deposit to exchange after 5 years? (35:50)
• What was the bug for the Bitcoin value overflow in 2010? (41:03)

Releases and release candidates

• LND 0.15.1-beta (45:13)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #23202 (45:38)
• Eclair #2275 (49:36)
• Eclair #2387 (52:01)
• LDK #1652 (56:21)
• HWI #627 (58:00)
• BDK #718 (1:00:47)
• BDK #705 (1:02:19)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Antoine Riard and Rodolfo Novak to discuss Newsletter #214.

News

• Overview of channel jamming attacks and mitigations (28:08)
• Updated silent payments PR (2:00)

Changes to services and client software

• Purse.io adds Lightning support (10:05)
• Proof of concept coinjoin implementation joinstr (12:14)
• Coldcard firmware 5.0.6 released (14:48)
• Nunchuk adds taproot support (20:26)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #25504 (47:46)
• Eclair #2234 (49:10)
• LDK #1503 (50:03)
• LND #6596 (53:30)
• BOLTs #1004 (54:05)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Lloyd Fournier to discuss Newsletter #213.

News

• Using Bitcoin-compatible BLS signatures for DLCs (1:59)

Releases and release candidates

• Rust Bitcoin 0.29 (40:47)
• Core Lightning 0.12.0rc2 (43:02)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #23480 (43:19)
• Bitcoin Core #22751 (44:50)
• Eclair #2273 (47:34)
• Eclair #2361 (50:27)
• LND #6810 (52:03)
• LND #6816 (53:10)
• BDK #640 (53:58)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Peter Todd, Larry Ruane, and Gloria Zhao to discuss Newsletter #212.

News

• Lowering the default minimum transaction relay feerate (2:30)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Decouple validation cache initialization from ArgsManager (31:25)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #25610 (45:50)
• Bitcoin Core #24584 (49:27)
• Core Lightning #5071 (53:55)
• BDK #645 (55:05)
• BOLTs #911 (56:02)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Andrew Chow and Rodolfo Novak to discuss Newsletter #211.

News

• Multiple derivation path descriptors (0:52)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Core Lightning #5441 (23:26)
• Eclair #2253 (24:33)
• LDK #1519 (26:40)
• Rust Bitcoin #994 (29:37)
• Rust Bitcoin #1088 (32:50)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Ruben Somsen to discuss Newsletter #210.

News

• Multiformat single-sig message signing (2:05)
• Proof of micro-burn (9:43)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Why do invalid signatures in `OP_CHECKSIGADD` not push to the stack? (30:41)
• What are packages in Bitcoin Core and what is their use case? (34:17)
• How much blockspace would it take to spend the complete UTXO set? (37:43)
• Does an uneconomical output need to be kept in the UTXO set? (39:37)
• Is there code in libsecp256k1 that should be moved to the Bitcoin Core codebase? (47:07)
• Mining stale low-difficulty blocks as a DoS attack (48:32)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #25351 (51:42)
• Core Lightning #5370 (53:51)
• BOLTs #1001 (56:25)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Fabian Jahr, Anthony Towns, and Matt Corallo to discuss Newsletter #306.

News

• Upcoming disclosure of vulnerabilities affecting old versions of Bitcoin Core (1:02)
• BIP and experimental implementation of testnet4 (10:17)
• Functional encryption covenants (24:58)
• Updates to proposed soft fork for 64-bit arithmetic (31:27)
• `OP_CAT` script to validate proof of work (33:32)
• Proposed update to BIP21 (42:12)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning 24.05rc2 (54:53)
• Bitcoin Core 27.1rc1 (55:51)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Core Lightning #7252 (56:50)
• LDK #2931 (1:02:19)
• Rust Bitcoin #2644 (1:04:11)
• BIPs #1541 (1:05:19)
• BIPs #1556 (1:07:34)
• BLIPs #32 (1:09:28)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Setor Blagogee, Oghenovo Usiwoma, Pierre Rochard, and Alex Bosworth to discuss Newsletter #305.

