This week’s newsletter summarizes an update to a proposed standard for LN and includes our regular sections about notable changes to services, client software, and popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. This week’s newsletter summarizes a proposal for creating a unified multi-wallet backup that circumvents the inability to import BIP32 extended private keys into many wallets that support deterministic key derivation. 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 youtu.be outputs, and mentions a proposal to encode output script descriptors in end-user interfaces. ● Encoded descriptors: Chris Belcher asked for feedback from the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list about base64 encoding output script descriptors so that they’re easier to copy and paste (and also so that regular users aren’t exposed to their code-like syntax). At least one reply was opposed to the idea and other replies which did support the idea each proposed a different encoding format. ● Bitstamp supports bech32: Bitstamp users can now benefit from using native bech32 addresses after the exchange announced support for both bech32 deposits and withdra
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● Coinbase withdrawal transactions now using batching: Coinbase has rolled out batch withdrawals that they estimate will reduce their load on the Bitcoin network by 50%. Instead of each withdrawal payment generating a single onchain transaction, multiple payments will be combined into a single transaction once every 10 minutes. ● Deribit supports bech32 withdrawals: Deribit announced that its exchange users can now withdraw bitcoins to bech32 native addresses. ● Proposal for using one BIP32 keychain to seed multiple child keychains: several weeks ago, Ethan Kosakovsky posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a proposal for using one BIP32 Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) keychain to create seeds for child HD keychains that can be used in different contexts. ● Proposed watchtower BOLT has been updated: Sergi Delgado Segura emailed the Lightning-Dev mailing list an updated version of a suggested protocol for watchtower communication. Reaction to the proposal was mixed (pro: 1, 2; con: 1, 2), but this week one hardware wallet manufacturer stated their intent to implement support for the protocol and requested additional review of the proposal. 3967 adds support for sending multipath payments, complementing the already-existing receiving logic. 3821 adds anchor commitments for LN channels and enables them by default if both participating nodes of a channel si
support.
3351 extends the invoice RPC with a new exposeprivatechannels parameter that allows the user to request the addition of route hints for private channels to a generated BOLT11 invoice. The user may optionally specify which channels they want to advertise in the invoice, including both public and private channels. That way a user with multiple wallets can backup all of them using just the super-keychain’s seed (plus the derivation paths and the library for transforming deterministic entropy into input data). The PR for the reversion notes, "the prior stricter policy created a large burden on applications that package lnd as they’re forced to deploy special code to handle certain upgrade paths. 4075 allows invoices to be created for payments greater than the previous limit of around 0.043 BTC. The network-wide HTLC limit of 0.043 BTC prevents payments greater than that amount over a single channel. Bitcoin has that potential to take over the traditional monetary system, though there are a lot of areas to work on before it can achieve its target. However, the proposal for tapscript would make it possible for an attacker to use the inefficiency to create blocks with transactions that could take a large amount of
to verify.
Fixing the inefficiency now reduces the number of changes that need to be made in the proposed schnorr, taproot, and tapscript soft fork. With multipath payments, LND can now split invoices into smaller HTLCs which can each take a different route, making better use of the liquidity in LN. Previous attempts at non-equal mixes were easy to compromise, but if an improved method was found, it could significantly improve the privacy of coinjoins by making their transactions look like payment batching. For that, I would like to give some special guidelines for online investors. Binance will appeal to crypto investors looking to trade big tokens like Bitcoin plus niche coins with low fees. Bitcoin has been unusually quiet and stuck in a range of $28,452 and $25,800 for the past four weeks, with investors seemingly reluctant to take positions in either spot or derivatives, according to economists and financial analysts.