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Bitcoin Socratic Seminar #48 - Topic Suggestions #134
Description
Bitcoin Socratic Seminar #48
📅 Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2026
📍 Location: ATL BitLab
Topic Suggestions
Post topic suggestions as comments below. Each comment should include:
- Topic title
- Link(s)
- Brief description
Approval: React with 🚀 to indicate interest. Topics approved by @sbddesign or @alexlwn123 will be added to the event page.
Created by BOLTy via GitHub App 🤖
Activity
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 26, 2026
Binohash: Transaction Introspection Without Softforks — robin_linus on X — First mined transaction demonstrating limited covenants using only existing Bitcoin script, potentially eliminating the need for a light client in BitVM bridges.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Recent OP_RETURN Output Statistics — Delving Bitcoin — ajtowns analyzes OP_RETURN usage since Bitcoin Core v30.0 relaxed mempool limits; only 0.44% of OP_RETURN data used the new larger sizes.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Bitcoin PIPEs v2 — Delving Bitcoin — Protocol enforcing covenant-like spending conditions without consensus changes using witness encryption on schnorr keys.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Second Releases hArk-based Ark Software — Docs — Ark v0.1.0-beta.6 uses hash-lock Ark (hArk) to eliminate synchronous interactivity during rounds.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Amboss Announces RailsX — Blog — Lightning-native DEX platform using Taproot Assets for swaps and financial services.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Nunchuk Adds Silent Payment Support — Announcement — Nunchuk now supports sending to silent payment addresses.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Electrum 4.7.0 Submarine Swaps — Release Notes — Users can pay onchain using Lightning balance via submarine swaps.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Secp256k1 Optimization — Delving Bitcoin — Significant performance optimizations to the secp256k1 library.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
PQ Provers for P2PKH Outputs — Delving Bitcoin — Proposal for post-quantum proof schemes to protect legacy P2PKH outputs.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
LND 0.20.1-beta — Release — Maintenance release with gossip panic recovery, reorg protection, and LSP detection heuristics.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
[BIP Draft] 24 nVersion Bits for General Purpose Use — bitcoin-dev mailing list — Matt Corallo proposes expanding nVersion nonce space from 16 to 24 bits (replacing BIP 320) to give miners more header-only mining headroom without rolling nTime.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Algorithm Agility for Bitcoin — bitcoin-dev mailing list — Ethan Heilman and others discuss approaches to maintain Bitcoin security against quantum and classic breaks in signature algorithms.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
The Limitations of Cryptographic Agility in Bitcoin — bitcoin-dev mailing list — Pieter Wuille examines the constraints and trade-offs of adding cryptographic agility to Bitcoin's consensus rules.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Hourglass V2 Update — bitcoin-dev mailing list — Mike Casey's updated proposal to rate-limit P2PK UTXO spending (1 BTC/block) as quantum attack mitigation, with discussion from Jameson Lopp and others.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
BIP 54 Active on Bitcoin Inquisition — bitcoin-dev mailing list — Antoine Poinsot announces BIP 54 (consensus cleanup) is now active on the Bitcoin Inquisition signet.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Ciphera - Bitcoin ZK Appchain Implementation — Delving Bitcoin — A ZK appchain design for Bitcoin using zero-knowledge proofs to enable programmable logic anchored to Bitcoin.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Hornet Node v0.1 Update — Delving Bitcoin — A new project aiming to create a standalone specification of Bitcoin consensus rules, separate from the reference client implementation.
The Future of the Bitcoin Core GUI — Delving Bitcoin — Antoine Poinsot continues discussion on Bitcoin Core's GUI priorities and direction, following up on earlier community conversations.
Using AI Tooling for Code Review — Delving Bitcoin — Discussion of using Claude and other AI tools for Bitcoin Core code review, inspired by instagibbs' success rebasing ln-symmetry.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
The Core Issue: Keeping Bitcoin Core Secure — Bitcoin Magazine
@dergoegge examines Bitcoin Core's security approach: the disclosure policy for handling discovered vulnerabilities, the extensive fuzzing infrastructure that hunts for bugs, and the broader testing toolkit that catches issues before they reach users.
via @bitschmidty
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 27, 2026
Open Source Agents Need to Get Serious About Payments — Matt Corallo on X
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Feb 28, 2026
From Optech Newsletter #394 (Feb 27, 2026):
Draft BIP: Output Script Descriptor Annotations — Optech #394 / bitcoin-dev — Craig Raw proposes appending key/value metadata (wallet birthday, gap limit) to descriptors via URL-like query syntax, improving silent payment scanning efficiency.
BIP324 v2 Transport: Distinguishable from Random Traffic? — Stack Exchange — Pieter Wuille clarifies BIP324 defeats byte-pattern signatures but not traffic-pattern analysis.
Bitcoin Core: New -txospenderindex — PR #24539 — New index tracking which tx spent each confirmed output; useful for Lightning and second-layer protocols.
Bitcoin Core: Embedded ASMap Data — PR #28792 — ASMap data now bundled in the binary, improving eclipse attack resistance without separate data files.
Bitcoin Core: Private Transaction Broadcast RPCs — PR #34329 — New RPCs for managing private tx broadcasts: getprivatebroadcastinfo and abortprivatebroadcast.
