November 2023 Topics - Githubissues

Credit: Sam Wouters
"There are no public metrics on how many people use Lightning, so critics point at metrics such as node count, channels, and capacity, which have plateaued over the past year and thus give a false impression that Lightning's adoption may be stagnating or declining. Our research shows the opposite.."
"Based on data from the operators of nodes comprising 52% of the public capacity on the Lightning Network, we estimate a lower bound of 6.6 million routed Lightning transactions in August 2023. The upper bound could be a multiple of this number if there was data availability of direct and private transactions between participants."
"This represents a 1,212% increase since the 503k Lightning payments estimate for August 2021 by K33 (formerly Arcane Research). This growth was despite a 44% Bitcoin price drop and a 45% decrease in search interest."
"The average Lightning transaction size on the public network was around 44.7k satoshis, or $11.84 in August 2023. Size distribution shows that nearly all Lightning payments are unaffordable on the Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning is effectively extending Bitcoin’s utility by enabling low-value payments over the Internet."

Credit: Namcios
“An unknown "Project Spartacus" has formed in an attempt to immortalize on bitcoin the thousands of Afghan War logs published by Julian Assange's WikiLeaks in 2010.”

Credit: Antoine Riard
“I think this new class of replacement cycling attacks puts lightning in a very perilous position, where only a sustainable fix can happen at the base-layer, e.g adding a memory-intensive history of all-seen transactions or some consensus upgrade. Deployed mitigations are worth something in face of simple attacks, though I don't think they're stopping advanced attackers as said in the first full disclosure mail.
Those types of changes are the ones necessitating the utmost transparency and buy-in of the community as a whole, as we're altering the full-nodes processing requirements or the security architecture of the decentralized bitcoin ecosystem in its integrality. On the other hand fully explaining why such changes would be warranted for the sake of lightning and for designing them well, we might need to lay out in complete state practical and critical attacks on a ~5 355 public BTC ecosystem. Hard dillema.”

Credit: Jesse Hamilton / CoinDesk
Press Release
“Under pressure to address reports that Hamas and other terrorist groups are partially funded with crypto, Treasury's FinCEN proposed a rule to categorize mixers as a threat.”
“The agency proposed designating 'crypto mixing' as an area of “primary money laundering concern" in order to impose certain recordkeeping and reporting requirements on involved transactions. The public will have 90 days to comment.”

Credit: Seth For Privacy / Freedom.tech
“Demistyfing FinCEN’s proposal to extend the PATRIOT Act to include cryptocurrency privacy tools.”

Credit: Fabian
“I found a potential malleability issue in the UTXO set dump files generated for and used by assumeutxo”

Credit: Rusty Russell
“I've done an exploration of what would be required (given OP_TX/OP_TXHASH or equivalent way of pushing a scriptPubkey on the stack) to usefully validate Taproot outputs in Bitcoin Script”

Credit: Ethan Heilman
“This BIP defines OP_CAT a new tapscript opcode which allows the concatenation of two values on the stack. This opcode would be activated via a soft fork by redefining the opcode OP_SUCCESS80.”

Credit: @mononautical
There's a lot of discussion about this newly discovered vulnerability on the mailing lists, but the actual mechanism is a bit hard to follow…..So here's an illustrated primer…”

Credit: nobsbitcoin
“Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that over $90 million worth of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have been used to fund Hamas - a claim that gained serious attention amongst multiple media outlets, noted Swan's Sam Callahan.”
"In response to the article, anti-Bitcoin politicians directly linked the WSJ article as evidence in a letter to the White House and Treasury “to address the serious national security threats posed by crypto’s use to finance terrorism,”
“One of the prominent anti-Bitcoin politicians, senator Elizabeth Warren, along with 28 other senators and 76 members of House of Representatives wrote a letter to U.S. Treasury and the White House calling to 'act to meaningfully curtail illicit crypto activity."
Our Data in WSJ Article on Hamas Crypto Fundraising 'Was Misrepresented', Says Surveillance Firm Elliptic

Credit: Jameson Lopp
A compilation of evidence that Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto were different people.

ChicagoBitdevs / ChicagoBitdevs.github.io