Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open-source reporter from the Insider Edition.
In this week update we feature the most interesting things happened during Bitcoin++ Payment Edition in Belrin. During the three-days conference, developers met to discuss how to make Bitcoin payments better for everyone.
We also cover some interesting news from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Notably, we discuss Peter Todd joining MARA Foundation, an interesting deep dive by Vinteum, and Blink Wallet’s post-mortem on the recent attack to their users.
Highlights from Bitcoin++ — Payments Edition
I spent last week at Bitcoin++ Payments Edition in Berlin. The first day of talks will be live-streamed starting from Thursday, October 8th, at 5PM UTC.
Day 1
Rene Pickhardt kicked-off the Berlin conference by talking about his experience in working on Lightning.
Calle gave a talk describing how they are working towards federaing Cashu ecash, so as not to rely on a single mint.
Erik Cativo, the designer behind several Cashu applications, talked about how they built the Numo point-of-sale app by working closely with the merchant using it.
Steven Roose, CEO at Second, described how Bark — their implementation of the Ark protocol — can make self-custodial Bitcoin payments easier.
Allen Farrington came back to Berlin for a sequel talk on the fiat payment stack. This time, he talked about how the different layers of Bitcoin can improve payment technology.
Day 2
Aleksei Moskvin and Markus Schofnegger, researchers at [[alloc]init], talked about Shielded Bitcoin, the new metaprotocol that promises ZCash-style private Bitcoin payments on-chain with no consensus change needed.
Setor, the developer behind BilndBit, talked about how is product is trying to balance UX and privacy for silent payments.
Elias Rohrer gave a talk about Loupe, the AI-assisted security scanning suite used in several projects across the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Jesse Shrader examined the technologies and opportunities behind cross-currency payments on Bitcoin using Lightning.
Niftynei moderated a panel with Calle, Joschisan, Michael, and Elias, where the devs discussed their different experiences with LLMs and tried to understand if Bitcoin can survive the current AI onslaught.
Day 3
Stutxo gave a talk on how to make Bitcoin magical internet money again, thanks to the ongoing effort of several projects.
Pim Keer presented a protocol for accountable Chaumian ecash, which protects users from token overissuance while maintaining unlinkability.
Jungly described the P2Poolv2 Share Chain, a way to make miner payouts non-custodial.
Ilya Evdokimov presented Zerosats, an experiment that aims to make Bitcoin transactions private while keeping the base chain maximally transparent.
Lightrider talked about his 7-years long experience in accepting Bitcoin as a payment method.
Niftynei moderated the final panel with Liam Eagen, George, Matthew Vuk, and Markus Schofnegger, exploring which should be the future Bitcoin stack for payments.
A BIPs Update
There was no newsworthy update in the last days in the BIP repository. We’ll provide new updates as soon as a new BIP gets published or gets assigned a number.
Other News from the Bitcoin World
Peter Todd <> MARA Foundation: MARA Foundation recently announced that Peter Todd had joined them as Lead Maintainer of Slipstream, a private mempool service that allows direct submission of transactions to MARA’s mining pool. Todd’s involvement with Slipstream is mainly due to the use of the service as a proving ground for different proposals in the Bitcoin R&D space.
Vinteum’s Deep Dive on Privacy: Vinteum — the organization behind open-source Bitcoin development in Brasil — published an interesting deep dive on how chain analysis work, with the aim to understand how private are Bitcoin transactions.
Blink Wallet Attack Post-mortem: Blink recently published the post-mortem for the attack that affected their wallet and that resulted in 6.61 bitcoin stolen from their users. It seems that the attacker leveraged a flaw in their admin tools to gain access to 35 accounts. All affected users were made whole, and the company put a bounty as high as 50% of the recovered funds.
More from BTC++ Insider Edition
Articles
Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Seoul this November 5-6 to talk about privacy in Bitcoin!