News

• Light client protocol for silent payments (1:52)
• Raw taproot descriptors (14:56)
• Should overlapping soft fork proposals be considered mutually exclusive? (28:02)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• What's the smallest possible coinbase transaction / block size? (1:13:32)
• Understanding Script's number encoding, CScriptNum (1:14:18)
• Is there a way to make a BTC wallet address public but hide how many BTC it contains? (1:16:04)
• Testing increased feerates in regtest (1:18:05)
• Why is my P2P_V2 peer connected over a v1 connection? (1:20:41)
• Does a P2PKH transaction send to the hash of the uncompressed key or the compressed key? (1:21:58)
• What are different ways to broadcast a block to the Bitcoin network? (1:23:20)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.18.0-beta (43:23)
• Core Lightning 24.05rc2 (1:12:21)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29612 (1:27:11)
• Bitcoin Core #27064 (1:29:59)
• Bitcoin Core #29873 (1:30:55)
• Bitcoin Core #30062 (1:34:15)
• Bitcoin Core #26606 (1:38:17)
• BOLTs #1092 (1:41:41)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Andrew Toth, Antoine Poinsot, and Tony Klausing to discuss ⁠Newsletter #304⁠.

News

• Upgrading existing LN channels (1:27)
• Challenges in rewarding pool miners (6:58)
• Spending previously received SP outputs (12:40)
• Proposed miniscript BIP (21:32)
• Channel value pegging (31:42)

Changes to services and client software

• Silent payment resources (43:50)
• Cake Wallet adds silent payments (46:14)
• Coordinator-less coinjoin PoC (46:26)
• OCEAN adds BOLT12 support (47:10)
• Coinbase adds Lightning support (48:57)
• Bitcoin escrow tooling announced (49:20)
• Block's call for mining community feedback (49:48)
• Sentrum wallet tracker released (50:34)
• Stack Wallet adds FROST support (51:19)
• Transaction broadcast tool announced (53:41)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Inquisition 27.0 (56:30)
• LND v0.18.0-beta.rc2 (1:00:10)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27101 (1:00:30)
• Bitcoin Core #30000 (1:01:27)
• Bitcoin Core #28233 (1:02:42)
• Core Lightning #7304 (1:09:41)
• Core Lightning #7063 (1:10:18)
• Rust Bitcoin #2740 (1:17:54)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Adam Gibson to discuss ⁠Newsletter #303⁠.

News

• Anonymous usage tokens (1:58)
• BIP39 seed phrase splitting (31:48)
• Alternative to BitVM (38:05)
• Continued discussion about updating BIP2 (40:41)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.18.0-beta.rc2 (44:25)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Core Lightning #7190 (44:51)
• LDK #2973 (46:18)
• LDK #2907 (48:21)
• BDK #1403 (48:59)
• BIPs #1458 (50:57)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Calvin Kim to discuss ⁠Newsletter #302⁠.

News

• Release of utreexod beta (0:56)
• BIP119 extensions for smaller hashes and arbitrary data commitments (20:15)

Releases and release candidates

• LDK v0.0.123 (25:16)
• LND v0.18.0-beta.rc2 (26:08)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29845 (28:16)
• Core Lightning #7111 (29:34)
• Libsecp256k1 #1518 (32:04)
• Rust Bitcoin #2707 (34:30)
• BIPs #1389 (37:29)
• BIPs #1567 (42:21)
• BIPs #1525 (44:08)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Ethan Heilman and Gloria Zhao to discuss ⁠Newsletter #301⁠.

News

• Consensus-enforced lamport signatures on top of ECDSA signatures (1:00)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Index TxOrphanage by wtxid, allow entries with same txid (31:04)

Releases and release candidates

• Libsecp256k1 v0.5.0 (51:15)
• LND v0.18.0-beta.rc1 (52:12)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28970 (26:33)
• Bitcoin Core #28016 (53:05)
• Bitcoin Core #29623 (57:00)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Tadge Dryja to discuss ⁠Newsletter #300⁠.

News

• CTV-like exploding keys proposal (0:59)
• Analyzing a contract protocol with Alloy (13:07)
• Arrests of Bitcoin developers (22:37)
• CoreDev.tech Berlin event (28:53)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Inquisition 25.2 (31:35)
• LND v0.18.0-beta.rc1 (35:59)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27679 (36:48)
• Core Lightning #7240 (39:39)
• Eclair #2851 (44:02)
• LND #8147 (45:49)
• LND #8627 (47:37)
• Libsecp256k1 #1058 (1:00:01)
• BIPs #1382 (1:02:01)
• BIPs #1068 (1:03:35)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gregory Sanders to discuss ⁠Newsletter #299⁠.

