Welcome again Bitdevs Taiwan
Our seventeenth Socratic Seminar event will be held at our typical location 9 LiShui St. Da’An Dist. Taipei.
We will start the socratic seminar discussion with general introductions and follow with discussion on the latest bitcoin developents and news.
Learn about bitcoin development. Share, debate, and discuss trade offs in progress. We discuss a variety of developments, from industry updates and press releases, pull requests in popular git repositories (e.g. Bitcoin Core, lnd, c-lightning, rust-bitcoin, Joinmarket, WasabiWallet), research papers, technical blog posts, IRC logs, network monitors and more. Please add to the discussion topics on GitHub. We’d love to hear from you. After the event the we socialize over food and drinks.
我們每月舉辦的蘇格拉底式的研討會活動旨在促進辯論、信息共享和開放討論。在活動前幾週,聚會成員會從各種來源去整理討論主題：流行git倉儲（例如 Bitcoin Core、lnd、c-lightning、rust-bitcoin, Joinmarket、WasabiWallet）中的pull requests、研究論文、技術博客帖文、IRC 日誌、網絡監測等。經過一段時間的討論，一些活動會有來自開源項目、公司、研究和其他相關內容的介紹。隨後是反饋和問答部分。活動結束後，我們會在活動場地進行社交。
Alex Gladstein has a great article about how Bitcoin Mining greates value for communities by tapping into stranded Energy. Translated this article to chinese because I think this story is important for Taiwanese
Note: These are all made possible with Taiwanese exports (ASICs, nodes, networking equipment) Bitcoin Magazine BTCZH.tw
Delivering these same capabilities on the Bitcoin blockchain without smart contracts and stablecoins was challenging & we therefore made the difficult decision to remove native Bitcoin & other UTXO support,” she added.
Coinbase Commerce now no longer receives Bitcoin from non-Coinbase users
Note: To date Coinbase still has not implemented lightning
Senator Elizabeth Warren honored Satoshi Nakamoto for the 15th anniversary of the network’s launch with a commemorative flag flown over the United States Capitol, although the service is available to anyone willing to pay a fee. “In participation of the Capitol Flag Program, Senator Warren’s office submitted a request to commemorate Nakamoto’s accomplishment of creating the first “truly inclusive financial system,” with the colors of the United States being flown above the Capitol on December 18, 2023 – a date known to Bitcoiners as HODL Day,” wrote Mark Goodwin in an entertaining article for Bitcoin Magazine. US regulators for the first time approved exchange-traded funds that invest directly in Bitcoin, a move heralded as a landmark event for the roughly $1.7 trillion digital-asset sector that will broaden access to the largest cryptocurrency on Wall Street and beyond.
“Investors will continue to be able to verify BITB’s holdings transparently on-chain, a unique capability that’s fundamental to the bitcoin blockchain. All are listed at http://bitbetf.com.”
Bitwise is one of two Bitcoin spot ETF providers that’s allocating a portion (10%) of its ETF proceeds to support open source Bitcoin development (no strings attached). Late in January, it became the first Bitcoin spot ETF to publicly disclose its bitcoin holding addresses. It didn’t take long. Just two days after BlackRock and other bitcoin spot ETFs began trading, we can reveal at least one on-chain address that belongs to BlackRock.
Aqua Wallet, developed by Jan3, is a non-custodial mobile Bitcoin, Lightning, Liquid and Tether USDT (on Liquid, Ethereum, and Tron) wallet. Available on Android (APK only for now) and iOS.
“The trial is of particular significance because it stands to affect a number of other upcoming court cases, perhaps most importantly including a lawsuit filed by Wright against several Bitcoin Core contributors,” reported Aaron van Wirdum
Mempool Goggles is a new visualization tool that lets you explore mempool transactions through 25 different filters.
“Click on the Mempool Goggles icon at the top left of the mempool block visualization to reveal the new filter menu. There are 25 different categories to explore, or mix-and-match to narrow down your focus even further.”
Stripe is a digital payments provider.
Bitcoin consulting service and hardware store Bitsaga.be has been deplatformed by payment processor Stripe for offering Bitcoin mining equipment on its site.
