October Topics

[MatulefM]

How Bitcoin Mining Can Transform The Energy Industry

• Credit: Arcane Research
• “Bitcoin mining is a much-maligned industry due to its vast energy consumption. The criticism relies heavily on the assumption that bitcoin miners provide no positive externalities to energy systems and only serve as energy hogs forcing additional non-renewable energy generation.”
• “Bitcoin mining possesses a combination of properties that makes it a uniquely flexible energy consumer. This flexibility allows bitcoin miners to provide positive externalities to various energy systems globally, including strengthening vulnerable electricity grids, improving the economics of renewable energy, mitigating natural gas flaring, and lowering heating costs by repurposing waste heat.”

Human Rights Foundation Donates $325,000 In BTC For Bitcoin Development

• Credit: Human Rights Foundation | Shawn Amick & Bitcoin Magazine
• “HRF made eight donations in BTC to further censorship-resistance, open-source solutions, Bitcoin Core development and other initiatives in the ecosystem.”
• “HRF has donated over $1.5 million in BTC and USD over the past two years to further Bitcoin development across the world and will announce its next round of donations in January 2023.”

Defending Privacy in Crypto - A Lawsuit Challenging the U.S. Treasury Department’s Sanctions of Tornado Cash

• Credit: Coinbase
• “We have no issue with the Treasury sanctioning bad actors and we take a hard stance against unlawful behavior. But in this case, Treasury went much further and took the unprecedented step of sanctioning an entire technology instead of specific individuals.”
• “Right now, developers are worried that they could be held responsible for something they had nothing to do with, and no ability to control. At a time when we should be encouraging innovation, this kind of fear and uncertainty will do the opposite — making developers wonder if, by pushing the industry forward, they could be putting themselves at risk.”

US Gov White House Report: Climate and Energy Implications of Crypto-Assets in the United States

• Credit: Whitehouse.gov
• “Responsible development of digital assets would encourage consensus mechanisms that minimize energy usage and environmental impacts while maximizing benefits to consumers.”
• “the Administration should explore executive actions, and Congress might consider legislation, to limit or eliminate the use of high energy intensity consensus mechanisms for crypto-asset mining.”

[MatulefM]

Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Citadel, and Other Financial Heavyweights Launch Bitcoin Exchange 'EDX Markets (EDXM)'

• Credit: Businesswire
• “By leveraging a network of select digital custodians to safeguard assets, trades will be netted and settled on the blockchain for greater speed and efficiency at lower cost, eliminating the need for expensive bilateral settlement. Customer security and regulatory compliance are also core foundational principles for EDXM. In particular, it will remove significant conflicts of interest that affect existing cryptocurrency exchanges by separating responsibility for operating the exchange from the entities trading on it.”

Taro Explainer: What Is Taro in Bitcoin?

• Credit: River Financial
• “Taro is a proposed protocol that will allow the issuance of digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.”

Open Source Bitcoin Denominated Mining Profitability Calculator

• Credit: Red Dirt Mining

Mining Concentration In America Poses A Major Threat To Bitcoin

• Credit: Shinobi / Bitcoin Magazine
• “The American government has every incentive to attack or capture Bitcoin that China does, even more in the case of the threat that Bitcoin represents to the U.S. Dollar. Bitcoin is a fundamental threat to the world order that the American Empire has established. If the government sees an opportunity to neuter that threat, they will take it.”

[MatulefM]

Was Satoshi a Greedy Miner?

• Credit: Jameson Lopp
• “Technical analysis of mining behavior exhibited by an entity that is plausibly Satoshi Nakamoto.”
• “Their goal was to keep the "heartbeat" of the network alive while it was being bootstrapped.”
• “They could have easily earned more than twice as much BTC if they had mined at full power.”

