Last Week in Bitcoin (Feb 02 - 08)

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:

• Sloth is the project for the new Flutter application for secure messaging over Nostr, superseding the old White Noise app.

  • During the monthly update, on Tuesday 3rd, the Marmot protocol team presented Sloth, the third complete rework of the White Noise Flutter application. The new project follows a clear development philosophy, with the goal of reducing complexity.

  • Marmot developers are focusing on improving the codebase organization, making it more maintainable and easier to extend, and providing extensive testing of each module. The new application is written in Rust and leverages the flutter_rust_bridge to integrate with the whitenoise-rs crate.

  • As of today, the team has already implemented around 50% of the features available in the original White Noise application. Notably, Sloth adds support for multi-account, allowing users to easily switch between different profiles. The rest of features are currently being developed. If interested, IS58 is keeping track of the work needed to bring Sloth in parity with the old White Noise app.

• PR1524 in CDK implements the saga pattern for the wallet’s operations, improving reliability in real-world scenarios.

  • During the weekly call, on Wednesday 4th, CDK developers announced that PR1524 had been merged. This PR implements the Saga pattern to refactor core wallet functionalities, ensuring operations are reliable and atomic in real-world scenarios.

  • Saga is a design pattern used to manage complex, multi-step tasks that involve different parts of a system. The main goal is to ensure that, in a distributed system, a large operation either finishes completely or reverts to the original state. Saga breaks an operation in smaller, independent steps. Each sub-operation is equipped with a compensation function, which reverts the state of each step in case any successive operation fails.

  • What is cool about the tech: The saga pattern ensures that, if anything happens during an operation, such as interruptions due to network failures or application crashes, the software can recover its original condition, without leaving broken or inconsistent states.

• v02.1 of LDK is out, fixing a bug with ElectrumSyncClient.

  • During the biweekly update, on Monday 2nd, LDK maintainer Matt Corallo announced that a new minor version of the rust-lighting crate was out to fix a bug related to unconfirmed transactions. The bug fix was also back-ported to v0.1.9.

  • The bug, fixed in PR4341, prevented the ElectrumSyncClient to sync in case unconfirmed transactions were present. The issue was related to how the blockchain.scripthash.get_history function works. In fact, this function not only returns the confirmed history for a specific scripthash but also appends any matching unconfirmed entries currently in the mempool. Due to missing filtering of those entries, the unconfirmed transactions prevented the node form proving block inclusion, effectively making the sync fail.

  • This minor version also allows the ChannelManager::splice_channel function to fail immediately in case the peer does not support splicing and makes the AttributionData structure public, to allow for the correct generation of some messages.

Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Florianopolis this February 26-28 to talk about exploiting Bitcoin.