This week’s newsletter summarizes continued discussion about storing data in the Bitcoin block chain, describes a hypothetical fee dilution attack against some types of multiparty protocols, and describes how a tapscript signature commitment can be used with different parts of the same tree. Also included are our regular sections with summaries of changes to services and client software, announcements of new releases and release candidates, and descriptions of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. We additionally provide one of our rare recommendations for a new search engine focused on Bitcoin technical documentation and discussion.

News

  • ● Continued discussion about block chain data storage: several threads on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list this week saw continued discussion about storing data in the block chain.

    • ● Offchain coin coloring: Anthony Towns posted a summary of a protocol currently being used for assigning special meaning to certain transaction outputs, a class of techniques generally called coin coloring. He also summarized a related protocol used for storing encoded binary data in Bitcoin transactions and associating it with particular colored coins. After summarizing the current state of affairs, he described a method for storing data using the nostr message transfer protocol and associating it with colored coins that could be transferred in Bitcoin transactions. This would have several advantages:

      • ● Reduced costs: no transaction fees need to be paid for data stored offchain.

      • ● Private: two people can exchange a colored coin without anyone else knowing anything about the data it references.

      • ● No transaction required for creation: data can be associated with an existing UTXO; there’s no need to create a new UTXO.

      • ● Resistant against censorship: if the association between the data and the colored coin is not widely known, then transfers of the colored coin are just as censorship resistant as any other onchain Bitcoin payment.

      Considering the censorship resistant aspect, Towns argues that “coloured bitcoins is largely unavoidable and simply something that must be dealt with, rather than something we should spend time trying to prevent/avoid.” He compares the idea that colored coins might have more value than fungible bitcoins to the operation of Bitcoin charging transaction fees based on transaction weight rather than value transferred, concluding that he doesn’t believe this necessarily leads to significantly misaligned incentives.

    • ● Increasing allowed OP_RETURN space in standard transactions: Christopher Allen asked whether it was better to put arbitrary data in a transaction output using OP_RETURN or the witness data of a transaction. After some discussion, several participants (1, 2, 3) noted that they were in favor of relaxing default transaction relay and mining policies to allow OP_RETURN outputs to store more than 83 bytes of arbitrary data. They reasoned that other methods for storing large amounts of data are currently in use and there would be no additional harm from OP_RETURN being used instead.

  • ● Fee dilution in multiparty protocols: Yuval Kogman posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list the description of an attack against certain multiparty protocols. Although the attack was previously described, Kogman’s post brought renewed attention to it. Imagine that Mallory and Bob each contribute one input to a joint transaction with an expected size and fee, implying an expected feerate. Bob provides a witness of the expected size for his input but Mallory provides a much larger witness than expected. This effectively decreases the feerate for the transaction. Several implications of this were discussed on the mailing list:

    • ● Mallory gets Bob to pay her fees: if Mallory has some ulterior motive for including a large witness in the block chain—for example, she wants to add arbitrary data—she can use part of Bob’s fee to pay the fees for that. For example, Bob wants to create a 1,000 vbyte transaction with a 10,000 satoshi fee, paying 10 sat/vbyte so it confirms quickly. Mallory stuffs the transaction with 9,000 vbytes of data Bob didn’t expect, reducing its feerate to 1 sat/vbyte. Although Bob pays the same absolute fee in both cases, he doesn’t get what he wanted (fast confirmation) and Mallory gets 9,000 sats worth of data added to the block chain at no cost to her.

    • ● Mallory can slow confirmation: a transaction with a lower feerate may confirm more slowly. In a time-sensitive protocol, this could cause a serious problem for Bob. In other cases, Bob might need to fee bump the transaction, which will cost him additional money.

    Kogman describes several mitigations in his post, although all of them involve tradeoffs. In a second post, he notes that he’s unaware of any currently deployed protocol that’s vulnerable.

  • ● Tapscript signature malleability: in an aside to the above-mentioned conversation about fee dilution, developer Russell O’Connor noted that signatures for a tapscript can be applied to a copy of the tapscript placed elsewhere in the taproot tree. For example, the same tapscript A is placed in two different places in a taproot tree. To use the deeper alternative will require placing an additional 32 byte hash in the witness data of the spending transaction.