“We understand that your business may be legal, but for now, due to various reasons, including requirements that apply to Stripe as a payment processor, requirements from our financial partners, and the potential risk exposure to Stripe, we’re currently not able to work with certain industries.”
Dual funding allows creation of Lightning payment channels where both parties can contribute funds. V2 channel establishment protocol may also be used for negotiated opening of single-funded channels, but its motivating purpose is providing support for dual funding.
The bill aims to extend Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) requirements including know-your-customer (KYC) rules to miners, validators, wallet providers and others.
The Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act would:
Note: Often Republic of China/Taiwan policy follows suit with the US, so best to keep alert on what is happening with the KYC/AML side – however generally everyone is already KYC’ed
Apple’s App Store continues to publish fraudulent apps that mimic popular Bitcoin wallets, leading to the theft of money from unsuspecting users.
Attack Scenarios
nobsbitcoin article Electrum Tips
Self-custodial Lightning Wallet built off of Blockstream Greenlight and Breez SDK, 100 spots for iOS and APK available for Android
Primal is a nostr client that works on Web, iOS, Android. Great explore feature. Offers a Zap-enabled lightning wallet which can hold up to 1.5million satoshis with a $15US/day buy limit. Apple Pay charges an additional fee to buy Bitcoin in this way
Note: Ln.bitdevs.tw now supports zaps!
The RoboSats Federation is a set of rules that allows multiple RoboSats instances to work together under a unified client app. This federated client app enables users to seamlessly interact with any coordinator, track the coordinator reputation, verify transparently devFund donations, and more.g the current cost-less-impairment accounting model for many entities.
nobsbitcoin article Announcement
“It’s true, you can write bitcoin smart contracts in Assembly now instead of learning boolean logic circuits,” wrote @Super Testnet. Someone also wrote a multiplication function for this virtual CPU
Strike offers global remittance through the Bitcoin Network, using Lightning. Strike allows Taiwan users to register and supports VISA debit card deposits. Balances are only held in USD Strike currently has no banking relationships in Taiwan
LNbank is a plugin for BTCPay Server to use the internal Lightning node in custodial mode: It allows server admins to open up the Lightning node and give users access via custodial layer 3 wallets. All users of BTCPay Server’s LNbank plugin are urged to upgrade to to v1.8.9 as soon as possible.
Note: This is a form of hot wallet risk. Software running on lightning nodes often have full control of the node in question which means any vulnerability found in that software can be used to steal balances. Recommend to be careful of what apps to run, and secure authentication token files properly (LND uses special cookies called macaroons)
Why this is a CVE - the software which creates these OP_IF/FALSE/PUSH transactions circumvents the existing filters, and there is no such mechanism is in place to to recognize these transactions as non-standard (there are no configuration options to address this).
datacarrier and datacarrier size parameters in bitcoin.conf does not include inscription transactions
Companies and individuals maintain their own versions of Bitcoin software and should be monitoring vulnerabilities across their stack. Ultimately everyone can decide whether or not a CVE applies to them, whether or not vulnerability should be classified as such is not the issue, it is a situation to address.
There is a patch available as commit #28408, the patch does not censor ordinals, it simply subjects an expanded set of transactions which inscribe data onto the blockchain to go through the same filters as before. The miners aligned with the patch are forgoing mining fees to run this filter.
Nodes which apply the patch have the drawbacks of fee-estimations being off and slower block validation times.
Note: demonstration available on how to apply the patch (homework!)
Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson confirmed that Hamas and other militant groups still prefer traditional means of finance during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.
An NFT project has been taking in deposits through Coinbase as a way to ‘consolidate’ utxos. Giving Coinbase many small utxos which they will need to combine sometime down the road
Taiwan BitDevs would like to explore Nostr with the audience by generating an npub with the audience present to follow along. Nostr stands for “notes and other stuff transmitted over relays” it is a protocol designed around censorship resistance which can be used for social media. Nostr is a lot of fun and a great way to use Lightning Network (NIP-57 / zaps / LNURL)
Theres an LNBits extension that allows you to list and shop for goods using nostr relays and get paid through Bitcoin/Lightning