This week’s newsletter includes our regular sections describing how you can prepare for taproot, summarizing the latest releases and release candidates, and listing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. This week’s newsletter provides information about the activation of taproot and includes our regular sections with summaries of changes to services and client software, new releases and release candidates, and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. Alternatively, they may be risklessly using a taproot-enforcing node to choose which block chain to use while also using an older node or custom software to choose which transactions to include in their blocks. This may prevent the software from disclosing an incorrectly-generated signature that may leak information about the private key or nonce used to generate it. This may indicate that they were falsely signaling readiness to enforce taproot’s rules, a risk we previously warned about. Bitcoins may also run the risk of bubbles and speculative attacks. Since May 2020, we’ve been in the fourth cycle, and we’ll see what happens over the next year.
MtGox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange with over 90 market share, stopped processing withdrawals early in February and has since shut down entirely, admitting to having lost a staggering 750,000 BTC. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty faces its second negative adjustment in a row. ● Taproot activated: as expected, the taproot soft fork activated at block height 709,632. As of this writing, several large mining pools are not mining blocks containing taproot spends. For the block queue to make sense, each block must contain a reference to the previous block (hashPrevBlock field). ● How could a 2 byte witness program make sense? 2039 adds the ability to get the status of the autopilot functionality as well as allowing enabling or disabling it while the program is running. Discussing BIP141’s requirement that a witness program be 2-40 bytes, 바이낸스 신원인증 Kalle Rosenbaum brainstorms examples of potential use cases for a 2 byte witness program size. The pull request also improves test coverage, adds more documentation to the address validation code, and improves error messages when decoding fails, especially to distinguish use of bech32 and bech32m. Extensive documentation on the new feature is also included.
● Ledger Live supports taproot: Ledger’s client software, Ledger Live, announced taproot support in their v2.35.0 release as an experimental feature. ● libwally-core adds bech32m support: The 0.8.4 release of this wallet primative library includes bech32m support. ● Muun wallet supports taproot: Muun wallet enabled taproot address support after activation occurred, including the ability for users to default to taproot receive addresses. This allows wallet users to generate and use P2TR addresses by creating a default bech32m descriptor with their wallet instead of importing one. 1166 improves the default route scoring logic by penalizing channels where the payment HTLC amount would constitute more than 1/8th of the channel’s capacity. DVD ROMS have a higher capacity, with two layers and the pits/lands are closer together resulting in a higher capacity. The penalty increases linearly as the payment amount reaches the channel capacity. The decrease in size leads to direct reduction in fees for the multisignature users and an indirect reduction in fees for all users as the same amount of demand for confirmed transactions can be fulfilled using a smaller amount of block space.
By comparison, a third party looking only at block chain data can’t tell that a spender used a multisignature. When a multisignature is used for a keypath spend, it is indistinguishable from single-sig spends. If all single-sig and multisigs in the block above were switched to P2TR keypath spends, only a few exotic spends would be distinguishable by their scripts (and even those could use keypath spends in the best case). For example, looking at block 692,039, we can distinguish not just the multisig spends from the single-sig spends but also distinguish between different set sizes and thresholds for the multisigs. Each use of multisigs is distinctively recorded to the block chain where surveillants can use them to make informed guesses about the wallet history and current balance of individual users. This exploits the Merkle tree structure to allow proof of inclusion without needing the full contents of the block. Their tasks were essentially to compare these NoSQL databases regarding their load performance, how they structure the data and what the query interface was like compared to traditional SQL databases like MySQL or Postgres. Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, Eclair, LND, Rust-Lightning, libsecp256k1, Hardware Wallet Interface (HWI), Rust Bitcoin, BTCPay Server, BDK, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.