This week’s newsletter announces a security upgrade for C-Lightning, describes a paper and additional research into wallets that accidentally revealed their private keys, and lists some notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. This week’s newsletter requests testing of the latest release candidates for Bitcoin Core and LND, describes how helping people accept payments to bech32 addresses can lower fees, and lists notable code changes in popular Bitcoin projects. 2506 adds a min-capacity-sat configuration parameter to reject channel open requests below a certain value. If a crashed node remains shutdown for too long, it’s possible for an attacker to steal from it if they previously opened a channel with that node. Note, though, that the attacker must risk their own money to attempt the attack, and so nodes can pretend to be offline in order to take money from any attackers-which is hoped to be enough of a risk to discourage most attacks. But by law, they must consider any legitimate request for power, which has meant doing costly studies and holding hearings-sparking a prolonged, public debate over this new industry’s impact on the basin’s power economy. Like many of the top exchange platforms in the space, it is doing everything to ensure user funds are safe.

Similar to buying gold or stocks, some people like to buy bitcoin as an investment in hopes that its value will go up. This bizarre process might not seem like it would need that much electricity-and in the early years, it didn’t. The process is called proof of work. Transactions are generated and youtu.be verified through a process called cryptocurrency mining, which utilizes compute power to solve complex math problems. The examples of problems are not made to criticize the pioneering developers of those systems, but to help all Bitcoin developers learn how to master the powerful fee-management capability that RBF provides. ● RBF usability study published: with only about 6% of the transactions confirmed in 2018 signaling support for BIP125 opt-in Replace-by-Fee (RBF), Optech contributor Mike Schmidt undertook an examination of almost two dozen popular Bitcoin wallets, block explorers, and other services to see how they handled either sending or receiving RBF transactions (including fee bumps). Taproot further improves MAST scalability, privacy, and fungibility by allowing even the used conditional branch in a script to be left out of the block chain in the common case. ● BIP174 discussion: as mentioned in last week’s newsletter, mailing list discussion continues surrounding this proposed BIP for an industry standard to make it easier for wallets to communicate with each other in the case of online/offline (hot/cold) wallets, software/hardware wallets, multisig wallets, and multi-user transactions (e.g. CoinJoin).

● Testnet high block production rate: late last week, a miner produced a large number of blocks in rapid succession on testnet, sometimes several blocks per second, leading to a degradation of service from some testnet providers. UPDATE (July 2): The estimated network hash rate decreased in the last 3-4 days, initially by as much as 10%, but rebounding a bit since then. The only solutions, besides wallets abandoning message signing support, are for wallet developers to agree on a standard and then widely implement it. With that in mind, here are my counterpoint arguments to some of the more common anti-bitcoin messages. If you to need test your software, it’s more reliable to build your own private testent using Bitcoin Core’s regtest mode. If someone on social media or a messaging app directs you to a cryptocurrency or foreign currency trading website, look for these 10 telltale signs to help you determine if it’s a scam. This provides a smart way to issue the currency and also creates an incentive for more people to mine. What separates Monero from everything else is that it is a gimmickless currency that has all the bare minimums of privacy.

Nearly every privacy law is rendered unenforceable and useless by Bitcoin. Future plans for the tool include privacy enhancements. Alternatively, you could just hold it for a long period of time and hope that it becomes more valuable in the future. These descriptors provide a comprehensive way to describe to software what output scripts you want to find, and it’s expected to be adapted over time to other parts of the Bitcoin Core API such as importprivkey, importaddress, importpubkey, importmulti, and importwallet. 15427 extends the utxoupdatepsbt RPC with a descriptors parameter that takes an output script descriptor and uses it to update a BIP174 Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT) with information about the scripts (addresses) involved in the transaction. Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) estimates that bitcoin consumes around 100 TW⋅h (360 PJ) annually, and says bitcoin mining uses about as much electricity as Egypt. This week, we’ll look at how much money they’ll save and discuss how their savings could also help you save money. Previously, the funding code would silently reduce the fee to the maximum, which could lead to users with typos in their transactions overpaying as much as $1,200 USD in fees (at current prices).