Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open-source reporter from the Insider Edition.
In this week update we feature the most interesting things happened during Bitcoin++ Economic Edition in Vienna, where devs met to discuss how economic incentives can shape the future of Bitcoin.
We also cover some other interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Notably, Cashu going on-chain, two vulnerabilities found in Joinmarket-ng, and a new proposal for a novel L2 on top of Bitcoin are discussed.
Highlights from Bitcoin++ — Economic Edition
I spent last week at Bitcoin++ Economic Edition in Vienna. Here is what caught my eye:
Knut Svanholm invited developers to ask themselves a simple question when proposing a change to Bitcoin: “Does this make Bitcoin better money?”
Matthew Vuk from Second leveraged the Austrian Economics framework to support the thesis that covenants do make Bitcoin better money.
Rene Pickhardt discussed how Ark and Lightning Network are not competing protocols, but are actually highly complementary. Ark could be the protocol to address some of the limitations of Lightning.
Hubertus from Bitcredit Protocol made the case for creating a credit system based on bills of exchange on top of Bitcoin, to push it from a volatile asset to a stable monetary system. He also briefly discussed their new ecash implementation, which is said to be non-custodial, which will be open-sourced in the next months.
Matt Corallo explained which could be the economic incentives in Bitcoin once a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) becomes a reality and the market response to the different proposals on the table.
Rusty Russell discussed his new venture, called Century Metadata, which aims to provide a simple solution to store and serve a small amount of encrypted data for 100 years or more. No, those data will not be stored on the Bitcoin chain.
Max Hillebrand gave a talk about “The Praxeology of Privacy”, based on his recent effort to bridge the Austrian economics theory and the cypherpunk world.
Luke de Wolf presented an approach to understand Bitcoin as critical infrastructure and outlines a cybersecurity-based framework to defend it.
The recorded event will be broadcast starting Thursday, June 4th, at 5pm UTC on YouTube! Don’t miss it!
A BIPs Update
There was no newsworthy update in the last days in the BIP repository. We’ll provide new updates as soon as a new BIP gets published or gets assigned a number.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
Cashu goes on-chain: Last week, Cashu contributors merged a new NUT specification, NUT-30, which defines how to mint and melt ecash tokens through an on-chain payment. The new spec has been already implemented both in CDK and cashu-ts.
New vulnerabilities: Developer floppy.md published a new audit report on Joinmarket-ng, a novel implementation of the JoinMarket CoinJoin protocol. Notably, he reported two vulnerabilities, one linked to failure to verify identity of a bondholder and a potential DOS vector around networking slots for !hp2 messages, which would prevent other nodes from hearing about invalid PoDLEs. Both vulnerabilities were fixed.
A new L2?: Burak presented a new design for an L2 protocol on top of Bitcoin, called Cube. By combining Ark-style unilateral exit and BitVM, Cube aims to provide trustless smart contract execution, ensuring users always keep total control over their funds.
Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Nairobi this June 17- 19 to talk about working in public in open-source!