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Publications

Recent publications from our blog posts and newsletters.

Jun 3, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #100
This week’s newsletter summarizes a proposed design for a coinswap implementation, describes new middleware for allowing lightweight wallets to request information directly from a user’s own node, and highlights two transaction size calculators. Also included are our regular sections with descriptions of several recently transcribed talks, new releases and release candidates, and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. A special final section celebrates the publication of Newsletter #100.
May 27, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #99
This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about the minimum allowed transaction size and includes our regular sections with popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange, releases and release candidates, and notable merges from Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
May 20, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #98
This week’s newsletter relays a request for comments on a proposed change to the BIP341 taproot transaction digest and briefly summarizes discussion about a new and more concise protocol for atomic swaps. Also included are our regular sections describing changes to services and client software, new releases and release candidates, and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
May 13, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #97
This week’s newsletter describes a proposal that taproot signatures make an additional commitment to spent scriptPubKeys and includes our regular sections with the summary of a Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting, a list of releases and release candidates, and descriptions of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
May 6, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #96
This week’s newsletter links to a discussion about using enhanced QR codes for communicating large transactions, includes a field report from Suredbits about building a high-availability LN node, and briefly summarizes several recently transcribed talks and conversations. Also included are our regular sections with releases, release candidates, and notable code changes from popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
May 6, 2020
Field Report: Running a Lightning node in an enterprise environment
A field report about how Suredbits uses Eclair, AWS, and a remote PostgreSQL database to operate an LN node with fast failover capability.
Apr 29, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #95
This week’s newsletter summarizes the disclosure of an issue affecting the safety of routed LN payments and announces a new presigned vault proposal. Also included are our regular sections with popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange, announcements of releases and release candidates, and descriptions of notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Apr 22, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #94
This week’s newsletter links to a prototype for creating vaults using pre-signed transactions and includes our regular sections about notable changes to services, client software, and popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Apr 15, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #93
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. Also included are our regular sections describing release candidates and changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
Apr 8, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #92
This week’s newsletter describes work on simplified ECDSA adaptor signatures and includes our regular sections for Bitcoin Core PR Review Club discussion summaries, release announcements, and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Apr 1, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #91
This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to make statechains deployable on Bitcoin without consensus changes, summarizes a discussion about a schnorr nonce generation function that helps protect against differential power analysis, and links to a proposed update to BIP322 generic signmessage. Also included is our regular section about notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Mar 25, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #90
This week’s newsletter summarizes several questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange and describes notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Mar 18, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #89
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.
Mar 11, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #88
This week’s newsletter links to a description of methods for preventing hardware wallets from leaking private information through transaction signatures, provides an update on the BIP322 generic signmessage protocol, and summarizes a recent meeting of the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club. Also included are our regular sections about new releases and notable merges of popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Mar 4, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #87
This week’s newsletter describes a proposed update to BIP340 schnorr keys and signatures, seeks feedback on a proposal to improve startup feature negotiation between full nodes, examines a suggestion for a standardized way to prevent hardware wallets from using corrupt nonces to leak private keys, and links to an analysis of the properties necessary in a hash function for taproot to be secure. Also included are our regular sections for release announcements and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Feb 26, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #86
This week’s newsletter announces the 2020 Chaincode Residency program, describes two proposed routing improvements for LN, summarizes three interesting talks from the Stanford Blockchain Conference, links to popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange, and lists several notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
Feb 19, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #85
This week’s newsletter announces the release of C-Lightning 0.8.1, requests help testing a Bitcoin Core maintenance release, summarizes a discussion about taproot versus implementing MAST and schnorr signatures separately, describes new ideas for using PoDLEs in LN channel construction, and highlights a new implication of work on privacy-enhanced payments to unannounced LN channels. Also included are our regular sections about notable changes to popular services, client software, and infrastructure projects.
Feb 12, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #84
This week’s newsletter seeks help testing a Bitcoin Core release candidate and summarizes some discussion about the BIP119 OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY proposal. Also included is our regular section about notable code and documentation changes.
Feb 5, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #83
This week’s newsletter announces the release of Eclair 0.3.3, requests help testing a Bitcoin Core maintenance release, links to a new tool for experimenting with taproot and tapscript, summarizes discussion about safely generating schnorr signatures with precomputed public keys, and describes a proposal for interactive construction of LN funding transactions. Also included is our regular section about notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
Jan 29, 2020
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #82
This week’s newsletter announces the release of LND 0.9.0-beta, asks for help testing a release candidate for a Bitcoin Core maintenance release, describes a proposal to break the linkability between UTXOs and unannounced LN channels, and summarizes a modification to the proposed SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUTANYSCRIPT signature hash that may simplify management of payments in eltoo-based payment channels. Also included are our regular sections for popular Bitcoin StackExchange Q&A and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure and documentation projects.