August & September topics

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Fedi Raises $4 Million To Scale Bitcoin Custody With Fedimint

• Credit: Namcios / Bitcoin Magazine
• “Fedimint wallets have the potential to bring strong privacy to Bitcoin users with better security than third-party custody setups and more ease of use than fully-fledged self-custody solutions.”
• Learn more: https://www.fedi.xyz/
• Learn more: https://fedimint.org/

Making Bitcoin Unstoppable Part One: Mesh Nets

• Credit: L0LA L33TZ / Bitcoin Magazine
• “If we want Bitcoin to succeed, we must begin to further research, prototype and build our own decentralized communication infrastructure. Because one day we may all depend on sending bitcoin without the internet.”

Keet Is Introducing P2p Digital Communications, Will Integrate Bitcoin Payments

• Credit: Namcios / Bitcoin Magazine
• Website: https://keet.io/
• “Keet allows a given set of parties to exchange instant video, message and file communications in a truly P2P fashion. The approach improves upon popular end-to-end encrypted but centralized offerings such as Zoom and WhatsApp because the data being shared isn’t forwarded to a central server at any time; rather, the connection is established purely between the users taking part in the chat — lowering latency and increasing reliability.”

How much blockspace would it take to spend the complete UTXO set?

• Credit: Murch
• TL;DR: Spending the whole UTXO set would take the blockspace of about 11,500 blocks.

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[bitcoin-dev] BIP Proposal: Receiving and Change Derivation Paths in a Single Descriptor

• Credit: Andrew Chow
• “Wallets typically have one descriptor for producing receiving addresses, and the other for change addresses…This proposal allows descriptors to have a single derivation path element that can specify a pair of indexes. Parsers would then expand these into two almost identical descriptors with the differenc being that the first uses the first of the pair of indexes, and the second uses the second.”

Galoy Brings U.S. Dollars To Bitcoin’s Lightning Network

• Credit: Galoy
• “We raised $4M to further bitcoin-native banking infrastructure.”
• “We’re releasing Stablesats - a feature to hold and transact dollars over Lightning without the use of stablecoins or fiat integration.”

Foundry Makes BTC Donation to Open Source Stratum V2 Protocol Developer to Improve Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work Mining Layer

• Credit: Foundry
• “In order to further improve the censorship resistance of Bitcoin by decentralizing block template production, Foundry is providing a grant of 100,000,000 Sats to a developer working on StratumV2.”
• “The developer will use the funds to focus on the implementation of the Job Negotiation Protocol in Stratum V2. Job Negotiation is a Stratum sub-protocol that allows miners to construct their own block templates and will further improve the censorship resistance of Bitcoin by decentralizing block template creation.”

Riot Produces 318 Bitcoin in July 2022 While Contributing to Power Grid Stability in Texas and Further Strengthening Financial Position, Generating Estimated Power Credits of $9.5 Million

• Credit: Riot Blockchain Inc.
• “"By providing power back into the ERCOT grid during periods of peak demand, the Company estimates that power credits and other benefits from curtailment activities totaled an estimated $9.5 million, significantly outweighing the reduction in BTC mined."

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Effortless Inbound Channel Opening For Voltage Nodes Credit: Voltage

• “With the click of one button, all users running a Voltage node may claim 500,000 sats of inbound liquidity from the main Voltage node. The purpose of this service is to immediately help onboard merchants and businesses, as well as general node runners. No more searching and waiting for channels”

U.S. Treasury sanction of privacy tools places sweeping restrictions on all Americans Credit: Coincenter

• “Sanctioning a tool that is not an alias of any person meriting sanction is substantially different from typical usage of the SDN list. It is a ban on a technology and not a sanction against a person…it is a ban on effectively every American’s ability to use a particular open source software tool.”
• Related: Tornado Cash co-founder reports being kicked off GitHub as industry reacts to sanctions / Credit: Cointelegraph
• Related: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash / Credit: FIOD

[bitcoin-dev] Regarding setting a lower minrelaytxfee Credit: Aaradhya Chauhan

• “Bitcoin Core only relays individual unconfirmed transactions that pay a feerate of at least one satoshi per vbyte (1 sat/vbyte). If a node’s mempool fills with transactions paying at least 1 sat/vbyte, then a higher feerate will need to be paid.” - Bitcoin Optech
• “If I'm okay to wait in a queue, I should have the option for same affordability for minimum fees in the future as it is today."

