Michael Folkson @[email protected]

NN Taleb on writing books that last and probabilistic predictions of what seems likely to break within a decade

Thanks to @michaelfolkson and attendees for yesterday London Bitcoin Devs, we discussed Schnorr and Taproot in some detail.

@openoms was there, also I met a guy working on GoTenna with Richard Myers and crew. Cool meetup.

Next week we're apparently talking about PayJoin using bluetooth(?) which is certainly relevant to my interests!

@michaelfolkson I'd expect musig/schnorr/taproot to reduce onchain channel costs by half or more. That seems pretty significant to me. Miniscript can help cleanly separate the program that manages the LN protocol bits from the wallet that stores and signs with private keys, making it easier to use things like hardware wallets for keeping your hot LN funds safe. That also seems pretty significant to me. There's also much improved fungibility by making cooperative open/close look like P2PK.

@Sosthene @harding Interesting discussion and countersign gist.

Sosthene, great blog post you made today. FWIW since you're low on reading todos, one resource I should have linked to in the notes before the meeting yesterday is the kanzure transcript of the v2 p2p discussion at core-dev last June. Will add it to the notes:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoin-core-dev-tech/2019-06-07-p2p-encryption/

Gmax earlier today was telling me about this proposal for jeremy rubin on something that has been a "hot" (or at least lukewarm!) topic in bitcoin research for years, namely a scripting change for what's colloquially referred to as just "covenants": the ability to restrict the outputs to which a utxo can be spent.

https://github.com/JeremyRubin/bips/blob/op-checkoutputshashverify/bip-coshv.mediawiki

It seems like a very good write up. Generally, if we had such an opcode it would open up vastly more interesting constructions than are currently possible.

Apparently we have Alex Bosworth coming to London Bitcoin Devs on July 3rd, heads up if you're interested.

h/t @michaelfolkson

Youtube up of Conner Fromknecht's deep dive into lnd 0.6 just released:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkyPw2_l6YE

(My PR is there, yay ... note this talk is pretty technical, I think the most interesting part is the modularised RPC subsystems, e.g. you can have someone with a macaroon that only allows them to do invoices, nothing else)

Also I've yet to see a SF meetup vid where you couldn't hear Murch in the audience. 😂

@michaelfolkson is bringing the Socratic Seminar format to London Bitcoin Devs, great idea and good topic:

https://www.meetup.com/London-Bitcoin-Devs/