#Bitcoin competes with central banks and base money #LiquidNetwork competes with SWIFT #LightningNetwork competes with Visa

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange - What would be a drawback if sum instead of SHA256 of amounts was used in the taproot signature message? - Post-BIP110 fork is it necessary to resync from block 0? - Can a Bitcoin node build a partial UTXO set from only the most recent blocks and use it to validate new transactions? bitcoinops.org/en/newsletter…

New zine drop 🐱 OP_CAT! 🐱

There’s a new zine from @satsie out! If you haven’t seen these before, check out all of them on satsie.dev/zines/index.html

RT @reardencode: @jonatack Why is dev time millions of dollars? Including volunteer hours from other contributors, rbitcoin has cost maybe…

Davidson Souza (@Erik17192799), Eric Price, and PortlandHODL (@PortlandHODL) joined Optech to discuss Newsletter #423: News ● Vardiff controllers that strand slowing miners (23:06) ● Improvements in Utreexo initial block download (1:18) ● New BIP draft for unspendable internal keys (1:17:51) Changes to services and client software ● BitBoxApp adds Spark-based Lightning payments (1:24:09) ● Covenants.diy script editor (1:28:40) ● EntropyLab offline key calculator (59:46) Releases and release candidates ● Eclair 0.14.3 (1:31:10) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #35445 (1:33:34) ● Bitcoin Core #36076 (1:38:51) ● Bitcoin Core #36150 (1:42:18) ● Bitcoin Core #36174 (1:44:37) ● Bitcoin Core #34743 (1:46:13) ● Bitcoin Core #36081 (1:48:07) ● Bitcoin Core #35975 (1:48:59) ● BIPs #2241 (1:50:04) ● BIPs #2258 (1:53:09) ● Eclair #3380 (1:56:33) ● Eclair #3376 (1:57:37) ● Eclair #3372 (2:04:34) ● LND #11163 (2:05:57) ● BDK #2246 (2:07:44)

June 25. BTC at $58K. The signs were already there.

SAY THE LINE

NEW: Bitcoin Core 32.0 is in release-candidate testing, with developers targeting October 10. The build can speed block checks by reading database data in parallel, without changing how fast blocks are found. Four wallet commands will default to a newer partially signed transaction format, with the old format still available on request. Security patches stop crafted wallet names from running commands on non-Windows nodes and cut unauthenticated HTTP memory growth from about 3.2 GB to about 3 MB in one test.

Some folks seem surprised that Bitcoin's exchange rate is holding up after the failure of the Clarity Act. Truly I tell you: Bitcoin needs no support from governments. All it needs is for governments to continue shooting themselves in the foot fiscally.

A quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction, with no soft fork, confirmed on mainnet in August. Producing it took ~3,100 GPU-hours across ~100 GPUs. That cost is now the problem to solve. Today, @StarkWareLtd in collaboration with @eigenlabs and Yukon Research, we're opening it to everyone. With $20,000 prize up for grab. The QSB Autoresearch Challenge targets the two GPU grinding workloads behind QSB: transaction pinning and subset selection, ranked as separate tracks. Every candidate is an ECDSA public-key recovery plus a SHA-256 hash, repeated billions of times. The CUDA seed was written fast with AI help and shipped once it worked. It is deliberately unoptimized. How it works: bring your coding agent, model and harness, and submit CUDA optimized kernels. Ranked runs execute in a sandbox on hosted NVIDIA RTX 4090s, against a fresh problem instance seeded after your code is locked. Every hit is re-derived on CPU, so no kernel gets throughput credit without doing the real elliptic-curve work. To take the lead, beat the current best by at least 1%. Why I'm excited: as far as I know, this is the first wide-scale autoresearch experiment aimed at improving a Bitcoin construction rather than breaking one. It is also a live test of which models and harnesses can do hardcore CUDA and cryptographic optimization, with results nobody has to take on trust. If you build on Bitcoin, write CUDA, or push coding agents hard: come break the baseline. Bring your clanker. qsb.fast/

I think Lightning gets underestimated because people mostly talk about it as fast Bitcoin payments. That is too narrow. The more interesting thing is low-cost settlement with Bitcoin underneath it.

