Location

The event will be hosted at NodeNBO:

Gigiri, Nairobi

nodenbo.com

Map

Announcements

Join us on our Bitcoin Socratic Seminar #29. A special thank you to our sponsor Btrust for food and refreshments.

Reminders

• We prefer no photos and no videos during the event
• Chatham House Rule
• Leave the meeting space as clean as you found it
• Suggest topics for the next Socratic Seminar! Where to find topics?

Topics

Bitcoin

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MC: Brandon

• Citrea recently changed their scheme to use a single 144-byte OP_RETURN

  • [OP_RETURN

    Storing data on the blockchain](https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/script/return/)

• Draft BIP for testnet5
  • BIP Draft: Testnet 5
• A post-quantum path for BIP324
• Disposing of “dust attack” UTXOs

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MC: Frank

• Bitcoin Core #35221: BIP434 peer feature negotiation — new feature P2P message for advertising and negotiating peer capabilities
• Removing RBF opt-in signaling from wallet transactions — proposes nSequence = MAX-2 (dominant in ~75% of mainnet txs) since full-RBF is now default and the signal only fingerprints wallets

Mining

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MC: Simon

• Bitcoin mining difficulty drops 10% — second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 as a price slide pushed miners offline; difficulty fell from 138.9T to 124.9T at block 953,568
• Oman launches mandatory national Bitcoin mining pool — all licensed miners must join the state-backed Omanhash.com pool, giving the government visibility into revenue, energy use, and BTC distribution; country has invested $700M+ in mining infrastructure since 2022

MC: Ryan

• https://www.256foundation.org/

Lightning Network

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MC: Isaack

• Alby Hub v1.23.0: Just-in-time channels — channels now open automatically to receive incoming payments; removes the “no inbound liquidity” friction for new users
• Block (Square) rolling out Lightning to ~4 million US merchants — largest single expansion of Lightning merchant acceptance infrastructure to date
• Bitnob: salary payments via Lightning across 23 African countries — transaction volumes growing 340% annually; what does this mean for Kenya?

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MC: Matthew

• Bark live on Bitcoin mainnet
• Arké: Native iOS Ark wallet — integrates onchain (BDK) and Lightning payments alongside Ark

Ecash

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MC: Jodom

• Fedimint v0.11.1 “Mint Condition” — BOLT12 send/receive, mnemonic-based gateway recovery, Pkarr DNS guardian discovery, memory usage slashed from ~1.6GB to under 200MB, redesigned gateway UI
• Fedimint v0.11.2-alpha.1 — backport improving recurring daemon guardian selection for available and vetted guardians

Upcoming Events & Announcements

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MC: Sharon

• Bitcoin Nairobi Conference
• Africa Bitcoin Conference 2026

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Submit suggestions for next meeting!

Issues on Github: https://github.com/BitDevsNBO/bitdevsnbo.org/issues