Last week in bitcoin (Nov 3 - 9)
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:
Marmot Protocol continues to improve on its way to fully implementing Nostr-based secure and private group messaging.
During the monthly call, Marmot developers gave an update regarding the secure messaging protocol and its client app, White Noise. The protocol is being audited, while the team is working on new features for the next releases.
The verification that Marmot is subject to is a crucial step to assess the security of the protocol, starting from the specifications then moving to the code. The White Noise crate and the Flutter app will be audited, too.
While development on the Marmot Development Kit (MDK) continues, a new implementation, marmot-ts, is currently being built, bringing all the functionalities of the Marmot protocol to the TypeScript ecosystem.
For what concerns White Noise, one of the main development effort was directed towards notifications. This feature is crucial for a messaging app, but doing it in a private way is not trivial since most notifications pass through Google and Apple’s servers. As of today, a solution is currently being tested and will be released for Android, leveraging local background processes to deliver real-time notifications.
PR1253 in CDK is implementing Pay-to-Blinded-Key (P2BK), bringing enhanced privacy to Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) transactions.
During the weekly call, CDK developers discussed PR1253, which aims to bring Pay-to-Blinded-Key (P2BK) to the Cashu implementation. P2BK allows a token to be locked to a public key without exposing it, allowing for “silent payments”-style transactions.
NUT-11 defines Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), a spending condition that allows a user to lock a token to a certain public key. However, the public key itself is exposed to the mint during redemption of the token. PR1253 allows to use a cryptographic scheme to blind the public key, so that only sender and receiver can derive it.
This implementation leverages ECDH-derived blinding scheme, as defined in NUT-XX. ECDH, which stands for Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman, is a cryptographic protocol that allows sender and receiver to establish a shared secret using elliptic curve cryptography. While both sides can deterministically derive the same blinding factor from their own keys, a third-party, like the mint, cannot, completely hiding the receiver’s public key.
Stratum V2 new repository structure in now in place, separating the protocol implementation to the different apps leveraging it.
Recently, developers of the mining protocol announced that the new repository structure was ready, separating low-level protocol crates from the different applications, creating a clear separation between the different parts of the protocol.
The Stratum repository contains the low-level protocol developments for the Stratum Reference Implementation (SRI). The
stratum-corecrate is available in this repository, together with other low-level crates implementing channel management, message handlers and encoding. It inherits the versioning from the main repository, thus the next release will be tagged as v1.6.0.The sv2-apps repository, on the other hand, contains all the application-level crates, like apps for miners, pool operators and various utilities for configuration and network settings. Those apps were migrated to the new repository, together with the related issues and PRs. On this repository, versioning will start from scratch, thus the next release will be tagged v0.1.0.
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.