News

• Weak blocks proof-of-concept implementation (0:56)
• BIP editors update (20:08)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Where exactly is the off-by-one difficulty bug? (26:44)
• How is P2TR different than P2PKH using opcodes from a developer perspective? (32:10)
• Are replacement transactions larger in size than their predecessors and than non-RBF transactions? (34:15)
• Are Bitcoin signatures still vulnerable to nonce reuse? (36:59)
• How do miners manually add transactions to a block template? (39:48)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.17.5-beta (41:40)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29850 (46:35)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss ⁠Newsletter #298⁠.

News

• What would have happened if cluster mempool had been deployed a year ago? (0:42)

Changes to services and client software

• Phoenix for server announced (19:26)
• Mercury Layer adds Lightning swaps (21:32)
• Stratum V2 Reference Implementation v1.0.0 released (22:46)
• Teleport Transactions update (25:09)
• Bitcoin Keeper v1.2.1 released (28:10)
• BIP-329 label management software (29:02)
• Key agent Sigbash launches (31:37)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 27.0 (35:19)
• BTCPay Server 1.13.1 (41:50)
• LDK 0.0.122 (42:55)

Notable code and documentation changes

• LDK #2704 (44:40)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Corallo, Greg Sanders, Sivaram Dhakshinamoorthy to discuss ⁠Newsletter #315⁠.

News

• Faster seed exfiltration attack (1:24)
• Block withholding attacks and potential solutions (17:21)
• Statistics on compact block reconstruction (21:47)
• Replacement cycle attack against pay-to-anchor (36:23)
• Proposed BIP for scriptless threshold signatures (42:24)
• Optimistic verification of zero-knowledge proofs using CAT, MATT, and Elftrace (50:40)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club (33:15)

Releases and release candidates

• Libsecp256k1 0.5.1 (53:11)
• BDK 1.0.0-beta.1 (53:43)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #30493 (54:38)
• Bitcoin Core #30285 (57:33)
• Bitcoin Core #30352 (1:02:26)
• Bitcoin Core #29775 (1:02:39)
• Core Lightning #7476 (1:08:21)
• Eclair #2884 (1:08:55)
• LND #8952 (1:12:10)
• LND #8735 (1:13:40)
• BIPs #1601 (1:14:44)

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Kulpreet Singh, Chris Stewart, Jameson Lopp, and Joost Jager to discuss ⁠Newsletter #297⁠.

News

• DSL for experimenting with contracts (1:24)
• Updating BIP2 (15:50)
• Discussion about resetting and modifying testnet (21:00)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Implement 64 bit arithmetic op codes in the Script interpreter (37:19)

Releases and release candidates

• HWI 3.0.0 (46:17)
• Core Lightning 24.02.2 (48:06)
• Bitcoin Core 27.0rc1 (49:41)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29648 (50:25)
• Bitcoin Core #29130 (21:00)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Antoine Poinsot to discuss ⁠Newsletter #296⁠.

News

• Revisiting consensus cleanup (0:46)
• Choosing new BIP editors (27:21)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 26.1 (37:22)
• Bitcoin Core 27.0rc1 (39:09)
• HWI 3.0.0-rc1 (39:40)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27307 (40:59)
• Bitcoin Core #29242 (43:50)
• Core Lightning #7094 (52:59)
• BDK #1351 (54:41)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Dave Harding, Peter Todd, Abubakar Sadiq Ismail, David Gumberg, and Jeffrey Czyz to discuss Newsletter #295.

