Last week in bitcoin (Sep 15 - 21)
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent last week at Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition. The event brought together developers and researchers that are currently working to scale Bitcoin. Here is what caught my eye:
PR286 wants to bring Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) to the Cashu protocol with NUT-26, with a first draft implementation already on its way.
During the weekly CDK call, developers discussed the draft PR1067, which aims to bring the OHTTP protocol to this Cashu implementation, following the proposal of NUT-26. Integrating OHTTP would improve newtwork-level privacy for wallets.
Already implemented in other projects, such as Payjoin, OHTTP allows to send an HTTP request to a server (to the mint, in case of Cashu), without revealing any information about the IP address of the sender. A client can send an encrypted request to a gateway, which in turns decrypts the message and forwards it to the mint without revealing the sender’s address. Then, the gateway encrypts the response and sends it back to the client.
What’s cool about the tech: This PR introduces the possibility to obfuscate one’s own IP address to improve privacy when making requests to a Cashu mint.
Alby is working actively to integrate Spark in its browser extension to bring the latest off-chain solution to their userbase. This feature is still experimental, but will probably be available in one of the next releases.
During the Alby Community Call, on Thursday 18th, Roland from Alby demoed the experimental integration of a Spark-based wallet in they browser extension. This works through the Spark Connector, an API layer that facilitates communication and integration with the Spark protocol.
Spark is a protocol that enables fast, low-cost, off-chain bitcoin transfers using statechains. Statechains allow a user to transfer ownership of UTXOs multiple times off-chain, without recording every transfer on-chain. This is done by passing around control of a private key, while a federation helps enforce rules to prevent cheating, like double-spending. The UTXO remains locked on-chain, but its ownership changes hands off-chain.
Learn more about Statechains’ tradeoffs in our Insider Edition piece.
What’s cool about the tech: The integration and use of new L2 protocols on top of Bitcoin can improve usability and decrease on-chain footprint. However, improvements come at the cost of higher trust on operators.
PR310 in bdk_wallet is bringing
WalletEvents, an enumerator for user-facing events that are needed by wallets to update their internal status.During the BDK Bindings call, on Tuesday 16th, BDK contributor Steve Mayers collected feedback on PR310, which aims to bring human-readable events reflecting status of funds in BDK-based wallets.
This PR addresses ISSUE6, opened by LDK contributor Elias Rohrer, which requested wallet events with the intent of notifying a user about changes occurring on-chain, such as transaction reception or payment sending. Some events that are displayed are connected to transaction confirmation, transaction replacement through RBF, chain reorganizations or transaction dropping.