Last week in bitcoin
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent 10+ hours in open-source developer calls in the Bitcoin ecosystem last week. Here is what caught my eye:
Payjoin announced the launch of the Payjoin Foundation, a non-profit focused on supporting open-source development for Bitcoin privacy projects.
Spacebear announced the launch of the Foundation at the bitcoin++ Privacy conference in Riga on Friday, August 8th. The non-profit will support funding Payjoin devs and R&D efforts.
Dan Gould will lead the organization, joined by Armand Sabouri and Spacebear; with Satsie (Bitcoin Dev Project) and Justin (Localhost Research) joining the board alongside Dan. Check out the Insider Edition’s in-depth coverage of the Payjoin Foundation launch here.
What’s cool about the announcement: The Foundation aims at facilitating funding for individual developers working on Payjoin by reducing administrative overheads, with the goal of allowing them to focus solely on the project development. You can contribute to their inaugural fund onchain here: bc1q4uqadj0j2xsyddusg24dfme30em9maam0366e0.
git-futz by feuplebian took home first at the bitcoin++ privacy edition in Riga, Latvia this past Friday, August 8th.
A command line tool designed to hide when you’re committing code to a project, git-futz helps bitcoin and other privacy project focused developers obfuscate what timezone they’re working in by changing the timestamp on recent git commits to be evenly spaced since the last mainline commit. Watch the hackathon presentation here.
2nd place went to a Spillman-channel ecash implementation by a team that included Steven Roose (2ndbtc), Michael (Boltz), and thesimplekid (Cashu). [video]; 3rd was a nostr key delegation protocol for allowing you to sign nostr events from your phone (Oren of RITREK, Kent of Sazmining, + Julius) [video].
Catch the talks, workshops and hackathon projects from Day 1 and 2 of bitcoin++ on the livestream replay; don’t forget to subscribe to our conference YouTube channel to get notifications when new videos are added from our side stages. Big thanks to our sponsors NYDIG, HRF, Base58, Fulgur Ventures, and Cake Wallet for making this event possible.
Highlight from bitcoin++ Riga edition: A privacy panel with Jeff Gardner, calle, Elias Rohrer, and SuperTestnet.
bitcoin++ Master of Ceremonies, Walton, sat down to talk about privacy challenges in bitcoin and open source with this experienced crew of hackers, builders, and protocol developers.
What’s important for privacy and where are we missing tools to protect privacy in bitcoin? Watch the full talk here.
PkgZap is a tool that helps npm package developers get funding directly from package users via zaps to their Lightning Address.
During the Alby Community Call on Thursday, August 7th, developers demoed PkgZap, a project that allows npm package maintainers to be able to receive bitcoin from directly users via the Lightning Network. After some time of neglect, there is now a dedicated team working on PkgZap.
To receive funds, package developers add an LN Address to their project’s package.json file. App developers that want to pay the library developers can run a built-in npm command to have PkgZap automatically send funds to all dependencies of their project that contain an LN Address.
What’s cool about the tech: Open source libraries and packages are the foundation of today’s software development, but getting funding is a cumbersome process for maintainers and requires relying on third party services. This tool from Alby simplifies the overall mechanism and allows for direct payment via lightning.
BDK Wallet v2.1.0 was released this week. This release introduces two significant features and some overall improvements.
Two new features came out with this release. First, BDK now supports BIP389, a compact descriptor annotation for communicating receive and change addresses in a single descriptor. Second, the transaction builder now includes convenience methods to exclude UTXOs that are unconfirmed or have not reached a certain number of confirmations.
What’s cool about the tech: BDK is a rust library for building wallets. Additional descriptor support and more functionality for filtering out undesirable inputs when building transactions make the utility more useful for wallet builders.
Join us in Istanbul this Sept 3-5 to talk all things scaling bitcoin (Ark, metaprotocols, BitVM, garbled circuits, rollups, and more). Ticket prices go up August 28th; get yours before they’re gone! Use code INSIDER for 21% off a ticket when bought with bitcoin before Aug 21st.