Bitcoin Socratic Seminar 30 - June 2024

[vnprc]

Welcome

Hello Bitcoiners! This is where we'll organize the topics of discussion for our upcoming Socratic Seminar.

Please use this issue to suggest topics that you'd like to see discussed at the seminar. To suggest a topic, simply add a new comment to this issue with the topic title as the comment's title.

As we work through organizing the topics, feel free to edit and update your comments as needed. This will help us keep everything organized and easy to follow.

To help get us started, here are some main topics of discussion that we could consider:

• Bitcoin Core
• Lightning Network
• Scaling
• Privacy
• Media
• Miscellaneous

• Remember, this is Bitcoin only, do not post about your favorite clown-coin.
  Thank you for your contributions and we look forward to a great seminar!

[vnprc]

Peer to Peer Rights Fund set up to fight the legal precedents attempting to be advanced in the Samourai case. https://p2prights.org/

[vnprc]

Ocean Mining moves HQ to El Salvador https://x.com/ocean_mining/status/1795822643452502516

[vnprc]

v3 transactions TRUCing along, renamed and assigned BIP number 431 https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0431.mediawiki

[vnprc]

Mutiny launches Harbor, a desktop ecash wallet https://blog.mutinywallet.com/harbor/

[vnprc]

LND 0.18 beta includes inbound fees, route blinding, fee estimates for invoices, and more https://lightning.engineering/posts/2024-05-30-lnd-0.18-launch/

[vnprc]

Jeremy Rubin write up on functional encryption covenants https://rubin.io/public/pdfs/fedcov.pdf

[vnprc]

Bitcoin Mechanic twitter post exploring empty blocks, bitmain's history of fuckery, and the latest firmware fix. Notably, he alleges without proof that Bitmain has been mining with the firmware fix while withholding that same bug fix from other miners using their hardware. https://x.com/grassfedbitcoin/status/1796311998466003418

For reference, here is the Greg Maxwell mailing list post with the original claim of reverse engineering covert asicboost from a bitmain ASIC. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014077.html

Another classic blog post wherein Jimmy Song argues that it doesn't seem like anyone actually ran covert ASICboost https://jimmysong.medium.com/examining-bitmains-claims-about-asicboost-1d61118c678d

Mempool Research drops their first research report on empty blocks https://research.mempool.space/empty-block-report/ twitter announcement https://x.com/mempoolresearch/status/1798362814350049653

The CEO of Luxor fires back at Ocean. Mononaut and Marathon peeps corroborating in the replies. https://x.com/hash_bender/status/1798378913749676033

[vnprc]

OP_CAT based proof of work signet bitcoin faucet https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/proof-of-work-based-signet-faucet/937

Example transactions https://mempool.space/signet/tx/d89088901fa453a300ff367da0253d8d5ab58b025e02b723c86fa10b3a502d71 https://mempool.space/signet/tx/695a09bbdde45ae9194a809a6df01473b263f0d706e9045f17ebdccee7d8bd75

[vnprc]

Ark Labs launch announcement https://blog.arklabs.to/introducing-ark-labs-a-new-venture-to-bring-seamless-and-scalable-payments-to-bitcoin-811388c0001b

[vnprc]

Starkware announces plans to expand their L2 to bitcoin as well as Ethereum. Throws their weight behind OP_CAT in the soft fork arena. https://starkware.co/scaling-bitcoin-for-mass-use/

[vnprc]

zksnacks, the default wasabi coordinator service, shut down. New wasabi release enables selection of coordinators announced via nostr. https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/wasabi-wallet-v2-0-8/

Wasabi coinjoin coordinator monitor bot https://x.com/FreeSabiBot

Commentary: We are witnessing brand new cypherphunk reputation markets develop from zero. Pay attention, this is going to be very important for all kinds of projects in the very near future.

[vnprc]

Calle, pseudonymous creator of the cashu ecash protocol, launches OpenCash non-profit to provide cashu development grants. https://opencash.dev/

[vnprc]

CISA research site https://cisaresearch.org/

[vnprc]

Ark v2 enables Ark Service Providers (ASPs) to reclaim their liquidity without having to wait for the expiration period (4 weeks) to elapse. The tradeoff is that ASPs need to compute very large tapscript trees with specialized hardware. This seems well within reach given the high capital requirements of being an ASP. https://brqgoo.medium.com/introducing-ark-v2-2e7ab378e87b

[vnprc]

Ecash TIDES using Cashu and Stratum v2 https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/ecash-tides-using-cashu-and-stratum-v2/870/29 A fascinating proposal to use ecash to represent hashrate shares submitted to a mining pool. This would enable an accountless mining pool where miners hold and potentially exchange ecash tokens of indeterminate value until the pool finds a new block, at which time the bitcoin value of each token is determined and the tokens can be exchanged with the pool for mining reward payouts.

[vnprc]

Super Testnet hedgehog progress update https://x.com/super_testnet/status/1800515195124748503

[vnprc]

Concurrently Secure Blind Schnorr Signature Scheme https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1676.pdf