This proposal couples activation of Segregated Witness (SegWit), the centrepiece of Bitcoin Core’s scaling roadmap, with an added block-size-increase hard fork down the road. ● Why are there 17 native segwit versions? The mathematically encoded organizational bylaws that DAOs can have are not just an alternative; they may potentially be the first legal system that people have that is actually there to help them. Blockchain technology was first outlined in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, two researchers who wanted to implement a system where document timestamps could not be tampered with. So, whenever you say that you want to mutual close your channel, the only one who is going to pay the fees for that is the party who initially opened that channel, so they don’t have an incentive, they really don’t want to overpay the fee. But then, if they’re not the one who initiated the closing, maybe they didn’t really want to close so they don’t have an incentive to - the incentives are a bit weird regarding how to set the fees. Van Valkenburgh laid out some simple advice on how to evaluate different options: pick a large operation, look for one that’s regulated and compliant with laws, especially in the United States, and pay attention to emergent best practices, such as exchanges that use cold storage and have insurance.

The discussion this week on the bitcoin-dev and lightning-dev mailing lists was about naming the sighash flag so that developers don’t use it accidentally without realizing its dangers. You can use our Bitcoin ATM finder tool to find the one nearest you. So now, it’s going to be a very simple version of RBF, where the incentive should be properly aligned because only one party is paying the fees and they are the one proposing that RBF. And then the other party can either just reject that entirely by disconnecting, or can either also accept the fee that was proposed, or youtu.be propose another fee inside the range that was proposed. If the amount owed is less, it will be added to the earnings of a later block (which may then total over the threshold amount). So, if the other person does not want to pay, they can just sign off on it; and if they want to have the closing transaction a higher priority, they have to actually pay more and then the other party can just sign off, so there’s no deadlock here anymore. So, we really need the protocol to be request response, where we can always have an opportunity to share nonces before we actually sign the transaction.

But we realized that this was causing issues for taproot because now that we are preparing a migration to taproot, whenever we sign a transaction, we will have to exchange nonces beforehand. Mike Schmidt: Okay, so each side gets a chance to propose and while you’re doing that communication, you’re also taking advantage of that interactivity point to also exchange nonces? Bastien Teinturier: Exactly. And on top of that, if you have both prepared two transactions, published them, they’re not confirming, at any point in time, you can just resend that message that says, "I’m ready to pay that fee now. In this monthly feature, we highlight some of the top voted questions and answers made since our last update. CSV, route hints; we have a couple of releases, HWI and LDK to go over; and just a single lone Bitcoin Core GUI PR to review. To register or learn more, please see the Taproot Review repository. And since this is request response as well, this makes it easy to share nonces for MuSig to taproot funding outputs. I’m at Spiral and I do open-source stuff as well, focusing on mempool as well as some Lightning work. Mike Schmidt: Well, it’s great to have some Lightning expertise for this newsletter, that’s for sure.

Introductions, Mike Schmidt, Contributor at Optech and Executive Director at Brink, where we fund Bitcoin open-source developers. ● What does it mean that the security of 256-bit ECDSA, and therefore Bitcoin keys, is 128 bits? ● How can I manually (on paper) calculate a Bitcoin public key from a private key? ● How do route hints affect pathfinding? Mark Erhardt: Hi, I’m Murch. Mark Erhardt: And this will always terminate, because the person that wants to close the channel, of course, already says, "Hey, I want to pay this amount and it’ll be taken from my portion of the channel". So at some point, we added a small tweak to that to make it one round and a half of exchange, where the party who wants to close the channel sends a Type-Length-Value (TLV) saying, "I will accept any fee inside that range, and I am proposing that one". And the other party can also say, "I want a transaction too, here is the fee I’m ready to pay. But the issue is that since this is automated, actually in implementations, it’s already decided from the start what fee you’re going to accept and what fee you’re going to reject, so this negotiation was not actually very useful, and it created a lot of issues between those that couldn’t agree on fees.