Bitcoin Optech Podcast

Join Bitcoin Optech as we discuss Bitcoin and Lightning technology each week and review our newsletters. https://bitcoinops.org/

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #343 Recap

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt discuss Newsletter #343.

03-04
54:20

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #342 Recap

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier and Joost Jager discuss ⁠Newsletter #342⁠.News● Allowing mobile wallets to settle channels without extra UTXOs (0:59) ● Continued discussion about an LN quality of service flag (13:14) Changes to services and client software● Ark Wallet SDK released (40:28) ● Zaprite adds BTCPay Server support (40:57) ● Iris Wallet desktop released (41:21) ● Sparrow 2.1.0 released (41:41) ● Scure-btc-signer 1.6.0 released (42:38) ● Py-bitcoinkernel alpha (43:48) ● Rust-bitcoinkernel library (44:30) ● BIP32 cbip32 library (45:56) ● Lightning Loop moves to MuSig2 (46:22) Notable code and documentation changes● Bitcoin Core #27432 (47:01) ● Bitcoin Core #30529 (48:29) ● Bitcoin Core #31384 (49:42) ● Core Lightning #8059 (50:52) ● Core Lightning #7985 (53:41) ● Core Lightning #7887 (54:32) ● Eclair #2967 (26:06) ● Eclair #2979 (32:24) ● Eclair #3002 (34:32) ● LDK #3575 (57:35) ● LDK #3562 (23:51) ● BOLTs #1205 (26:13)

03-03
58:38

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #341 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss Newsletter #341.News● Continued discussion about probabilistic payments (0:34) ● Continued discussion about ephemeral anchor scripts for LN (7:26) ● Stats on orphan evictions (14:31) ● Updated proposal for updated BIP process (27:08) Bitcoin Core PR Review Club● Cluster mempool: introduce TxGraph (35:43) Releases and release candidates● LND v0.18.5-beta (43:48) ● Bitcoin Inquisition 28.1 (44:10) Notable code and documentation changes● Bitcoin Core #25832 (51:43) ● Eclair #2989 (55:49) ● LDK #3440 (56:36) ● LND #9470 (57:14) ● BTCPay Server #6580 (58:15)

02-18
59:32

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #340 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse, Johan Halseth, Pieter Wuille, Sergi Delgado, Bastien Teinturier, Oleksandr Kurbatov, Antoine Poinsot and Bob McElrath to discuss Newsletter #340.News● Channel force closure vulnerability in LDK (2:14) ● Zero-knowledge gossip for LN channel announcements (16:01) ● Discovery of previous research for finding optimal cluster linearization (26:29) ● Erlay update (46:38) ● Tradeoffs in LN ephemeral anchor scripts (1:09:50) ● Emulating OP_RAND (1:30:30) ● Discussion about lowering the minimum transaction relay feerate (1:36:33) Changing consensus● Updates to cleanup soft fork proposal (1:43:46) ● Request for a covenant design supporting Braidpool (2:28:59) ● Deterministic transaction selection from a committed mempool (2:04:52) ● Fast difficulty adjustment algorithm for a DAG blockchain (2:19:24) Releases and release candidates● BDK Wallet 1.1.0 (2:39:15) ● LND v0.18.5-beta.rc1 (2:39:43) Notable code and documentation changes● Bitcoin Core #21590 (38:58) ● Eclair #2983 (1:23:30) ● Eclair #2968 (1:27:53) ● LDK #3556 (2:40:31) ● LND #9456 (2:41:10)

02-14
02:43:04

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #339 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Matt Morehouse and 0xB10C to discuss Newsletter #339.News● Vulnerability in LDK claim processing (0:47)● Replacement cycling attacks with miner exploitation (17:28)● Updated stats on compact block reconstruction (23:56)Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange● Who uses or wants to use PSBTv2 (BIP370)? (32:38)● In the bitcoin's block genesis, which parts can be filled arbitrarily? (34:41)● Lightning force close detection (36:47)● Is a segwit-formatted transaction with all inputs of non-witness program type valid? (40:01)● P2TR Security Question (41:41)● What exactly is being done today to make Bitcoin quantum-safe? (44:27)● What are the harmful effects of a shorter inter-block time? (47:57)● Could proof-of-work be used to replace policy rules? (51:19)● How does MuSig work in real Bitcoin scenarios? (54:54)● How does the -blocksxor switch that obfuscates the blocks.dat files work? (57:18)● How does the related key attack on Schnorr signatures work? (59:42)Releases and release candidates● LDK v0.1.1 (1:01:19)Notable code and documentation changes● Bitcoin Core #31376 (1:03:24)● Bitcoin Core #31583 (1:04:48)● Bitcoin Core #31590 (1:05:40)● Eclair #2982 (1:07:17)● BDK #1614 (1:11:39)● BOLTs #1110 (1:12:08)

