Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #67

Description

After Bitcoin Core developers finish working on the upcoming 0.21 release, it’s likely that the results of this survey will help them choose the activation parameters that will be used for taproot in a subsequent release. As explained in a blog post about the survey, answers will be used to help inform developers about what people use and want from the software. ● Formal specification of miniscript: Dmitry Petukhov published a formal specification of miniscipt based on the documentation written by other developers. ● C-Lightning 0.9.2rc1 is a release candidate for the next maintenance version of C-Lightning. ● C-Lightning 0.9.2 is the release for the next maintenance version of C-Lightning. ● C-Lightning 0.9.3 is the project’s newest minor release. ● Taproot activation survey results: Anthony Towns received survey responses from an unnamed set of 13 “smart dev-type people” about their preferences for a soft fork activation mechanism to use wiaot.
As of this writing, all pools listed on the site-who represent more than half of the current network hash rate-have indicated that they will support activation. While digital asset prices have fallen sharply, the underlying network has continued to process transactions. On the other hand, Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed. This week’s newsletter links to a website that tracks miner support for taproot activation, announces a new organization funding Bitcoin research and development, and includes our regular sections with popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, announcements of releases and release candidates, and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. In short, please consider performing extra diligence on any software or service to which you will entrust the creation of non-reversible Bitcoin transactions. In the meantime, Johan Halseth posted to the Lightning-Dev mailing list this week about a PR he opened to LND that will only accept a payment if the maximum amount of fees a peer can steal from that payment (and all previously accepted pending payments) is less than the channel reserve-the minimum amount that must be kept in each side of a channel to serve as a penalty in case an old state ioast.
643 as part of the multipath payments feature to prevent probing attacks by nodes along the payment path. David Lynch asks if moving away from Replace-By-Fee (RBF) would prevent double spend attacks. ● Fidelity bonds for LN routing: Gleb Naumenko and Antoine Riard posted a to the Lightning-Dev mailing list to use stake certificates (another name for fidelity bonds) to prevent a type of channel jamming attack first described in 2015. These are attacks where a malicious user sends a payment to themselves or a confederate through a series of channels and then delays either accepting or rejecting the payment. ● What is the motivation for separating Bitcoin Core into independent node, wallet, and GUI processes? This week’s newsletter announces a meeting to discuss taproot activation mechanisms, includes a link to a Bitcoin Core usage survey, and includes our regular sections with top questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, a list of releases and release candidates, and descriptions of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about bi-directional upfront fees for LN and 바이낸스 (information from insna.info – http://insna.info/binance-the-ultimate-convenience/) relays the results of a small survey among experts about their preferences for taproot activation. Of course, actual enforcement of the soft fork will depend on it gaining broad support among users-and users may decide to use an alternative act mechanism.
Although the source of the loss was not fully determined in the thread, it was suggested that virtual machine images or other curated collections of software, especially those designed for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, provide an effective mechanism for delivering backdoored software to valuable servers. Because anyone who was ever a delegate can trigger an onchain spend, statechains are designed to use the eltoo mechanism to ensure an onchain spend by the most recent delegate (Carol) can take precedence over spends by previous delegates (Alice and Bob), assuming the trusted third party hasn’t colluded with a previous delegate to cheat. Any intermediate hop who doubts the payment will succeed before the deadline will now reject the payment, allowing previous hops to also settle the failed payment before the deadline and receive their refund. Any ultimate receiver who wants to use hold invoices for longer than the remaining time will now need to phe backwards fee.