A Look At the Lightning Network Credit: Lyn Alden / Swan Bitcoin

• “The primary goal of this article is to examine the topic of how bitcoin has evolved as a medium of exchange, and more broadly to analyze the order in which new monetary assets can be accepted as a store of value and a medium of exchange.”

Losing your keys without losing your coins Credit: Ryan Lanman & Alex Schoof / Block

• “most people holding coins on custodial platforms are hesitant to move to self-custody wallets because they are nervous about making mistakes using them - and not because they think self-custody solutions are less secure.”
• “Wallet is made up of three parts - a mobile “App”, a specialized “Hardware” device, and our backend “Server” - with each controlling one of 3 keys, and all transactions needing approval from at least two of them. As a reminder, the customer controls two of these keys using the App and the Hardware, with Block managing the Server key on their behalf.”
• "By optionally enabling Social Recovery, you can pick a set of close personal contacts to rely on to help you recover from some situations faster, and even get back to safety if both your devices are lost (App AND Hardware)."

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A Treatise on Bitcoin Seed Backup Device Design

• Credit: Jameson Lopp
• “There are tons of guides, products, and services that promise to help you in this endeavor. Since one of the principles of Bitcoin is to verify rather than trust, over the past 4 years I've stress tested and reviewed 70 different metal seed backup devices”

*[No Internet Connection or Smartphone? You Can Still Use Bitcoin Now ()](https://inbitcoinwetrust.substack.com/p/no-internet-connection-or-smartphone)**

• Credit: In Bitcoin We Trust Newsletter
• *(): Only in Africa for the moment, thanks to the promising Machankura** project.
• “In Sub-Saharan Africa, the Internet penetration rate is just over 30%. On the South Asian side, it's not much better at 38.56%.”
• “In this project, it is possible to send and receive Bitcoin without an Internet connection or a smartphone. A simple GSM cell phone does the trick…it is based on a technology that has been around for many years: Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).”

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Lightning Channel Jamming Research

• Credit: Antoine Riard and Gleb Naumenko
• “Channel Jamming attack is a type of Denial-of-Service, and the attacker’s goal is to disrupt victim’s operation efficiently.”
• “We believe that Channel Jamming is a substantial risk to the LN, both against individual nodes and the network as a whole.”

OpenSats Legal Defense Fund - #WeAreAllHODLONAUT

• Credit: OpenSats
• Resources: https://www.defendingbtc.com/ & https://opensats.org/projects/opensats_legal_defense
• “Fund aims to defend open-source contributors from lawsuits regarding their activities in the Bitcoin and FOSS ecosystems by directing donations to fund any related legal fees which may arise from their contributions, thereby minimizing the financial repercussions of litigation which can discourage contributors from actively working on and openly discussing Bitcoin and open-source projects.”

Known Physical Bitcoin Attacks

• Credit: Jameson Lopp
• “A list of known attacks against Bitcoin / crypto asset owning entities that occurred in meatspace. NOTE: this list is not comprehensive; many attacks are not publicly reported.”

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[bitcoin-dev] BIP Proposal: Wallet Labels Export Format

• Credit: Craig Raw
• “Proposed BIP to standardize the format wallets use to export labels for their addresses and transactions. A standardized export format could in theory allow two pieces of wallet software that used the same BIP32 account hierarchy to open each others’ backups and recover not just funds but all of the information the user manually entered about their transactions.” - Bitcoin Optech

New York Digital Investment Group Announces Lightning Accelerator Project Called “In Wolf’s Clothing”

• Credit: Craig Deutsch / Bitcoin Magazine
• Source: https://wolfnyc.com/****
• ““The reality is that this year, the progress in Bitcoin and Lightning is staggering. Month after month after month, the nodes on Lightning are growing.” The accelerator is geared toward individual founders and small teams, developers working on Lightning, Taro and covenants, and pre-seed, seed, series A companies. Transportation and lodging will be provided for participants from anywhere in the world.”

RoboSats is now available as an app on your umbrel node

• Credit: Robosats

Mempool Project Launches Lightning Explorer

• Credit: Mempool