Bitcoin Transaction Fee Research Report

• Credit: Joe Burnett, Head Analyst, Blockware Solutions & Pierre Rochard, VP of Research, Riot
• “In the long run, the market may naturally find an equilibrium for on-chain fees. It could reach a point where there is not much more demand for scaling technology and fees are high enough to avoid censorship after X blocks. When will this occur? Impossible to know, but it’s safe to say that Bitcoin’s long-term “security” is probable and that miners will likely experience more scaling cycles where they earn a significant amount of transaction fees as Bitcoin adoption accelerates and the use of it as a medium exchange begins.”

New Block Explorer Released 'Spiral' Using Homomorphic Encryption to Protect Privacy

• Credit: Spiral
• “When you use a block explorer, you're linking your identity with your money, inviting phishing. Spiral offers the privacy of a self-hosted node, with zero maintenance.”

[bitcoin-dev] Spookchains: Drivechain Analog with One-Time Trusted Setup & APO

• Credit: Jeremy Rubin
• “This post draws heavily from Zmnscpxj's fantastic post showing how to make drivechains with recursive covenants. In this post, I will show similar tricks that can accomplish something similar using ANYPREVOUT with a one time trusted setup ceremony.”

The power of valves for better flow control, improved reliability & lower expected payment failure rates on the Lightning Network

• Credit: Rene Pickhardt / BitMEX
• “ Valves are an important tool for flow control in fluid or gas networks. We investigate the possibilities to set up valves on the Lightning Network to improve flow control and reduce expected payment failure rates.”

[kevkevinpal]

Lightning Signer Project on Esp32

• Credit: Validating Lightning Signer and Sphinx Chat
• "This is an implementation of a lightning node where the private keys are separated from the actual node via hardware device (esp32) and using the validating lightning signer project"

Lightning Tor - Indra Labs

• Credit: Indra Labs
• "This project is aiming to solve some of the problems of the tor network by utilizing the lightning network to use a tor like network"

Developers of Bitocin analysis

• Credit: NYDig
• "This is a document that does an analysis of developers who work on technologies around the bitcoin network"

[MatulefM]

Spatial Analysis of Global Bitcoin Mining

• Credit: Nature
• “Here we explore the spatial distribution of Bitcoin mining through bottom-up tracking and geospatial statistics. We find that mining activity has been detected at more than 6000 geographical units across 139 countries and regions, which is in line with the distributed design of Bitcoin network. However, in terms of computing power, it has demonstrated a strong tendency of spatial concentration and association with energy production locations. “

Bitcoin Non-Profit Brink Funding 11 Bitcoin, Lightning Developers To Improve The Ecosystem

• Credit: Brink & Bitcoin Magazine
• “Brink, a non-profit dedicated to improving the Bitcoin protocol, now has 11 Bitcoin and Lightning developers supported by grants from the foundation”

[Lightning-dev] Fee Ratecards (your gateway to negativity)

• Credit: lisa neigut
• “A ratecard is a set of four values, positive or negative, that price different bands of available liquidity for a channel.”
• “Currently, all payments are priced equally. Fee ratecards update this such that payments can be priced differently, depending on the current available capacity in a channel. This allows node operators to dynamically price their liquidity, without needing to continually issue gossip updates as the balance changes (which may leak payment flow timing).”

[bitcoin-dev] bitcoin-inquistion: evaluating soft forks on signet

• Credit: Anthony Towns
• “As we've seen from the attempt at a CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY activation earlier in the year, the question of "how to successfully get soft fork ideas from concept to deployment" doesn't really have a good answer today.”

Hello Taro: Building the (Tap)Root of the World's Financial Network with Bitcoin

• Credit: Michael Levin & Lightning Labs
• “Today we're excited to announce the alpha release of the Taro daemon, enabling developers to mint, send, and receive assets on the bitcoin blockchain.”
• “In the coming months, more enhanced features will be added to the Taro daemon including universe functionality. Universes will allow users and asset issuers to provide proofs about asset provenance, supply issuance, and more easily interact with Taro asset data. Once the on-chain functionality is complete, we'll work towards integrating the Taro protocol into lnd, bringing Taro assets to the Lightning Network. The initial work to implement simple, unannounced Taproot channels in lnd has begun, a prerequisite for Lightning channels that can send and receive Taro assets.”