Today is the 10 year anniversary of the production release of @opentimestamps I created OpenTimestamps in a few weekends because I was frustrated that no-one else had created such an obvious and necessary tool. Since then it has become the global standard for secure timestamps: if you ask an LLM how to create a timestamp, it'll almost certainly suggest using OpenTimestamps. OpenTimestamps has grown to the point where everything from art, to forum posts, to software releases, to war crimes evidence is getting timestamped with OpenTimestamps. Along with some applications I won't be able to talk about for at least a few years... fortunately that data is timestamped! While I have no way of knowing for sure how many documents in total are getting timestamped per second – merkle trees – I can say that as of the past two weeks (beyond that I automatically delete logs) the public calendars I run have averaged about 5 timestamp requests per second from about 60,000 distinct IP addresses. I have no idea what all these people are using OpenTimestamps for. But clearly it's getting fairly popular! Thanks goes out to @realSimpleProof, $TIME, and all the people who have donated directly to the public calendars for their support. OpenTimestamps costs a few hundred a month to run now, along with my time. Without your help keeping OpenTimestamps running would be a lot more painful. If you want to donate, you can do so right here: alice.btc.calendar.opentimes… Thanks also goes to @RCasatta and @BULLBITCOIN_ for running two of the four public calendars. They're one of the reasons why OpenTimestamps doesn't have a single point of failure. Finally, thanks goes to the many people who have contributed code to OpenTimestamps over the years, including entire libraries in languages like java and JavaScript that I have no experience with. In fact, the majority of OpenTimestamps clients are quite possibly using code I didn't write at all! petertodd.org/2016/opentimes…

The cover of Time magazine in 2006 and 2026. From "climate change will destroy humanity" to "AI will destroy humanity".

Our new interactive network graph lets you explore thousands of Lightning nodes and their public channels. Zoom and pan across the network, search for a node by alias or public key, and select it to highlight its connections. Want a different perspective? Choose “Center graph on this node” to rearrange the rings around it. Each ring represents one additional channel hop from the center. By default, the graph shows the largest connected group. You can reveal smaller disconnected groups or switch from purple dots to nodes’ own profile colors. Hover over a node to see its alias. lightningnetwork.plus/networ…

Aren't these guys supposed to "stabilize prices"?

Lightning adoption is increasingly becoming a product design question, not only a protocol question. @BitBoxSwiss v4.52.0, released today, adds a mobile-only beta Lightning hot wallet with send, receive, Bitcoin top-up and on-chain withdrawal flows. The beta label matters, but so does the direction: a company known for Bitcoin hardware security is bringing faster payments into its mobile experience. For payment and fintech teams, this is the larger pattern to watch. Infrastructure adoption becomes meaningful when users no longer have to think about which rail is doing the work. They choose an action, the product handles the payment path, and the operational layer manages liquidity, reliability and edge cases behind the scenes. This is something the team at @ZapriteApp is hard at work doing, as expressed by @parkeralewis earlier this quarter. We love to see the advancements. Great work.

Adam Gibson and Rob Segers joined Optech to discuss Newsletter #422: News ● A protocol for probabilistic coinjoin and covert betting (1:14) ● Update on silent payments light clients (43:26) Releases and release candidates ● LDK v0.3-rc1 (1:04:06) ● LDK v0.2.6 (1:05:58) ● BTCPay Server 2.4.4 (1:07:44) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #35949 (1:13:04) ● Bitcoin Core #34931 (1:15:11) ● Bitcoin Core #36048 (1:18:14) ● Bitcoin Core #36123 (1:21:12) ● Bitcoin Core #36176 (1:22:32) ● Core Lightning #9434 (1:24:49) ● LND #11061 (1:26:29) ● LND #11125 (1:27:23) ● LND #11064 (1:28:33) ● BTCPay Server #7561 (1:29:31) ● BTCPay Server #7559 (1:31:03)

i've been revamping Sapio a bit: - arbitrary covenant emulators, not just CTV - visual programming for contract composing - general improvements

Right. Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.