This week’s newsletter describes a proposed contract for trustless miner feerate futures, links to a coin selection algorithm for LN nodes providing dual funding liquidity, details a prototype for a vault using OP_CAT, and discusses sending and receiving ecash using LN and ZKCPs. Also included are our regular sections summarizing popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing recent changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

News

  • ● Trustless contract for miner feerate futures: ZmnSCPxj posted to Delving Bitcoin a set of scripts that will allow two parties to conditionally pay each other based on the marginal feerate to include a transaction in a future block. For example, Alice is a user who expects to include a transaction in block 1,000,000 (or a block shortly thereafter). Bob is a miner who has some chance of mining a block around that time. They each deposit some of their money into a funding transaction that can be spent one of three ways:

    1. Bob receives back his deposit plus claims Alice’s deposit by spending the funding transaction’s output in block 1,000,000 (or a block shortly thereafter). The script they use requires Bob’s unilateral spend to be a certain minimum size, such as larger than two typical spends.

    2. Alternatively, Alice receives back her deposit plus claims Bob’s deposit spending the funding transaction’s output sometime after block 1,000,000 (for example, a day later in block 1,000,144). Alice’s transaction is relatively small.

    3. A further alternative is that Alice and Bob can cooperatively spend the funding transaction’s output however they would like. This uses a taproot keypath spend for maximum efficiency.

    If feerates at block 1,000,000 are lower than expected, Bob can include his large spend in that block (or another block shortly thereafter) and profit. Profiting at this moment of network-wide low feerates is especially advantageous for Bob as a miner because low feerates mean that he doesn’t earn as much reward from any blocks he produces.

    If feerates at block 1,000,000 are higher than expected, Bob won’t want to include his large spend in a block—it’ll cost more in fees than it earns him in profit. This allows Alice to profit by including her smaller spend in block 1,000,144 (or later). Profiting at this moment of network-wide high feerates is especially advantageous to Alice as it offsets the high fee cost of including the regular transaction she planned to include in block 1,000,000.

    Additionally, if both Alice and Bob realize that it’ll be profitable for Bob to include his spend in block 1,000,000, they can cooperatively spend to Bob to create a smaller transaction than Bob’s unilateral version. This benefits Bob by saving him fees and benefits Alice by reducing the amount of data in block 1,000,000, which means Alice may need to pay less in fees for the transaction she planned to include in that block.

    There were several replies to the topic. One reply noted that the contract has the interesting property of not only being trustless (a common reason to prefer consensus-enforced contracts) but also avoids corrupting the counterparty. For example, if there was a centralized futures market for feerates, Bob and other miners could accept fees out of band or use other tricks to manipulate the apparent feerate; but, with ZmnSCPxj’s construction, that’s not a risk: Bob’s choice about whether or not to use the large-size spend is purely informed by his perspective on current mining and mempool conditions. That reply also contemplated whether larger miners might have an advantage over smaller miners, with Anthony Towns providing a payoff table showing that an attempt to game the contract would result in greater profits for miners using the default transaction selection algorithm.

  • ● Coin selection for liquidity providers: Richard Myers posted to Delving Bitcoin about creating a coin selection algorithm that is optimized for LN nodes offering liquidity via liquidity advertisements. His post describes an algorithm that he implemented in a Bitcoin Core draft PR. Testing the algorithm, he found “a 15% reduction in on-chain fees compared to [Bitcoin Core’s] default coin selection”. Myers is seeking criticism of the approach and suggestions for improvement.

  • ● Simple vault prototype using OP_CAT: developer Rijndael posted to Delving Bitcoin about a Rust-language proof-of-concept implementation he’s written for a vault that only depends on the current consensus rules plus the proposed OP_CAT opcode. A brief example of how the vault could be used: Alice generates an address with a script created by the vault software and receives a payment to the address. Then a spend is triggered either by her or by someone attempting to steal her funds.

