Last week in bitcoin (Oct 13 - 19)
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 Great Script Restoration proposal, first proposed by open-source contributor Rusty Russel, is progressing and a first working prototype is being tested and used for benchmarking.
On Wednesday, Core-lightning engineer Rusty Russel organized an open call to discuss the status of the so-called Great Script Restoration proposal. This ides aims to restore all the Bitcoin scripting functionalities that were removed in version v0.3.1 in order to avoid denial-of-service issues.
The Great Script Restoration is a collection of 4 different BIPs, which can be found in a draft PR:
bip-unknown-varops-budget: This BIP extends and generalizes the SigOp budget (BIP-342) into a variable operations budget to constrain usage to ensure rapid evaluation of the script.
bip-unknown-script-restoration: This BIP restores the opcodes that were previously disabled.
bip-unknown-optx: This BIP introduces a new opcode, OP_TX, for introspection of a transaction.
bip-unknown-covenant-support-opcodes: This BIP proposes several new opcodes for tapscript v2, to take full advantage of scripting enhancements and covenant facilities offered by OP_TX.
As of today, a working prototype for the Great Script Restoration is currently being refined. According to developer Julian Moick, who is currently implementing the proposal, the code is not yet production ready. The code will be released to the public only after polishing and refactoring. This implementation is being used for testing the script budget and is currently supporting various opcodes. Benchmarking on different CPUs is currently being performed to adjust the script budget.
PR1915 in Stratum V2 Reference Implementation (SRI) repository aims to create a bitcoin_core_sv2 crate for connecting the Sv2 protocol to Bitcoin Core through IPC.
During the weekly meeting, Stratum V2 contributor plebhash announced that he was able to mine some blocks on the internal signet using the new bitcoin_core_sv2 crate, currently under development. This library acts as a translation layer between Bitcoin Core’s Mining Interface over IPC and Sv2 Template Distribution Protocol.
This integration was made possible after open-source contributor Sjors merged PR31802 in Bitcoin core, which switches on by default
ENABLE_IPC, allowing forbitcoin-nodeandbitcoin-guibinaries to be included in releases. This creates a generic mining interface via IPC connection for providing Sv2 miners with new block templates.
PR1118 and PR1171 in Cashu Development Kit (CDK) are adding supports for new FFI language bindings for Go and Dart.
During the weekly call, on Wednesday 15th, CDK developers discussed two draft PRs which aim to bring CDK to other programming languages through the uniffi bindings. In particular, PR1118 is implementing bindings for the Go language, while PR1171 is building those for Dart, leveraging the work performed by the Payjoin team to create the uniffi-dart frontend.
These PRs aim to expand the languages supported by the CDK bindings, allowing for Cashu to be easily supported by a broader set of applications. As of today, CDK is already supporting bindings to Python, Swift, for native iOS development, and Kotlin, for native Android.
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.