News

• Disclosure of free relay attack (1:22)
• Transaction fee sponsorship improvements (9:55)
• Mempool-based feerate estimation (34:49)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• What are the risks of running a pre-SegWit node (0.12.1)? (50:30)
• When is OP_RETURN cheaper than OP_FALSE OP_IF? (55:51)
• Why does BIP-340 use secp256k1? (56:33)
• What criteria does Bitcoin Core use to create block templates? (58:08)
• How does the initialblockdownload field in the getblockchaininfo RPC work? (1:04:45)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 26.1rc2 (1:07:34)
• Bitcoin Core 27.0rc1 (1:07:55)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28950 (1:17:13)
• LND #8418 (1:19:07)
• LDK #2756 (1:23:44)
• LDK #2935 (1:25:55)
• LDK #2419 (1:27:39)
• Rust Bitcoin #2549 (1:32:54)
• BTCPay Server #5852 (1:33:36)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Sebastian Falbesoner, Anthony Towns, and Russell O’Connor to discuss ⁠Newsletter #294⁠.

News

• BIP324 proxy for light clients (1:20)
• Overview of BTC Lisp (10:44)

Changes to services and client software

• BitGo adds RBF support (38:59)
• Phoenix Wallet v2.2.0 released (40:11)
• Bitkey hardware signing device released (44:19)
• Envoy v1.6.0 released (47:49)
• VLS v0.11.0 released (49:22)
• Portal hardware signing device announced (50:54)
• Braiins mining pool adds Lightning support (51:44)
• Ledger Bitcoin App 2.2.0 released (54:14)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 26.1rc2 (55:51)
• Bitcoin Core 27.0rc1 (56:48)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27375 (57:43)
• Bitcoin Core #27114 (58:59)
• Bitcoin Core #29306 (1:02:19)
• LND #8310 (1:09:04)
• Rust Bitcoin #2458 (1:10:12)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by ZmnSCPxj, Anthony Towns, and Armin Sabouri to discuss Newsletter #293.

News

• Trustless onchain betting on potential soft forks (1:11)
• Overview of Chia Lisp for Bitcoiners (14:06)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Re enable `OP_CAT` (35:48)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning v24.02.1 (50:33)
• Bitcoin Core 26.1rc1 (51:03)
• Bitcoin Core 27.0rc1 (52:11)

Notable code and documentation changes

• LND #8136 (54:58)
• LND #8499 (57:26)
• LDK #2916 (58:31)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Josie Baker, Salvatore Ingala, and Fabian Jahr to discuss ⁠Newsletter #292⁠.

News

• Updating BIP21 `bitcoin:` URIs (18:07)
• PSBTs for multiple concurrent MuSig2 signing sessions (46:30)
• Discussion about adding more BIP editors (58:33)
• GitLab backup for Bitcoin Core GitHub project (1:11)

Releases and release candidates

• Eclair v0.10.0 (1:03:24)
• Bitcoin Core 26.1rc1 (1:05:18)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29412 (1:06:53)
• Eclair #2829 (1:17:29)
• LND #8378 (1:19:06)
• BIPs #1421 (1:20:28)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Richard Myers, Rijndael, Luke Dashjr, and Jason Hughes to discuss Newsletter #291.

News

• Trustless contract for miner feerate futures (1:31)
• Coin selection for liquidity providers (7:18)
• Simple vault prototype using `OP_CAT` (21:15)
• Sending and receiving ecash using LN and ZKCPs (44:44)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Why can't nodes have the relay option to disallow certain transaction types? (49:41)
• What is the circular dependency in signing a chain of unconfirmed transactions? (53:28)
• How does Ocean’s TIDES payout scheme work? (34:02)
• What data does the Bitcoin Core wallet search for during a blockchain rescan? (57:57)
• How does transaction rebroadcasting for watch-only wallets work? (59:37)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning 24.02 (1:02:20)

Notable code and documentation changes

• LDK #2770 (1:04:20)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gloria Zhao, callebtc, Chris Stewart, Fabian Jahr, and Pierre Corbin to discuss ⁠Newsletter #290⁠.

News

• DNS-based human-readable Bitcoin payment instructions (1:41)
• Thinking about mempool incentive compatibility (9:50)
• Cashu and other ecash system design discussion (29:15)
• Continued discussion about 64-bit arithmetic and `OP_INOUT_AMOUNT` opcode (39:52)
• Improved reproducible ASMap creation process (49:17)

Changes to services and client software

• Multiparty coordination protocol NWC announced (1:11:00)
• Mutiny Wallet v0.5.7 released (1:19:07)
• GroupHug transaction batching service (1:19:48)
• Boltz announces taproot swaps (1:22:43)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning 24.02rc1 (1:24:07)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27877 (1:24:58)
• BOLTs #851 (1:29:00)

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gregory Sanders and Gloria Zhao to discuss Newsletter #289.

