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, right above Fifth Third Bank.
BitVM is a new paper from Robin Linus detailing a way to express turing-complete bitcoin contracts. BitVM is based on a challenge-response protocol using fraud proofs and it can be built on bitcoin as it is today without any change to bitcoin consensus rules. Super Testnet, of course, has a proof of concept implementation. For those of us who don’t already know what “arbitrary computation using only NAND gate circuits” means, Shinobi has published has a nice high-level explainer in Bitcoin Magazine.
Bitcoin Core contributor Ishaana Misra dropped a report detailing her efforts to automate wallet fingerprinting. The report details ways to identify bitcoin wallets only from their on-chain footprint. Ishaana defines four categories of fingerprints, a methodology for identifying them, and describes the results of her attempt to automate wallet detection. This seems like an excellent foundation for future wallet privacy research.
After 4 long years AssumeUTXO has been merged into the Bitcoin Core main repo. If that wasn’t exciting enough, BIP 324, encrypted P2P transport, was merged one day later. The sound of nerds rejoicing was reportedly heard reverberating for days throughout the secret citadel of the Bitcoin Core cabal.
Andrew Chow proposed two BIPs to add Musig2 support to wallet descriptors and PSBTs. The Musig2 PSBT BIP proposes new fields and has a brief description of the new concepts and additional rounds of communication entailed with Musig2. The MuSig2 descriptor BIP adds a new key expression musig() usable only inside of a tr() expression.
SimLN is a new project to simulate a realistic ligntning network on any test network. It creates random activity based on the network topology. Additionally, developers can specify specific payment patterns to test. SimLN supports LND and CLN. Work is ongoing to add Eclair and LDK-node support.
Sam Wouters dropped another Lightning Research Report showing the impressive growth of the network in terms of users, transactions, and volume despite flat numbers for node count, channels, and capacity. The report is chock full of graphs and statistics compiled from River and other companies who elected to share their data. These nodes represent 29% of network capacity and 10% of channels. It’s safe to say that River remains bullish on lightning.