May 2023 Topics

[MatulefM]

Lightspark Platform: Enterprise AI for Optimizing Lightning Liquidity, Connectivity and Routing

• Credit: Lightspark & Christian Catalini
• "AI will exponentially increase the velocity of money on the Lightning network while delivering low latency and high reliability. Bitcoin won't remain idle in Lightning channels; it will be put to work as developers worldwide explore what's possible with a truly open and interoperable protocol for money,"

Stratum v2 Reference Implementation (SRI) Update Is Out

• Credit: Pavlenex
• "The new update allows miners to select transactions via a new sub-protocol and their node. This is a major milestone in democratizing transaction selections in pooled mining and decentralizing bitcoin!"
• "A Job Negotiator, in combination with a template provider, gives the responsibility back to miners or an independent third party to provide a new template (select transactions), thereby making bitcoin pool infrastructure more decentralized."

Civ Kit: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Market System

• Credit: Nicholas Gregory, Ray Youssef and Antoine Riard
• “We propose a new peer-to-peer electronic market system, which enables censorship-resistant and permissionless trading between users of the global Bitcoin system. This design builds on top of the new Nostr protocol for its peer-to-peer order book and relies on the Bitcoin blockchain as a source of truth for its Web-of-Stakes market ranking paradigm. Market trades are locked under Bitcoin contracts to avoid reliance on trusted third parties for dispute arbitration. All market nodes are incentivized by privacy-preserving service credentials backed by Bitcoin payments. This market system should enable global trade of any kind of item all over the world: fiat currencies, goods, services.”

The state of the Bitcoin Lightning Network in 2023

• Credit: Joe Hall / Cointelegraph
• “To what extent does the surge in the use of custodial wallets and difficulties in running a Lightning node undermine the Lightning Network?”

Bitcoin mining has zero carbon emissions.

• Credit: Riot Platforms Inc & Pierre Rochard

[MatulefM]

Mercury Node: A Lightweight Lightning Node Implementation

• Credit: Mercury Wallet
• "As mercury-node evolves, we believe it will make it easier for mobile wallets to run a lightweight, non-custodial Lightning node, empowering users with more control over their funds."

A Technical Overview of Taproot Outputs and MuSig2

• Credit: Elle Mouton
• "This post is aimed at refreshing your memory on these topics or giving you enough of an understanding of how Taproot outputs and MuSig2 work."

[bitcoin-dev] RGB protocol announcement

• Credit: Dr Maxim Orlovsky

[MatulefM]

[bitcoin-dev] Proposal to Remove BIP35 P2P 'mempool' Message

• Credit: WIll Clark

UK's Online Safety Bill Takes Aim at End-to-End Encryption

• Credit: No Bullshit Bitcoin
• “As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption, opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of friends, family members, employees, executives, journalists, human rights activists and even politicians themselves, which would fundamentally undermine everyone’s ability to communicate securely.”

Coinstr: Bitcoin Collaborative Custody Using Nostr

• “Coinstr is a multisignature Bitcoin wallet that allows users to configure complex spending policies, like Bitcoin smart contracts. When a spending proposal is made, Coinstr uses the Nostr protocol to orchestrate signature requests and approvals.”

Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund Is Backing 13 Bitcoin Developers Fighting CSW

• Credit: BTCCasey / Bitcoin Magazine
• "The outcomes of these cases are important for everyone, even those who may not be interested in Bitcoin, because these lawsuits could have serious detrimental effects on open-source development writ large, which will negatively impact our lives in ways we may not even realize until it’s too late," - Jack Dorsey

Spiral Distributed More Than $7M In Grants To Open Source Projects & Developers

• “Every org that benefits from the work of FOSS devs and designers should be supporting them. This way, devs, and designers get paid to do what they love, bitcoin gets better, and everyone wins."

The Emerging Bitcoin-Native Venture Capital Landscape 2022 - Report

• Credit: Christopher Calicott / Trammel Venture Partners
• "This research brief represents two years of data and subsequent analysis of the Bitcoin ecosystem, which during 2021 and 2022 has seen significant growth as a startup investment category."

NIP-89 Ephemeral bitcoin transaction broadcasting

• Credit: benthecarman
• “nostr-tx-broadcast is a tool that listens to nostr relays for bitcoin transaction events and broadcasts them to the bitcoin network.”

[MatulefM]

[bitcoin-dev] Vaults in the MATT framework

• Credit: Salvatore Ingala

[bitcoin-dev] On adaptor security (in protocols)

• Credit: AdamISZ

Swap Service: An Orderbook For Performing Submarine Swaps Over Nostr

Munstr: MuSig + Nostr

• "Munstr (MuSig + Nostr) is a combination of Schnorr signature based MuSig (multisignature) keys in a terminal based wallet."
• It uses "decentralized Nostr networks as a communication layer to facilitate a secure and encrypted method of transporting and digitally signing bitcoin transactions in a way that chain analysis cannot identify the nature and setup of the transaction data.

LNMesh: Offline Lightning Network Payments Using Community Wireless Mesh Networks

• Credit: Ahmet Kurt, Abdulhadi Sahin, Ricardo Harrilal-Parchment, and Kemal Akkaya
• “Users of a neighborhood or a community can establish a wireless mesh network to use it as an infrastructure to enable offline LN payments when they do not have any Internet connection."

Ongoing Attack On I2P Network: Bitcoin Nodes Using i2pd Affected

Balaji Forfeits $1M BTC Bet, Donates Additional $500k to Support Bitcoin Development

Bitcoin Network Reaches New Transaction All-Time High As Fees Surge Due To BRC-20 Tokens

• Credit: nobsbitcoin
• “Bruh”

Biden Administration Proposes A 30% Tax on Bitcoin Mining

• Credit: nobsbitcoin
• Response by Andrew Bailey

Fedi Raises $17 Million in Series A Round

• “Fedi gives the world a scalable and secure alternative to third-party cryptocurrency exchanges, cloud backup services, and encrypted messaging apps”

OpenSats Receives Additional Funding of $10m from #startsmall #

• “The structure of OpenSats remains unchanged: we want to create a sustainable, independent, and consistent ecosystem of funding for bitcoin, nostr, and other open-source projects. Having multiple open-source contributors on our board—tenured core devs among them—helps us to better understand what is needed to put effective long-term support structures into place.”

[MatulefM]

Bitcoin and CTV Covenants

• Credit: Polyd_
• "But what does this mean exactly? To put it in perspective, if Taproot enables signature aggregation, CTV takes it a step further by enabling transaction aggregation. If channels allow you to go up and off-chain, covenants allow you to go down and in-chain. When someone sends you a transaction, why can't you also initiate one or two transactions?"

[MatulefM]

A Proof of Liabilities Scheme for Ecash Mints

• Credit: calle