    • ● Legitimate spend: Alice triggers the spend by creating a trigger transaction with two inputs and two outputs; the inputs are the spend of the vaulted amount and an input that adds fees; the outputs are a staging output for the exact amount of the first input and a small output that pays the eventual withdrawal address. After a certain number of blocks passes, Alice completes the withdrawal by creating a transaction with two inputs and one output; the inputs are the first trigger output from before plus another fee-paying input; the output is the withdrawal address.

      In the first spend, OP_CAT plus a previously described trick using schnorr signatures (see Newsletter #134) verifies that the output being spent has the same script and amount as the corresponding output being created, ensuring no funds are withdrawn from the vault by the trigger transaction. The second transaction verifies that its first input has a BIP68 relative timelock for a certain number of blocks (e.g. 20 blocks), that the output pays the exact amount of the first input, and that the output pays the same address as the second address of the trigger transaction. The relative timelock provides a contest period (see below); the exact amount verification ensures no funds are withdrawn without permission; and the address verification ensures a thief can’t change a legitimate withdrawal address into their own address at the last moment (a problem with all presigned vaults we’re aware of, see Newsletter #59).

    • ● Illegitimate spend: Mallory triggers a spend by creating a trigger transaction as described above. Alice’s watchtower realizes that the spend is illegitimate during the contest period (e.g., the 20 block delay) and creates a re-vaulting transaction with two inputs and one output; the inputs are the trigger transaction’s first output and a fee-paying input; the output is a return to the vault. Because the re-vaulting transaction only has one output but the withdrawal conditions of the script require spending from a trigger transaction with two outputs, Mallory is unable to complete stealing Alice’s funds.

      Because the money is returned to the same vault script it started in, Mallory can still create another trigger transaction and force Alice to go through the same cycle over and over, resulting in fee costs for both Mallory and Alice. Rijndael’s extended documentation for the project notes that you’d probably want to allow Alice to spend the money to a different script in that case, and that the ideas behind his construction allow for that but it isn’t currently implemented for simplicity.

    These CAT-based vaults can be compared against the types of presigned vaults we can create today without consensus changes and the BIP345-style OP_VAULT vaults that would provide the best-known set of vault features if support for them was added in a soft fork.

    Presigned BIP345 OP_VAULT OP_CAT with schnorr
    Availability Now Requires soft fork of OP_VAULT and OP_CTV Requires soft fork of OP_CAT
    Last-minute address replacement attack Vulnerable Not vulnerable Not vulnerable
    Partial amount withdrawals Only if prearranged Yes No
    Static and non-interactive computable deposit addresses No Yes Yes
    Batched re-vaulting/quarantining for fee savings No Yes No
    Operational efficiency in best case, i.e. only legitimate spends
    (only very roughly estimated by Optech)    		 2x size of regular single-sig 3x size of regular single-sig 4x size of regular single-sig

    The prototype has received a small amount of discussion and analysis on the forum as of this writing.

  • ● Sending and receiving ecash using LN and ZKCPs: Anthony Towns posted to Delving Bitcoin about linking “ecash mints to the lightning network without losing ecash’s anonymity or adding any additional trust”. His proposal for achieving that goal uses a zero-knowledge contingent payment (ZKCP) for sending payments to the user of an ecash mint and a process of committing to a hash preimage for withdrawing ecash funds to LN.

    Calle, the lead developer of the Cashu ecash implementation, replied with some concerns but also support for the idea, a reference to a zero-knowledge proof system already implemented for Cashu, and a note that he’s actively researching and writing code to support atomic ecash-to-LN transfers.

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Bitcoin Stack Exchange is one of the first places Optech contributors look for answers to their questions—or when we have a few spare moments to help curious or confused users. In this monthly feature, we highlight some of the top-voted questions and answers posted since our last update.

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 24.02 is a release of the next major version of this popular LN node. It includes improvements to the recover plugin that “make emergency recoveries less stressful”, improvements to anchor channels, 50% faster block chain syncing, and a bug fix for the parsing of a large transaction found on testnet.

Notable code and documentation changes

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