Core Lightning: Payment Fronting Nodes — PR #8490 — Config option to specify entry-point nodes for incoming payments, improving privacy.
Bitcoin Core: settxfee/paytxfee Removed — PR #32138 — Static fee rate options removed; users should rely on fee estimation or per-tx fee rates.
Rust Bitcoin 0.33.0-beta — Release — Major update with new consensus-encoding crate, P2P message encoding traits, and stricter transaction decoding.
Bitcoin Core 28.4rc1 — Release — Maintenance release candidate with wallet migration fixes and DNS seed removal.
License Update: UltrafastSecp256k1 → MIT — Delving Bitcoin — The optimized secp256k1 implementation relicensed to MIT.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 2, 2026
UltrafastSecp256k1 v3.14.0 — Delving Bitcoin — New release with continued multi-architecture secp256k1 performance improvements; active discussion from gmaxwell, sipa, and others.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 3, 2026
Bitcoin Core: Mining IPC Breaking Changes — PR #34568 / Optech #394 — Removes deprecated mining methods and adds threading support for createNewBlock, prerequisite for Stratum v2 cooldown feature.
Bitcoin Core: createNewBlock() Cooldown for Stratum v2 — PR #34184 / Optech #394 — Optional cooldown prevents flooding Stratum v2 clients with outdated templates during IBD/startup; adds interrupt() for clean abort.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 4, 2026
Writing Fuzz Targets for Wallets: Avoiding Known Issues — Delving Bitcoin — Bruno Garcia shares performance and determinism pitfalls when fuzzing Bitcoin wallets, based on Bitcoin Core experience and conversations with BDK maintainers.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 4, 2026
BIP54: Extending GBT with Coinbase Fields — bitcoin-dev — Sjors Provoost proposes adding coinbase_locktime, coinbase_sequence, and coinbase_version fields to getblocktemplate for BIP54 forward compatibility.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 4, 2026
BIP-352: K_max Limit Merged — bitcoin-dev — The proposed K_max=2323 per-group recipient limit for silent payments has been merged into BIP-352 to mitigate adversarial scanning performance issues.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 16, 2026
From Optech Newsletter #396 (March 13, 2026):
Gossip Observer: LN Traffic Analysis Updates — Delving Bitcoin / Optech #396 — Rusty Russell proposes encoding improvements for set-reconciliation-based gossip; Harvey-Buschel posts new data on daily message volumes, detected communities, and propagation delays.
BIP392: Silent Payment Descriptor Format — BIPs #2047 / Optech #396 — New sp() descriptor published for silent payment wallets, defining how to represent silent payment keys in output script descriptors.
LND: Onion Message Forwarding — LND #10089 / Optech #396 — LND adds onion message forwarding support, a key step toward BOLT12 offers.
LDK: Trampoline Routing Groundwork — LDK #4304 / Optech #396 — Refactors HTLC forwarding to support multiple incoming/outgoing HTLCs per forward, enabling trampoline nodes to act as MPP endpoints on both sides.
LDK: Dual Funding on Splices — LDK #4416 / Optech #396 — Acceptor can now contribute funds when both peers attempt to initiate a splice simultaneously.
BDK Wallet 3.0.0-rc.1 — Release / Optech #396 — Major release candidate with persistent UTXO locking, structured wallet events, NetworkKind adoption, and Caravan wallet format import/export.
Libsecp256k1: Runtime SHA256 Compression API — Libsecp256k1 #1777 / Optech #396 — New API lets applications supply a custom SHA256 compression function at runtime, enabling hardware-accelerated hashing without recompilation.
Bitcoin Core: Default dbcache Increased to 1 GiB — Bitcoin Core #34692 / Optech #396 — Default dbcache doubled on 64-bit systems with ≥4 GiB RAM.
bolty-from-atl-bitlab commentedon Mar 16, 2026
Script Restoration BIPs Submitted — bitcoin-dev — Rusty Russell submits the first two BIPs of his "Bitcoin Scripting Proposal BIP Quartet" (varops budget + tapscript leaf 0xc2) for BIP numbers, with updated operation costs from wider hardware benchmarks.
[Draft BIP] Ladder Script — bitcoin-dev — Proposes transaction version 4 with typed, structured spending conditions inspired by PLC ladder logic; includes native PQ signature support (FALCON-512/1024, Dilithium3, SPHINCS+) and anti-data-embedding hardening.
[BIP Proposal] Pay to Schnorr Key Hash (P2SKH) — bitcoin-dev — New SegWit output type combining P2WPKH-sized 22-byte scriptPubKey with 64-byte Schnorr signatures via key recovery, achieving the smallest combined footprint of any single-key output type.
Compact Isogeny PQC for HD Wallets and Silent Payments — Delving Bitcoin — Proposes using isogeny-based post-quantum cryptography as a compact replacement for HD wallet derivation, key-tweaking, and silent payment protocols.
V-PACK: Stateless VTXO Verification for Ark — Delving Bitcoin / Optech #395 — Standard for independently verifying Ark VTXOs across implementations, enabling hardware wallet auditing of off-chain state.
Add 9 rocket-approved topics from issue #134
BitDevs Socratic Seminar #48 (#140)