News

• Ideas for relay enhancements after cluster mempool is deployed (1:11)
• What would have happened if v3 semantics had been applied to anchor outputs a year ago? (25:55)
• Bitcoin-Dev mailing list move (35:47)
• I Love Free Software Day (37:56)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Add `maxfeerate` and `maxburnamount` args to `submitpackage` (39:57)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28948 (46:24)
• Core Lightning #6785 (49:39)
• Eclair #2818 (50:18)
• Eclair #2816 (52:29)
• LND #8338 (56:20)
• LDK #2856 (56:56)
• LDK #2442 (59:09)
• Rust Bitcoin #2451 (59:39)

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier and Eugene Siegel to discuss Newsletter #288.

News

• Public disclosure of a block stalling bug in Bitcoin Core affecting LN (1:26)
• Securely opening zero-conf channels with v3 transactions (17:08)
• Requirement to verify inputs use segwit in protocols vulnerable to txid malleability (27:00)
• Proposal for replace by feerate to escape pinning (35:21)
• Bitcoin-Dev mailing list migration update (51:15)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.17.4-beta (1:00:02)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29189 (1:01:13)
• Bitcoin Core #28956 (1:07:23)
• Bitcoin Core #29347 (1:10:03)
• Core Lightning #6985 (1:10:45)
• Core Lightning #6904 (1:12:54)
• Core Lightning #7022 (1:14:53)
• Core Lightning #6936 (1:16:16)
• LND #8345 (1:18:02)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Sergi Delgado to discuss ⁠Newsletter #314⁠.

News

• Disclosure of vulnerabilities affecting Bitcoin Core versions before 22.0 (0:56)
• Optimizing block building with cluster mempool (11:23)
• Hyperion network event simulator for the Bitcoin P2P network (14:30)

Releases and release candidates

• BDK 1.0.0-beta.1 (41:01)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #30515 (41:36)
• Bitcoin Core #30126 (43:00)
• Bitcoin Core #30482 (44:18)
• Bitcoin Core #30275 (45:18)
• Bitcoin Core #30408 (47:29)
• Core Lightning #7474 (49:27)
• LND #8891 (51:21)
• LDK #3139 (51:57)
• Rust Bitcoin #3010 (52:48)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gloria Zhao and Brandon Black to discuss ⁠Newsletter #287⁠.

News

• Kindred replace by fee (1:10)
• Opposition to CTV based on commonly requiring exogenous fees (19:11)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• How does block synchronization work in Bitcoin Core today? (28:14)
• How does headers-first prevent disk-fill attack? (30:31)
• Is BIP324 v2transport redundant on Tor and I2P connections? (33:57)
• What's a rule of thumb for setting the maximum number of connections? (34:57)
• Why isn't the upper bound (+2h) on the block timestamp set as a consensus rule? (37:01)
• Sigop count and its influence on transaction selection? (43:22)

Releases and release candidates

• HWI 2.4.0 (48:03)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29291 (48:41)
• Eclair #2811 (49:23)
• LND #8167 (52:10)
• LND #7733 (53:01)
• LND #8275 (54:01)
• Rust Bitcoin #2366 (56:34)
• HWI #716 (58:35)
• BDK #1172 (58:49)
• BINANAs #3 (59:29)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Niklas Gögge, Bastien Teinturier, Anthony Towns, Gloria Zhao, Nicholas Gregory, and Tom Trevethan to discuss ⁠Newsletter #286⁠.

News

• Disclosure of fixed consensus failure in btcd (1:33)
• Proposed changes to LN for v3 relay and ephemeral anchors (13:40)
• New documentation repository (29:56)

Changes to services and client software

• Envoy 1.5 released (45:41)
• Liana v4.0 released (46:39)
• Mercury Layer announced (47:46)
• AQUA wallet announced (57:18)
• Samourai Wallet announces atomic swap feature (57:49)

Releases and release candidates

• LDK 0.0.120 (58:37)
• HWI 2.4.0-rc1 (59:11)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29239 (59:37)
• Eclair #2810 (1:02:16)
• LDK #2791 (1:05:32)
• Rust Bitcoin #2230 (1:07:43)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Brandon Black, Chris Stewart, Gregory Sanders, and Oliver Gugger to discuss ⁠Newsletter #285⁠.

