Socratic Seminar 13

Announcements

Bitcoin KPIs

Market/Adoption

Technology

- Blockstream released an early draft BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) for non-interactive half-aggregation of BIP 340 Schnorr signatures.
- It allows multiple Schnorr signatures to be aggregated into a single, smaller signature off chain by a third party without any involvement from the actual signers.
- Several examples of potential applications/benefits:
- Off-chain networks could transmit aggregated signatures with lower bandwidth requirements.
- Bitcoin script opcodes requiring multiple signatures could take a single half-aggregate signature instead.
- Transactions could have a single half-aggregate signature instead of one signature per input.
- Half-aggregation may actually be preferable to full-aggregation in many cases because half-aggregation is simpler, and full-aggregation requires interaction among signers.
- The draft specification only covers the cryptographic scheme and does not prescribe a particular application
- This would be the first BIP with a formal specification, which reduces ambiguity in how particular operations might be interpreted or behave when implemented - better security assurances via formal proofs.

- Nunchuk specializes in collaborative multisig - making it easy for multiple people to hold different keys in a quorum and interact as necessary to sign/broadcast transactions (i.e., easier multisig where participants are geographically distributed).
- Nunchuk mobile users can now sign collaborative Bitcoin transactions by tapping an NFC card to a phone.
- TAPSIGNER is available for purchase on the Coinkite website.

- It's intended to be a signing device that favors convenience over security - decent tradeoff for part of a multisig quorum.

- People initially thought that BlueWallet was inadvertently leaking user addresses/TXIDs, even if they had push notifications disabled - this doesn't seem to be the case.
- Push notifications are disabled by default, and users can choose to run their own monitoring server (FOSS software GroundControl) if they want notifications without relying on BlueWallet.
- From @nvcoelho: "The data used in this feature is all public addresses. No xpubs are monitored."

Mining

Coinkite Giveaway #1

Optional Topics

Obsidian Note Links

Sponsors

USD/BTC