02-07
01:15:58

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #338 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Andrew Toth and Dave Harding to discuss ⁠Newsletter #338⁠. News - Draft BIP for unspendable keys in descriptors (0:49) - PSBTv2 integration testing (9:55) - Correction about offchain DLCs (15:25) Changes to services and client software - Bull Bitcoin Mobile Wallet adds payjoin (28:10) - Bitcoin Keeper adds miniscript support (28:52) - Nunchuk adds taproot MuSig2 features (29:26) - Jade Plus signing device announced (32:08) - Coinswap v0.1.0 released (32:36) - Bitcoin Safe 1.0.0 released (35:14) - Bitcoin Core 28.0 policy demonstration (35:41) - Rust-payjoin 0.21.0 released (36:21) - PeerSwap v4.0rc1 (37:34) - Joinpool prototype using CTV (38:24) - Rust joinstr library announced (39:58) - Strata bridge announced (40:36) Releases and release candidates - BTCPay Server 2.0.6 (41:41) Notable code and documentation changes - Bitcoin Core #31397 (42:19) - Eclair #2896 (44:21) - LDK #3408 (46:02) - LND #9405 (47:57)

01-28
49:31

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #337 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by vnprc to discuss ⁠⁠Newsletter #337⁠⁠. News - Continued discussion about rewarding pool miners with tradeable ecash shares (0:35) - Offchain DLCs (38:32) Releases and release candidates - LDK v0.1 (39:34) Notable code and documentation changes - Eclair #2936 (41:32) - Rust Bitcoin #3792 (42:46) - BDK #1789 (43:42) - BIPs #1687 (46:39) - BIPs #1396 (50:15)

01-21
52:42

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #336 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Abubakar Sadiq Ismail, Gregory Sanders, and Daniel Roberts to discuss ⁠Newsletter #336⁠. News Investigating mining pool behavior before fixing a Bitcoin Core bug (1:07) Contract-level relative timelocks (15:04) Multiparty LN-Symmetry variant with penalties for limiting published updates (29:06) Releases and release candidates Bitcoin Core 28.1 (39:54) BDK 0.30.1 (40:45) LDK v0.1.0-beta1 (42:01) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #28121 (42:22) BDK #1592 (43:14)

01-14
47:06

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #335 Recap

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Yuval Kogman, Jeremy Rubin, and Steve Myers to discuss ⁠Newsletter #335⁠. News Deanonymization attacks against centralized coinjoin (1:39) Updated ChillDKG draft (14:09) Changing consensus CTV enhancement opcodes (18:41) Adjusting difficulty beyond 256 bits (31:52) Transitory soft forks for cleanup soft forks (33:44) Quantum computer upgrade path (48:09) Consensus cleanup timewarp grace period (56:10) Releases and release candidates BDK wallet-1.0.0 (1:06:44) LND 0.18.4-beta (1:17:28) Core Lightning v24.11.1 (1:18:13) Bitcoin Core 28.1rc2 (1:18:47) LDK v0.1.0-beta1 (1:19:37) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #31223 (1:20:19) Eclair #2888 (1:21:09) LDK #3495 (1:22:35) LDK #3436 (1:24:31) LDK #3435 (1:25:02) LDK #3365 (1:26:04) LDK #3340 (1:26:41) BDK #1670 (1:28:47) BIPs #1689 (1:31:45) BIPs #1697 (1:33:49) BLIPs #52 (1:34:21) BLIPs #54 (1:35:40)