News

• Disclosure of past vulnerability in Core Lightning (2:15)
• New LNHANCE combination soft fork proposed (4:59)
• Proposal for 64-bit arithmetic soft fork (21:08)
• Overview of cluster mempool proposal (38:25)
• Updated specification and implementation of Bitcoin transaction compression (45:22)
• Discussion of Miner Extractable Value (MEV) in non-zero ephemeral anchors (46:51)

Releases and release candidates

• LDK 0.0.119 (56:24)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29058 (57:17)
• Bitcoin Core #29200 (58:59)
• Bitcoin Core #28890 (1:00:08)
• Eclair #2808 (1:01:25)
• LND #8188 (1:02:09)
• LND #8096 (1:07:44)
• LND #8095 (1:09:08)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gloria Zhao, Gregory Sanders, Dave Harding, and Stéphan Vuylsteke to discuss Newsletter #284.

News

• Discussion about LN anchors and v3 transaction relay proposal (1:03)
• LN-Symmetry research implementation (35:03)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Nuke adjusted time (attempt 2) (50:01)

Notable code and documentation changes

• LND #8308 (1:05:06)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Niklas Gögge, Antoine Riard, Abubakar Sadiq Ismail, Gloria Zhao, Salvatore Ingala, Johan Torås Halseth and SeedHammer Team to discuss Newsletter #283.

News

• Disclosure of past LND vulnerabilities (2:07)
• Fee-dependent timelocks (25:09)
• Cluster fee estimation (8:32)
• How to specify unspendable keys in descriptors (17:48)
• V3 transaction pinning costs (34:14)
• Descriptors in PSBT draft BIP (48:19)
• Verification of arbitrary programs using proposed opcode from MATT (57:52)
• Pool exit payment batching with delegation using fraud proofs (1:04:59)
• New coin selection strategies (1:14:36)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning 23.11.2 (1:17:57)
• Libsecp256k1 0.4.1 (1:18:14)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28349 (1:19:06)
• Core Lightning #6957 (1:20:21)
• Core Lightning #6869 (1:21:15)
• Eclair #2796 (1:21:47)
• Eclair #2787 (1:22:23)
• LDK #2781 (1:23:14)
• LDK #2723 (1:24:16)
• BIPs #1504 (1:25:00)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Dave Harding, and Mike Schmidt discuss ⁠Newsletter #282: 2023 Year-in-Review Special⁠.

January

• Bitcoin Inquisition (10:59)
• Swap-in-potentiam (14:03)
• BIP329 wallet label export format (19:32)

February

• Ordinals and inscriptions (20:22)
• Bitcoin Search, ChatBTC, and TL;DR (41:50)
• Peer storage backups (43:40)
• LN quality of service (44:10)
• HTLC endorsement (47:31)
• Codex32 (48:33)

March

• Hierarchical channels (50:57)

Summary 2023: Soft fork proposals (54:22)

April

• Watchtower accountability proofs (1:04:24)
• Route blinding (1:05:58)
• MuSig2 (1:08:36)
• RGB and Taproot Assets (1:12:47)
• Channel splicing (1:16:06)

May

• LSP specifications (1:21:10)
• Payjoin (1:23:07)
• Ark (1:27:40)

June

• Silent payments (1:30:33)

Summary 2023: Security disclosures (1:32:34)

July

• Validating Lightning Signer (1:36:10)
• LN developer meeting (1:38:00)

August

• Onion messages (1:38:28)
• Outdated backup proofs (1:41:52)
• Simple taproot channels (1:44:39)

September

• Compressed Bitcoin transactions (1:46:40)

Summary 2023: Major releases of popular infrastructure projects (1:48:19)

October

• Payment switching and splitting (1:49:46)
• Sidepools (1:51:30)
• AssumeUTXO (1:55:28)
• Version 2 P2P transport (1:55:51)
• Miniscript (1:57:18)
• State compression and BitVM (2:00:07)

November

• Offers (2:05:53)
• Liquidity advertisements (2:08:26)

Summary 2023: Bitcoin Optech (1:11)

December

• Cluster mempool (2:11:10)
• Warnet (2:13:12)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Bastien Teinturier and Rodolfo Novak to discuss Newsletter #281.

