Our 23rd Socratic Seminar event will be held at 9 LiShui St. Da’An Dist. Taipei.
For the last event of 2024, a year-end review of all technical discussions will also be had
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。
The Czech Republic has enacted a law that exempts Bitcoin holdings held for more than three years from capital gains tax. This legislation received unanimous approval from the nation’s parliament on December 6 and is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2025.
A vulnerability in the WabiSabi protocol allows malicious coordinators to deanonymize users’ coins and link inputs to outputs, compromising the privacy of coinjoin participants. Users are urged to update their instances immediately.
The affected versions of the WabiSabi protocol have a vulnerability due to inadequate client-side validation of credential issuers. It allows malicious coordinators to use multiple issuers to differentiate inputs from outputs, trace input ownership, and break the anonymity set of Bitcoin’s coinjoin process, compromising user privacy.
David Harding announced to Delving Bitcoin a vulnerability he had responsibly disclosed earlier in the year. Old versions of Eclair, LDK, and LND with default settings allowed the party who opened a channel to steal up to 98% of channel value. Core Lightning remains affected if the non-default –ignore-fee-limits configuration option is used; this option’s documentation already indicates it is dangerous.
The announcement also described two less severe variants of the vulnerability. All LN implementations listed above attempt to mitigate those additional risks, but a complete solution awaits additional work on package relay, channel upgrades, and related projects.
The vulnerability takes advantage of the LN protocol allowing an old channel state to commit to more onchain fees than the fee-paying party controls in the latest state. For example, in a state where Mallory controls 99% of the channel balance, she dedicates 98% of the overall balance to endogenous fees. She then creates a new state that pays only minimal fees and forwards 99% of the channel balance to Bob’s side. By personally mining the old state that pays 98% to fees, she can capture those fees for herself—reducing the maximum value Bob can receive onchain from his expected 99% to an actual 2%. Mallory can use this method to simultaneously steal from about 3,000 channels per block (with each channel potentially controlled by a different victim), allowing theft of about $3 million USD per block if the average channel value is about $1,000 USD.
note: from version Eclair v0.10.0 (29 Feb 2024), LDK 0.0.123 (8 May 2024), LND 0.18.3-beta 1 (11 Sept 2024)
Eclair (French for Lightning) is a Scala implementation of the Lightning Network developed by ACINQ.
U.S.-based Bitcoin ATM operator Byte Federal has reported a data breach that may have compromised the personal information of approximately 58,000 customers.
“Customer personal information that was subject to the attempt at unauthorized access includes name, birthdate, address, phone number, email address, government-issued ID, social security number, transaction activity, and photographs of users,” said the company.
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.
Ashigaru is a self-custodial, open-source and secure mobile Bitcoin wallet that is private by design. It has been forked and build upon Samourai Wallet Source Code. Available on Android.
“The Ashigaru Open Source Project is pleased to announce the update of Ashigaru mobile to v1.1.0. Thank you to those who have used the wallet and provided valuable feedback, some of which has been addressed within this update,” announced the project. This release implements automatic updates of Tor onion services, removing all dependencies and reliance on DNS from the app, overhauls Settings screen user interface, introduces new transaction alerts, and more
note: although ashigaru is open source from the remains of the last version of Samourai wallet, ashigaru uses a pre-compilied bitcoinj library
Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the district’s chief federal law enforcement officer, announced his resignation. He will step down from his position effective at 11:59 p.m. on December 13, 2024.
Damian Williams assumed office on October 10, 2021, appointed by President Joe Biden. During his three-year tenure, Williams has overseen many high-profile cases, including the convictions of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, the prosecutions of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and rap artist Sean “Diddy” Combs, as well as the developers of Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet privacy tools. Edward Y. Kim, the current Deputy United States Attorney, will take over as Acting United States Attorney when he departs. Additionally, President-elect Trump has announced his intention to nominate Jay Clayton, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to lead the office.
At the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024 conference, Bitcoin miner manufacturer Bitmain announced two new machines: the Antminer S21+ Hyd and the Antminer S21+.
RoboSats is a simple and private way to exchange bitcoin. It simplifies the peer-to-peer user experience and uses lightning hold invoices to minimize custody and trust requirements while helping users stick to best privacy practices. Available on the web, Android, Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
RoboSats v0.7.3 is now available! This release introduces the ability to fetch orders from the LNP2PBot platform when the user enables Nostr orders in settings, thanks to shared Nostr order books. “Robosats and LNP2PBot are two separate platforms for P2P Bitcoin exchange. Both are now publishing their public orders to Nostr, so we can now display their orders in our client. This brings a lot of benefits. One of the most direct is that Robosats users will now have more info when comparing premiums, which will reduce the arbitrage between platforms and increase the general liquidity,” said KoalaSat. Additionally, Android app users now have the option to enable Nostr orders in settings, along with a few other fixes.
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:
(placeholder for discussion over drama regarding opcodes)
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:
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
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
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