        *
   / \
  A   *
     / \
    A   B

    That means that even if Mallory provides Bob with a valid witness for her tapscript spend before Bob provides his own signature, it’s still possible for Mallory to broadcast an alternative version of the transaction with a larger witness. Bob can only prevent this issue by receiving from Mallory a complete copy of her tree of tapscripts.

    In the context of future soft fork upgrades to Bitcoin, Anthony Towns opened an issue to the Bitcoin Inquisition repository being used to test SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT (APO) to consider having APO commit to additional data to prevent this issue for users of that extension.

Changes to services and client software

In this monthly feature, we highlight interesting updates to Bitcoin wallets and services.

Optech Recommends

  • ● BitcoinSearch.xyz is a recently-launched search engine for Bitcoin technical documentation and discussions. It was used to quickly find several of the sources linked in this newsletter, a vast improvement over other more laborious methods we’ve previously used. Contributions to its code are welcome.

Releases and release candidates

New releases and release candidates for popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. Please consider upgrading to new releases or helping to test release candidates.

  • ● Core Lightning 23.02rc2 is a release candidate for a new maintenance version of this popular LN implementation.

  • ● BTCPay Server 1.7.11 is a new release. Since the last release we covered (1.7.1), several new features have been added and many bug fixes and improvements have been made. Especially notable, several aspects related to plugins and third-party integrations have been changed, a migration path away from legacy MySQL and SQLite has been added, and a cross-site scripting vulnerability has been fixed.

  • ● BDK 0.27.0 is an update to this library for building Bitcoin wallets and applications.

Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, Core Lightning, Eclair, LDK, LND, libsecp256k1, Hardware Wallet Interface (HWI), Rust Bitcoin, BTCPay Server, BDK, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.

  • ● Core Lightning #5361 adds experimental support for peer storage backups. As last mentioned in Newsletter #147, this allows a node to store a small encrypted backup file for its peers. If a peer later needs to reconnect, perhaps after losing data, it can request the backup file. The peer can use a key derived from its wallet seed to decrypt the file and use the contents to recover the latest state of all of its channels. This can be seen as an enhanced form of static channel backups. The merged PR adds support for creating, storing, and retrieving the encrypted backups. As noted in the commit messages, the feature hasn’t yet been fully specified or adopted by other LN implementations.

  • ● Core Lightning #5670 and #5956 make various updates to its implementation of dual funding based on both recent changes to the specification and comments from interoperability testers. Additionally, an upgradewallet RPC is added to move all funds in P2SH-wrapped outputs to native segwit outputs, which is required for interactive channel opens.

  • ● Core Lightning #5697 adds a signinvoice RPC that will sign a BOLT11 invoice. Previously, CLN would only sign an invoice when it had the preimage for the HTLC hash, ensuring it would be able to claim a payment to the invoice. This RPC can override that behavior, which could (for example) be used to send an invoice now and later use a plugin to retrieve the preimage from another program. Anyone using this RPC should be aware that any third party that has prior knowledge of the preimage for a payment intended for your node can claim that payment before it arrives. That not only steals your money but, because you signed the invoice, generates very convincing evidence that you were paid (this evidence is so convincing that many LN developers call it proof of payment).

  • ● Core Lightning #5960 adds a security policy that includes contact addresses and PGP keys.

  • ● LND #7171 upgrades the signrpc RPC to support the latest draft BIP for MuSig2. The RPC now creates sessions linked to a MuSig2 protocol version number so that all operations within a session will use the correct protocol. A security issue with an older version of the MuSig2 protocol was mentioned in Newsletter #222.

  • ● LDK #2002 adds support for automatically resending spontaneous payments that don’t initially succeed.

  • ● BTCPay Server #4600 updates the coin selection for its payjoin implementation to try to avoid creating transactions with unnecessary inputs, specifically an input that is larger than any output in a transaction containing multiple inputs. That would not happen with a regular single-spender, single-receiver payment: the largest input would have provided sufficient payment for the payment output and no additional inputs would have been added. This PR was partly inspired by a paper analyzing payjoins.