News

• Discussion about griefing liquidity ads (0:46)

Changes to services and client software

• Stratum v2 mining pool launches (15:43)
• Bitcoin network simulation tool warnet announced (16:31)
• Payjoin client for Bitcoin Core released (17:30)
• Call for community block arrival timestamps (18:44)
• Envoy 1.4 released (21:41)
• BBQr encoding scheme announced (22:09)
• Zeus v0.8.0 released (22:45)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• What are all the rules related to CPFP fee bumping? (25:16)
• How is the total number of RBF replaced transactions calculated? (29:41)
• What types of RBF exist and which one does Bitcoin Core support and use by default? (31:37)
• What is the Block 1,983,702 Problem? (34:48)
• What are hash functions used for in bitcoin? (45:12)

Releases and release candidates

• LND 0.17.3-beta (51:59)

Notable code and documentation changes

• LDK #2685 (52:22)
• Libsecp256k1 #1446 (53:04)
• BTCPay Server #5389 (53:36)
• BTCPay Server #5490 (59:54)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Pieter Wuille and Matthew Zipkin to discuss Newsletter #280.

News

• Cluster mempool discussion (0:57)
• Testing with warnet (32:42)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Testing Bitcoin Core 26.0 Release Candidates (43:18)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 26.0 (45:30)
• LND 0.17.3-beta.rc1 (57:41)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28848 (58:49)
• LDK #2540 (59:49)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Lisa Neigut and Bastien Teinturier to discuss Newsletter #279.

News

• Update to the liquidity ads specification (1:00)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Is the Schnorr digital signature scheme a multisignature interactive scheme, and also not an aggregated non-interactive scheme? (38:49)
• Is it advisable to operate a release candidate full node on mainnet? (41:40)
• What is the relation between nLockTime and nSequence? (44:40)
• What would happen if we provide to OP_CHECKMULTISIG more than threshold number (m) of signatures? (52:18)
• What is (mempool) policy? (54:30)
• What does Pay to Contract (P2C) mean? (57:31)
• Can a non-segwit transaction be serialized in the segwit format? (58:18)

Releases and release candidates

• Core Lightning 23.11 (1:00:05)
• Bitcoin Core 26.0rc3 (1:03:31)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Rust Bitcoin #2213 (1:04:55)
• BDK #1190 (1:09:04)

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier and Robin Linus to discuss Newsletter #278.

News

• Offers-compatible LN addresses (1:20)

Changes to services and client software

• BitMask Wallet 0.6.3 released (17:42)
• Opcode documentation website announced (20:08)
• Athena Bitcoin adds Lightning support (21:42)
• Blixt v0.6.9 released (22:22)
• Durabit whitepaper announced (23:07)
• BitStream whitepaper announced (25:01)
• BitVM proof of concepts (42:33)
• Bitkit adds taproot send support (55:17)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.17.2-beta (55:53)
• Bitcoin Core 26.0rc2 (56:34)
• Core Lightning 23.11rc3 (57:37)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Core Lightning #6857 (58:45)
• Eclair #2752 (59:42)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss ⁠Newsletter #313⁠.

News

• Varied discussion of free relay and fee bumping upgrades (0:31)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Why is restructure of mempool required with cluster mempool? (29:54)
• DEFAULT_MAX_PEER_CONNECTIONS for Bitcoin Core is 125 or 130? (36:32)
• Why do protocol developers work on maximizing miner revenue? (38:34)
• Is there an economic incentive to use P2WSH over P2TR? (42:26)
• How many blocks per second can sustainably be created using a time warp attack? (45:30)
• pkh() nested in tr() is allowed? (49:01)
• Can a block more than a week old be considered a valid chain tip? (51:25)
• SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY mediated tx modification (57:35)
• Why does RBF rule #3 exist? (1:00:35)

Releases and release candidates

• BDK 1.0.0-beta.1 (1:02:05)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #30320 (1:02:58)
• Bitcoin Core #29523 (1:07:42)
• Core Lightning #7461 (1:10:03)
• Eclair #2881 (1:11:06)

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gregory Sanders, Antoine Poinsot, and Max Edwards to discuss Newsletter #277.

