Last Week in Bitcoin (Dec 15 - 21)
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:
A Cashu protocol monthly update with updated NUTs, new notable releases and demos of latest developments.
During the monthly call, on Thursday 18th, Cashu developers gave updates on the status of the ecash ecosystem. Contributors presented new NUT specifications, discussed the latest releases from notable Cashu-based projects and demoed the latest developments.
On the specifications side, developers presented modifications to NUT-11 and NUT-14, adding new rules for P2PK and HTLC contracts, the new NUT-XX for batched minting, describing how a wallet can mint multiple quotes in a single atomic operation, and updates to error codes and Spilman Channels.
Many updates to libraries and mints where also discussed. CDK recently released v0.14.2, together with UniFFI bindings for Kotlin, Swift, and Python, cashu-ts released v3.2.0, and nutshell presented v0.18.2. Finally, developers reported the winners’ list from the Nut November hackathon.
v0.3.1 of Tollgate is out, fixing Wi-Fi auto-detection and new compressed packages for limited-size devices.
During the monthly community call, on Sunday 21st, TollGate maintainers provided an update on the latest development of the project. TollGate works by enabling Wi-Fi routers to accept Bitcoin payments for internet access. This allows users with a router and an internet connection to operate as internet service providers.
Recently, developers released v0.3.1, which introduces two key improvements. First of all, a fix was introduced to allow proper detection of Wi-Fi networks, which were previously filtered out by mistake. Moreover, the team was able to provide smaller packages, to allow devices with limited storage to run TollGate. Alle the available packages are available here.
If you are interested in knowing more about TollGate and its latest developments, the team holds a monthly community call on the 21st day of the month at 21:00, Honk Kong time-zone.
PR1304 in BOLTs specifications aims to add support for network message padding for improving privacy.
During the monthly Lightning specifications meeting, on Monday 15th, LDK contributor tnull asked for feedback on his draft PR1304, which aims to reduce metadata leaking from transmitted network messages. The proposal is currently under active discussion.
While the messages exchanged on the network are Noise-encrypted, a passive adversary monitoring the network traffic could easily classify those messages by type by leveraging the message size, which can be easily observed. Thus, an attacker could draw conclusions on a node behavior, acquiring critical information.
The proposal introduces a new option called
option_message_padding, which would allow two parties to opt-in into padding the network messages up to a size large enough to cover all the basic operations. A draft of a reference implementation is currently being developed in rust-lightning in PR4248.