Last week in bitcoin (Nov 10 - 16)
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:
The first ever BTC++ local edition was held in Durham, North Carolina, bringing together miners, hackers and protocol devs.
Last week, the first ever BTC++ local edition took place in Durham, North Carolina. This series of events aims to bring the global conference local as well, highlighting local bitcoin developer talent wherever it finds itself. The recordings of the event will be available soon on Bitcoin++ X account.
Most talks were centered around mining, with an update on the development of Hashpool, a mining pool leveraging Stratum V2 and ecash, discussions on the implications of new protocol developments on miners’ operations and demos on open-source mining equipment. Finally, 256Foundation announced the release to the general public of their Mujina Mining Firmware.
Covenants were another hot topic during the conference, with Sean Ryan of Anchorage presenting his thesis on why a soft fork would make Bitcoin better money.
v0.2.0-rc2 of rust-lightning — “Native Asynchronous Splicing” — is available and is bringing splicing and asynchronous payments to the Lightning implementation.
On the open call, LDK maintainer Matt Corallo announced that the release candidate for v0.2.0 or rust-lightining was out. Developers invited users to test the new release to gather more feedback, while some reported issues were already being fixed.
This release brings many new features to LDK, the main one being splicing. According to the release notes, the implementation is expected to be compatible with Eclair and future versions of CLN. Moreover, this version implements asynchronous payments for BOLT12 offers (still specific to LDK only), zero-fee-commitment channels, asynchronous Rust APIs and other minor changes. See release notes for all the updates.
LDK-Node maintainer tnull also announced that developers were already working on integrating v0.2.0 inside the node library and that the release candidate for v0.7.0 would be out soon.
v2.2.0 of bdk-ffi, exposing the latest APIs for bdk_wallet to various programming languages.
During the weekly call, on Tuesday 11th, bdk-ffi maintainer thunderbiscuit announced that the new version of the UniFFI-based bindings library was out, bringing the latest release of bdk_wallet to Python, Kotlin, JVM and Swift.
The new release is based on the minor version v2.2.0 of bdk_wallet and exposes its Rust APIs to other target languages using the uniFFI bindings generator.
This version also complies with the new specifications from the Google Play Store, which require applications targeting Android 15+ to support increased page size of 16KB.
Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Taipei this December 15-17 to talk about standing sovereign with Bitcoin.