News

• Eliminating malleability from ephemeral anchor spends (1:54)

Field Report: A Miniscript Journey (20:17)

Releases and release candidates

• LND 0.17.1-beta (37:27)
• Bitcoin Core 26.0rc2 (40:05)
• Core Lightning 23.11rc1 (53:24)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28207 (55:33)
• LDK #2715 (1:02:34)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Johan Torås Halseth and Abubakar Ismail to discuss Newsletter #276.

News

• Mailing list hosting (1:05)
• HTLC aggregation with covenants (5:36)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• Fee Estimator updates from Validation Interface/CScheduler thread (16:47)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 26.0rc2 (26:14)
• Core Lightning 23.11rc1 (29:26)
• LND 0.17.1-beta.rc1 (31:28)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Core Lightning #6824 (32:38)
• Core Lightning #6783 (34:59)
• Core Lightning #6780 (36:29)
• Core Lightning #6773 (39:06)
• Core Lightning #6734 (39:58)
• Eclair #2761 (41:02)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss ⁠Newsletter #275⁠.

News

• Continued discussion about scripting changes (0:40)

Releases and release candidates

• LDK 0.0.118 (14:57)
• Rust Bitcoin 0.31.1 (17:35)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28685 (21:24)
• Bitcoin Core #28651 (22:34)
• Bitcoin Core #28565 (24:57)
• LND #7828 (31:01)
• LDK #2660 (33:14)
• BOLTs #1086 (35:02)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier, Fabian Jahr, Ethan Heilman, and Armin Sabouri to discuss Newsletter #274.

News

• Replacement cycling vulnerability against HTLCs (1:40)
• Bitcoin UTXO set summary hash replacement (24:21)
• Research into generic covenants with minimal Script language changes (40:02)
• Proposed BIP for OP_CAT (45:38)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• How does the Branch and Bound coin selection algorithm work? (52:17)
• Why is each transaction broadcast twice in the Bitcoin network? (54:29)
• Why are OP_MUL and OP_DIV disabled in Bitcoin? (56:57)
• Why are hashSequence and hashPrevouts computed separately? (58:56)
• Why does Miniscript add an extra size check for hash preimage comparisons? (59:52)
• How can the next block fee be less than the mempool purging fee rate? (1:00:51)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 25.1 (1:12:00)
• Bitcoin Core 24.2 (1:12:00)
• Bitcoin Core 26.0rc1 (1:14:23)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Robin Linus and Antoine Poinsot to discuss ⁠Newsletter #273⁠.

News

• Security disclosure of issue affecting LN (1:09)
• Payments contingent on arbitrary computation (8:15)
• Proposed BIP for MuSig2 fields in PSBTs (26:44)

Changes to services and client software

• BIP-329 Python library released (29:10)
• LN testing tool Doppler announced (30:19)
• Coldcard Mk4 v5.2.0 released (31:54)
• Tapleaf circuits: a BitVM demo (32:27)
• Samourai Wallet 0.99.98i released (34:24)
• Krux: signing device firmware (35:12)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 24.2rc2 (36:06)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27255 (38:07)
• Eclair #2703 (45:54)
• LND #7267 (47:06)
• BDK #1041 (47:39)

Mike Schmidt is joined by Steven Roose and Gloria Zhao to discuss Newsletter #272.

News

• Specification for `OP_TXHASH` proposed (1:42)

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

• util: Type-safe transaction identifiers (18:36)

Releases and release candidates

• LDK 0.0.117 (27:33)
• BDK 0.29.0 (28:35)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #27596 (29:32)
• Bitcoin Core #28331 (30:38)
• Bitcoin Core #27609 (33:08)
• Bitcoin Core GUI #764 (34:55)
• Core Lightning #6676 (36:29)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gijs van Dam and Dave Harding to discuss Newsletter #271.

News

• Secure remote control of LN nodes (1:48)
• Payment splitting and switching (12:23)
• Pooled liquidity for LN (34:31)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.17.0-beta (55:26)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Eclair #2756 (58:26)
• LDK #2486 (1:01:33)
• LDK #2609 (1:02:34)