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.
Bitcoin core developer Bruno Garcia has published an excellent technical dive into the version handshake. Sometimes referred to as “the dance”, this is the process by which a bitcoin node introduces itself to another node to begin sharing p2p data.
Vanilla lightning payments have great privacy properties for the sender of a payment, but quite bad privacy for the recipient. Route blinding is a proposal to fix this gap. It works by having the payment recipient conceal the last few hops of the payment route using cryptographic blinding. And after 2.5 long years it’s almost ready for use in the real world!
Elle Mouton drops another 🔥 blog post chock full of diagrams all about the steps required to open a lightning channel today (pre-taproot).
Many hardware wallets such Ledger and ColdCard (but notably not Trezor) use a secure element, which is a tiny piece of hardware inside the device that is specially designed to keep your private keys safe from attackers with access to the hardware. The Blockstream Jade wallet takes a completely different approach, using a dedicated server operated by Blockstream in place of a secure element. Triangle BitDevs host Jesse will compare and contrast these two approaches to hardware device security.
Cashabi is a new proposal that issues eCash tokens backed by WabiSabi coinjoin credentials that can be redeemed for post-coinjoin UTXOs. What could be better than combining the fantastic privacy benefits of eCash with the fantastic privacy benefits of CoinJoin? How about doing all the E2E encrypted messaging using disposable nostr identities? 🥸