Our 22nd Socratic Seminar will be co-hosted with TempoX! Thank you to TempoX for offering the space, food, and their willingness to promote Bitcoin development and awareness. Hopefully, we will be able to showcase the importance of Bitcoin, and the problems it solves, to a wider audience.
Location : Tempo House
We will start the Socratic Seminar with general introductions and follow with discussion on the latest bitcoin developments 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。
Recently, there has been some really cool mempool P2P upgrades to Bitcoin that are worth talking about.
Gregory Sanders has written a guide for Optech aimed at developers of wallets and other software that uses Bitcoin Core to create or broadcast transactions. The guide walks through the use of several of the features and describes how the features can be useful for multiple protocols, including simple payments and RBF fee bumping, LN commitments and HTLCs, Ark, and LN splicing.
CVE-2023-50428 remains at large
Similar to Stratum V2, DATUM is designed to decentralize block construction by empowering miners to create their own block templates via their own Bitcoin node. Users can mine on pools that offer Datum support or solo mine without needing a third party to set up a server for them.
Disclosed vulnerabilities include a blocktxn remote node crash (CVE-2024-35202), an issue with mutated blocks hindering block propagation, and a node communication issue due to inv-to-send sets growing too large.
Disclosed vulnerabilities include:
At the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024 conference, Bitcoin miner manufacturer Bitmain announced two new machines: the Antminer S21+ Hyd and the Antminer S21+.
Italy intends to increase the capital gains tax on Bitcoin from 26% to 42% as part of a strategy to fund costly election commitments while reducing the budget deficit.
In this tutorial I will share the steps to use electrum plugin for joinstr on Ubuntu. First step is to get the latest version of electrum. Run the below commands so that electrum can be used:
v1.0.0-beta.5 ReleasedHere is the summary of the latest and previous beta releases.
beta.1: This release includes the first beta version of bdk_wallet with a stable 1.0.0 API. The changes in this version include reworked wallet persistence, changeset, and construction, optional user provided RNG, custom tx sorting, and use of merkle proofs in bdk_electrum.beta.2: The primary user facing changes are re-enabling single descriptor wallets and renaming LoadParams methods to be more explict. Wallet persistence was also simplified and blockchain clients no longer depend on bdk_chain.beta.{3|4}: Fixed transaction creation to not skip unused addresses, added function for sorting wallet transactions and option to change default BNB fallback coin selection. We moved the bdk_hwi crate functionality to the rust-hwi repo.beta.5: This release changes bdk_wallet transaction creation to enable RBF by default, it also updates the bdk_esplora client to retry server requests that fail due to rate limiting. The bdk_electrum crate now also offers a use-openssl feature.Proton, the privacy-focused Swiss technology company, is launching Proton Wallet, an open-source, E2E-encrypted, and self-custodial Bitcoin wallet.
The product is currently available to Proton Visionary and Lifetime plan users. Other users can sign up to an early waitlist or receive an invite from an active Proton Wallet user.
Always great to see contributions to Bitcoin Development
“HRF’s latest batch of grants focus on education for people living under authoritarian regimes, privacy and Lightning development, decentralized communications, and providing nonprofits and human rights groups with easier onramps to financial freedom tools. Areas of focus include key countries and regions in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa,” announcement reads. These are the projects receiving financial aid from the HRF:
utreexod is a full node bitcoin implementation with support for utreexo accumulators. It enables immediate node bootstrap by having the UTXO state hardcoded into the codebase, uses a tiny amount of memory, and has a low disk i/o.
Key features:
utreexo proponent Calvin Kim attended Taipei Bitcoin Tech Summit 2023 with Taiwan BitDevs
A solo Bitcoin miner with 3 TH/s has mined block 853742, overcoming odds of 1 in 1.2 million and earning 3.192 BTC (approximately $200,000). 1 in 3,500 year odds!
“Using BOLT12 also allows us to prove to the world that a payment was made, the size of the payment, the node to which it was paid, and that it was paid by us. This means we can continue to offer fully transparent and verifiable pooled mining while no longer being restricted by the base layer.”
“Pools traditionally have held miners’ bitcoins like a bank, while on-chain Bitcoin transactions get increasingly expensive as the demand for Bitcoin rises. For small miners, the problem is exacerbated since in some cases the cost of the transaction fee is higher than the reward that they earn. This is unsustainable because it creates lock-in to custodial pools. OCEAN helps overcome this risk using Lightning,” OCEAN co-founder Luke Dashjr said.
Announcement Press Release Documentation]
“Looking at the merkle branches that mining pools send to miners as part of stratum jobs, it’s clear that the BTCcom pool, Binance pool, Poolin, EMCD, Rawpool, and possibly Braiins* have exactly the same template and custom transaction prioritization as AntPool,” analyst 0xB10C recently shared in a post.
note: pooled mining is surprisingly something that wasn’t unexpected
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivers a groundbreaking speech Bitcoin 2024, outlining his vision for integrating Bitcoin into America’s economic and national security strategies. As an independent presidential candidate, RFK Jr. proposes bold initiatives including making the US government a major Bitcoin holder, eliminating taxes on Bitcoin transactions, and using Bitcoin mining to incentivize green energy production.
This issue announces an upcoming disclosure of Bitcoin Core vulnerabilities, and describes: a draft BIP for testnet4, functional encryption covenants, proposed updates to 64-bit arithmetic in Bitcoin Script, looks at OP_CAT script to validate proof of work, as well as proposed update to BIP21.
“Several members of the Bitcoin Core project discussed on IRC a proposed policy for disclosing vulnerabilities that affected older versions of Bitcoin Core…” “After this policy has a chance to be further discussed, it is the intention of the project to begin disclosing vulnerabilities affecting Bitcoin Core 24.x and below. It is strongly recommended that all users and administrators upgrade to Bitcoin Core 25.0 or above within the next two weeks.”
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
In October, The New York Times published an article detailing some of the security concerns around a Cheyenne-based crypto-mining operation with Chinese origins located within one mile of F.E. Warren Air Force Base.
On Monday, The White House released a statement ordering the sale of land to the company be reversed, citing a national security risk.
The purchasers acquired the land from Cheyenne LEADS in June 2022, and then made improvements to allow for specialized cryptocurrency mining operations. The land is in close proximity to F.E. Warren, a strategic missile base and home to Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles.droid
Mutiny Wallet to shut down EOY
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
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!)
Discover and show support to some of the latest Bitcoin grassroots projects and initiatives launched via the Geyser crowdfunding platform.
The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute was founded in November 2013 to advance and preserve knowledge of Bitcoin’s history, economics, and technology.
SNI is a Texas nonprofit corporation exempt from tax under Section 501(c)(3) and classified as a public charity.
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