01-07
01:37:27

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #334: 2024 Year-in-Review Special Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Dave Harding, Niklas Gögge, Gloria Zhao, and Rearden to discuss ⁠Newsletter #334: 2024 Year-in-Review Special⁠. January Fee-dependent timelocks (16:18) Optimized contract protocol exits (17:20) LN-Symmetry proof-of-concept implementation (18:22) February Replace by feerate (22:32) Human-readable payment instructions (27:25) Improved ASMap generation (28:09) LN dual funding (32:33) Trustless betting on future feerates (32:56) Summary 2024: Vulnerability disclosures (7:05) March BINANAs and BIPs (33:33) Enhanced feerate estimation (34:41) More efficient transaction sponsorship (46:08) April Consensus cleanup (50:06) Reforming the BIPs process (51:08) Inbound routing fees (53:10) Weak blocks (54:01) Restarting testnet (57:43) Developers arrested (1:00:06) Summary 2024: Cluster mempool (1:01:10) May Silent payments (1:06:51) BitVMX (1:07:37) Anonymous usage tokens (1:09:50) LN channel upgrades (1:12:00) Ecash for pool miners (1:13:33) Miniscript specification (1:14:54) Utreexo beta (1:16:16) June LN payment feasibility and channel depletion (1:18:17) Quantum-resistant transaction signing (1:20:02) Summary 2024: P2P transaction relay (1:20:39) July Blinded paths for BOLT11 invoices (1:31:07) ChillDKG key generation for threshold signatures (1:31:47) BIPs for MuSig and threshold signatures (1:32:18) August Hyperion network simulator (1:33:00) Full RBF (1:33:56) Summary 2024: Covenants and script upgrades (2:08) September Hybrid jamming mitigation tests and tweaks (1:35:10) Shielded CSV (1:38:40) LN offline payments (1:41:22) October BOLT12 offers (1:42:34) Mining interfaces, block withholding, and share validation cost (1:43:13) Summary 2024: Major releases of popular infrastructure projects (1:50:41) November SuperScalar timeout tree channel factories (1:51:19) Fast and cheap low-value offchain payment resolution (1:53:29) Summary 2024: Bitcoin Optech (1:55:17)

12-23
01:59:40

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #333 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Dave Harding, /dev/fd0, and Gloria Zhao to discuss Newsletter #333. News Vulnerability allowing theft from LN channels with miner assistance (1:11) Deanonymization vulnerability affecting Wasabi and related software (12:00) Insights into channel depletion (18:12) Poll of opinions about covenant proposals (31:14) Incentive-based pseudo-covenants (41:49) Bitcoin Core developer meeting summaries (46:45) Bitcoin Core PR Review Club Track and use all potential peers for orphan resolution (48:18) Changes to services and client software Java-based HWI released (1:00:32) Saving Satoshi Bitcoin development education game announced (1:01:24) Neovim Bitcoin Script plugin (1:02:19) Proton Wallet adds RBF (1:03:36) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange How long does Bitcoin Core store forked chains? (1:03:51) What is the point of solo mining pools? (1:05:02) Is there a point to using P2TR over P2WSH if I only want to use the script path? (1:11:17) Releases and release candidates Core Lightning 24.11 (1:13:23) BTCPay Server 2.0.4 (1:16:59) LND 0.18.4-beta.rc2 (1:17:23) Bitcoin Core 28.1RC1 (1:17:44) BDK 1.0.0-beta.6 (1:18:36) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #31096 (1:18:58) Bitcoin Core #31175 (1:19:51) Bitcoin Core #31112 (1:21:37) LDK #3446 (1:22:56) Rust Bitcoin #3682 (1:26:13) BTCPay Server #5743 (1:27:17) BDK #1756 (1:30:23) BIPs #1535 (1:31:12) BOLTs #1180 (1:32:33)

12-18
01:34:25

Bitcoin Optech: Channel Depletion Research Deep Dive Podcast

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by René Pickhardt and Christian Decker to discuss Pickhardt’s ⁠Lightning Network channel depletion research⁠. Summary of Pickhardt's research (1:01) Why look at wealth distributions? (5:45) What can be learned from depletion? (11:38) Circular rebalancing (13:33) What determines where the spanning tree is? (15:28) Mitigating depletion (20:14) Adjacent channels and their impact (26:39) Multiparty channels, channel factories, and Ark (29:52) Hub-and-spoke topology discussion (41:06) What real world data would inform the theoretical? (54:54)

12-12
58:18

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #332 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Antoine Riard and Antoine Poinsot to discuss ⁠Newsletter #332⁠. News Transaction censorship vulnerability (0:55) Continued discussion about consensus cleanup soft fork proposal (19:20) Releases and release candidates Eclair v0.11.0 (46:45) LDK v0.0.125 (47:26) Core Lightning 24.11rc3 (47:59) LND 0.18.4-beta.rc1 (48:21) Bitcoin Core 28.1RC1 (48:34) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #30708 (49:15) Core Lightning #7832 (50:32) LND #8270 (51:36) LND #8390 (52:49) BIPs #1534 (55:49)

