Socratic Seminar #30

Location

The event will be hosted at NodeNBO:

Gigiri, Nairobi

Join us on our Bitcoin Socratic Seminar #30. A special thank you to our sponsor Btrust for food and refreshments.

MC: Brandon

btc-verified: Formalizing the Bitcoin protocol in Lean4 — first result formally proves Core’s CVE-2012-2459 merkle-root mutation check is correct
- Bitcoin-Dev mailing list announcement
Fountain codes: a way to reduce blockchain storage costs — letting pruned nodes serve IBD from erasure-coded “droplets”; discussion raised peer-count, DoS, and fingerprinting concerns
BIP95: draft spec for testnet5 merged into the BIPs repo — follow-up to the testnet5 draft we discussed last month; removes testnet4’s exploited min-difficulty exception and enforces BIP54 rules from block 1
Draft BIP: prohibit merkle internal-node preimages that encode 64-byte transactions — Jeremy Rubin’s alternative to BIP54’s outright 64-byte transaction ban; most responses preferred the simpler ban

MC: Frank

Triggering EC disabling with a NUMS point spend or hashrate majority — Pieter Wuille on consensus-enforced “tripwire” and “miner lockdown” triggers for disabling elliptic curve spends in post-quantum output types
- Public key recovery for P2MR EC leaves
- Lattice-based signatures: why has Bitcoin PQ work favored hash-based schemes?
Bitcoin Core #35295: parallel prevout fetching — fetches coins spent by a block’s inputs concurrently; benchmarks show IBD speedups from 1.18x to over 3x
Bitcoin Core 31.1 — fixes an IP address leak in -privatebroadcast, plus chainstate compaction, wallet migration, and MuSig2 key aggregation fixes
- Bitcoin Core 30.3

MC: Sy ⚡

interoperability-tests-sv2: new library for testing Stratum v2 compliance — verifying compatibility between the SRI reference implementation and other SV2-based software as protocol experimentation grows
Bitcoin Core #34020: transaction lookup methods for the Mining IPC interface — getTransactionsByTxID()/getTransactionsByWitnessID() support Stratum v2 custom job declaration, letting pools request only the template transactions they’re missing

MC: Nkatha

MC: Isaack Njama

Core Lightning #9104: experimental option_simple_close support — each peer proposes its own closing transaction and fee, ending stuck fee negotiations in cooperative closes
Eclair #3323: fail incoming HTLCs with expiries over 2016 blocks — caps how long funds can be locked and raises the cost of channel jamming
LND #10832: BOLT12 InvoiceRequest support lands — continues LND’s offers implementation with TLV encoding, decoding, and structural validation
LND #10900: SubmitPackage RPC for 1p1c packages — zero-fee v3 commitment transactions with ephemeral anchors can now be fee-bumped via package relay on bitcoind backends
LND v0.20.2-beta — maintenance release; tightens final-hop HTLC CLTV expiry validation
LDK #4748 & #4751: splicing state-machine edge case fixes — delayed tx_signatures and stale splice commitment_signed messages could block splices or force close live channels

MC: Martin

Cashu.me released as native iOS and Android apps — the OG ecash web wallet goes native, built on CDK’s Swift and Kotlin bindings with Lightning, onchain, tap-to-pay, and multi-currency support
CDK #1834: retrieve mint quotes associated with a public key — implementation ready, awaiting the spec’s official NUT number
- nuts #341: the draft specification
Nutshell 0.20.1 — NUT-29 batched minting, NUT-26 bech32m payment requests, async-melt, and P2PK pubkey deduplication hardening

MC: Fidel

MC: Susan

MC: Jodom

MC: Sharon

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