We will start with introductions, some basic ground rules, and jump into technical discussions. We will cover aspects of the bitcoin protocol, new research developments, recent news, and software developments.

Please note the meeting location at 4801 Glenwood Ave suite 200 in Raleigh. It’s the huge Fifth Third Bank building.

Announcements

  • no pictures or recordings
  • chatham house rules
  • don’t be a dick
  • Hack Day - biweekly unstructured meetup for bitcoin builders
  • Rust Meetup - stay tuned
  • thank you to our sponsor Lolli
  • introductions

Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core 24.0 Release Candidate Testing Guide

Bitcoin core contributor kouloumos put together a testing guide for the 24.0 release candidate. There’s a lot of cool stuff in this release, check out his twitter thread to see the highlights in 280 char chunks.

[PR merged] wallet: fast rescan with BIP157 block filters for descriptor wallets

PR #25957 enables fast wallet rescan using compact block filters, only for descriptor wallets.

When Taproot?

When Taproot? is a cool new site promoting adoption of taproot. It examines the stages of adoption for wallets, exchanges, and other services, why taproot adoption is a good thing, and how you can help.

BIP 351

BIP351 is a stealth address protocol that makes it possible for two parties to transact using addresses that only they can calculate. It’s an improvement over BIP47 because it takes measures to conceal the initial notification transaction. However, it still suffers from some of the same drawbacks: the sender must exercise coin control and it requires an on-chain transaction before any payments can be made.

Lightning

Lightning

CLN Channel Splicing Draft PR

Dustin Dettmer has opened a draft PR to enable channel splicing on CLN. There is a long list of TODO items to get this PR across the finish line but this feature represents a massive improvement to LN usability.

Advances in Channel Jamming Research

The prolifically productive dream team Gleb Naumenko and Antoine Riard have released a series of research reports examining channel jamming. Read the lightning-dev post for a brief summary or dive into the gitbook and read the whole shebang.

Taro alpha release

Lightning Labs has released the taro daemon alpha. Despite what the name might imply the taro daemon is not a little monster that steals your root vegetables, it is a tool to issue and transfer assets on bitcoin and lightning. Check out this blog post for the English explanation or the repo if you want to get technical.

Onion Messages and Asynchronous Lightning Payments

LDK developer vallywal explains how onion messages not only unlock bolt12 offers and blinded routes, but the combination of onion messages and PTLCs enable async payments over lightning that don’t lock up network liquidity. Really tho, the awesomest part of this blog post is all the 🔥 diagrams.

Privacy

Bisq

Buy and sell bitcoin privately and securely on a Bisq’s peer-to-peer network.

PayJoin

Payjoin is a type of coinjoin where merchant and buyer create a coordinated transaction. Coordination happens with PayToEndPoint [P2EP] concept. PayJoin obfuscates the amount of the transaction and breaks the common ownership heuristic. If the payjoin fails it will fallback to an ordinary transaction. It has the additional benefit of allowing the merchant to consolidate UTXOs.

LN-Vortex

ln-vortex is a tool written in scala that allows coinjoin lightning channel opens. Ben Carman and @deregs_ just opened the first mainnet vortex coinjoin.

Scalability

Taro Skepticism

A critical look at the scalability properties of the Taro protocol if deployed on the bitcoin blockchain

Miscellaneous