Socratic Seminar 31

2022-10-31

Housekeeping

• Questions are encouraged, including basic ones!
• Socratic Seminars are held under the Chatham House Rule: share the information you receive, but do not reveal the identity of who said it.
• For the privacy of other attendees, please refrain from taking photographs of other people without their permission.
• Socratic seminars are best when the moderator can let the conversation flow, so try to keep things concrete and focused.
• The reading list covers September 26th to October 30th.

Chain Weather Report

• Lightning Network Capacity Over 5000 BTC in lightning channels.
• Fees
• Bitcoin Node Count
• Ongoing Tor Network DDoS

Core

• Erlay PR Merged
• PR to loosen relay policy for small transactions Originally created because of leaf-Node weakness in Bitcoin Merkle Tree Design

RBF

• New transaction policies (nVersion=3) for contracting protocols
• Muun developers object to full RBF rollout timeline "Even though many of the biggest miners offer off-band transaction broadcasting services, they currently won't process conflicting transactions."
• Full RBF Summary by Gloria Zhao "Does Core control whether full RBF happens or not?"

Research and Development

• Judica VM. Why? It's hard to get started on Bitcoin apps. Ethereum applications are extremely hackathon friendly. A note on security.
• Pay-to-contract
• ZeroSync instant-sync Bitcoin client
• Refreshed BIP324 encrypted transport protocol
• Validity Rollups research by John Light
• What has the Taproot Annex ever done for us? TLV format proposal for annex data.
• (low impact) MuSig2 vulnerability: It is still true that cryptography is hard, unfortunately.
• Taro Alpha Release
• Block update on hardware signing device Decision to not include a screen is controversial.
• NYDIG Bitcoin developer report Some interesting charts on pages 10 and 13.

Grab Bag

• Why is there a 5 days gap between genesis and block 1?
• Who is Crazy1o1?!?! Ongoing user of 1-1 multisig transaction
• HODLONAUT VICTORIOUS
• Celsius doxxes all users
• Fedimint distributed key generation
• ser wen taproot

Mining

• Stratum V2 reference implementation is published
• Trouble for public Bitcoin miners

Lightning

• BTCD and LND impacted by block parsing bug
• Watchtower-free Lightning channels for casual users
• VLSProject Lightning Cutie
• LNsploit
• Ephemeral Anchors
• Original LN grant proposal (apparently mostly complete, but not released)
• Continuing LN development grant, beginning with submarine swaps

Ordinals

• ord wallet send
• Ordinal Bounty 3