12-10
58:25

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #331 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Anthony Towns to discuss ⁠Newsletter #331⁠. News Lisp dialect for Bitcoin scripting (0:48) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange How does ColliderScript improve Bitcoin and what features does it enable? (43:24) Why do standardness rules limit transaction weight? (48:10) Is the scriptSig spending an PayToAnchor output expected to always be empty? (56:16) What happens to the unused P2A outputs? (57:13) Why doesn't Bitcoin's PoW algorithm use a chain of lower-difficulty hashes? (1:01:47) Clarification on false value in Script (1:04:38) What is this strange microtransaction in my wallet? (1:06:02) Are there any UTXOs that can not be spent? (1:09:04) Why was BIP34 not implemented via the coinbase tx's locktime or nSequence? (1:13:15) Releases and release candidates Core Lightning 24.11rc2 (1:15:19) BDK 0.30.0 (1:15:49) LND 0.18.4-beta.rc1 (1:16:16) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #31122 (1:17:17) Core Lightning #7852 (1:20:25) Core Lightning #7740 (1:21:27) Core Lightning #7719 (1:22:48) Eclair #2935 (1:23:47) LDK #3137 (1:24:34) LND #8337 (1:26:22)

12-09
01:28:39

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #330 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by ZmnSCPxj, Vojtěch Strnad, Moonsettler, Brandon Black, Ethan Heilman, and Dusty Daemon to discuss Newsletter #330.

11-26
01:32:21

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #329 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt discusses Newsletter #329. News MAD-based offchain payment resolution (OPR) protocol (0:21) Papers about IP-layer censorship of LN payments (3:10) Releases and release candidates BTCPay Server 2.0.3 (6:21) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #30592 (8:29) Bitcoin Core #30930 (9:46) LDK #3283 (11:35) LND #7762 (12:31)

11-22
13:42

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #328 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Gregory Sanders discuss Newsletter #328. News Disclosure of a vulnerability affecting Bitcoin Core versions before 25.1 (0:53) Bitcoin Core PR Review Club Ephemeral Dust (6:54) Releases and release candidates Bitcoin Core 27.2 (14:55) Libsecp256k1 0.6.0 (15:40) Notable code and documentation changes LDK #3360 (17:40) LDK #3207 (18:45)

11-22
20:45

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #327 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Andrew Toth to discuss ⁠Newsletter #327⁠. News Timeout tree channel factories (0:50) Draft BIP for DLEQ proofs (10:53) Releases and release candidates BTCPay Server 2.0.0 (20:02) Notable code and documentation changes Bitcoin Core #31130 (22:56) LDK #3007 (25:14) BIPs #1676 (27:15)

11-05
28:43

Bitcoin Optech: SuperScalar Deep Dive Podcast

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by ZmnSCPxj to discuss his SuperScalar proposal. Why a deep dive? (0:40) Proposal overview (1:58) Importance of reallocating liquidity (4:13) What about overloading channels with liquidity from the start? (9:42) Discussion of multi-LSP vs single LSP approaches (13:05) Ensuring unilateral exit is possible (15:22) Malicious users forcing unilateral closes (20:21) Decker–Wattenhofer channels vs John Law's tunable penalties (27:11) Decker–Wattenhofer relative lock times impact on users (38:44) Discussion of trustless non-P2P protocol structure (40:01) Contrasting SuperScalar with Ark (44:08) Implementation discussion (48:44)

10-31
53:03

Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #326 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Elle Mouton and Andrew Toth to discuss Newsletter #326. News Updates to the version 1.75 channel announcements proposal (1:36) Draft BIP for sending silent payments with PSBTs (16:28) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange Duplicate blocks in blk*.dat files? (30:07) How was the structure of pay-to-anchor decided? (32:45) What are the benefits of decoy packets in BIP324? (36:38) Why is the opcode limit 201? (39:20) Will my node relay a transaction if it is below my minimum tx relay fee? (40:31) Why doesn't the Bitcoin Core wallet support BIP69? (42:09) How can I enable testnet4 when using Bitcoin Core 28.0? (44:50) What are the risks of broadcasting a transaction that reveals a `scriptPubKey` using a low-entropy key? (47:33) Releases and release candidates Core Lightning 24.08.2 (52:12) Notable code and documentation changes Eclair #2925 (52:56) LND #9172 (53:37) Rust Bitcoin #2960 (55:47)

10-29
57:13

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