3268 changes the default network from Bitcoin testnet to Bitcoin mainnet. Also included is our regular section about notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. This week’s newsletter requests help testing the next version of LND, summarizes a discussion about soft fork activation mechanisms, and describes a few notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. Independent code archaeology by Gregory Maxwell indicates that the main culprit was probably the BitPay Bitcore software which introduced a bug around July 2014 and released a fix about a month later. ● Publication of videos and study material from schnorr/taproot workshop: youtu.be Optech published a blog post with links to videos, Jupyter notebooks, GitHub repositories, and more information produced for the schnorr and taproot workshops held in San Francisco and New York City last month. This week’s newsletter summarizes the final week of the organized taproot review, describes a discussion about coinjoin mixing without either equal value inputs or outputs, and mentions a proposal to encode output script descriptors in end-user interfaces. ● Final week of organized taproot review: December 17th was the final scheduled meeting of the taproot review group. Subsequent to the workshop, CTV proposer Jeremy Rubin announced a mailing list to help coordinate future review and discussion of the BIP119 proposa
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The discussion to date did not come to any clear conclusion. As an alternative to either BIP9 or BIP8 alone, Corallo proposes a three-step process: use BIP9 to allow a proposal to be activated within a one-year window; pause for a six-month discussion period if the proposal is not activated; and-if it’s clear that the community still wants the proposal activated-force activation using a BIP8 flag day set to two years in the future (with faster activation possible using versionbits signaling). 16373 causes the bumpfee RPC used for Replace-by-Fee fee bumping to return a Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT) when the user attempts to fee bump a transaction using a wallet with disabled private keys. In these estimates, the variation in confirmation speed for different transaction types all paying the same total fee can be more than 6 blocks (about an hour on average). PoW is also used to regulate block times (and thus protect against denial of service) since the difficulty adjustment makes it expensive to reliably produce blocks more often than every 10 minutes on average. Pieter Wuille explains that PoW does not create trust, but instead creates incentive for miners to cooperate with other miners by building on their bloc
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Tiny blocks with fewer transactions took even less time than that. This limits the ability of a miner who is reorganizing (forking) the chain from being able to arbitrarily rearrange transactions to maximize their fee revenue. It can also tell Alice the various sizes related to the script so she can estimate her transaction fee expenses. ● LN simplified commitments: in two separate threads, developers of LND discussed their work on implementing simplified commitments, which are LN settlement transactions that only pay a minimal onchain transaction fee and which contain two additional outputs (one for each party). We thank all of you for reading this series and for helping to improve Bitcoin scalability one wallet and service at a time. This will lower the transaction fees for the users of that software and make more block space available to all Bitcoin users, helping to keep fees lower for everyone a little bit longer. Experienced users are encouraged to help test the software so that any problems can be identified and fixed prior to release. If the first 18 months of the activation period passes without activation (but also without any blocking problems being discovered), new releases can enable this option by default for the remaining 24 months of the activation pe
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The goal of the proposed specification is to allow all LN implementations to interoperate with any watchtower rather than there being a different watchtower implementation for every LN implementation. There is extreme marketing power behind the perfect domain to promote your products and services. By our efforts and by the efforts of many other Bitcoiners, we think we’re on the brink of success: 19 of the 23 popular wallets and services we’ve evaluated are ready to pay bech32 addresses and 4 already generate bech32 receiving addresses by default. Every week, it’s looking more and more reasonable for wallets to switch to bech32 soon, and we expect to hear from an increasing number of developers that their next major release will default to bech32 receiving addresses. For example, a wallet developer today who wants to switch from 2-of-3 multisig to 2-of-2 multisig with a 1-of-2 timelocked escape clause might have to write and test a new function for the new case.