Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #239 Recap

Join Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt as they are joined by James O’Beirne, Christian Decker, and Russell O’Connor to discuss Newsletter #239 (https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2023/02/22/).

A full transcript of the discussion is available here (https://bitcoinops.org/en/podcast/2023/02/23/).

News

• Draft BIP for OP_VAULT (1:18)

• LN quality of service flag (4:15)

• Feedback requested on LN good neighbor scoring (13:58)

• Proposed BIP for Codex32 seed encoding scheme (20:27)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Why is witness data downloaded during IBD in prune mode? (36:40)

• Can Bitcoin’s P2P network relay compressed data? (40:39)

• How does one become a DNS seed for Bitcoin Core? (41:18)

• Where can I learn about open research topics in Bitcoin? (44:00)

• What is the maximum size transaction that will be relayed by bitcoin nodes using the default configuration? (47:55)

• Understanding how ordinals work with in Bitcoin. What is exactly stored on the blockchain? (50:07)

• Why doesn’t the protocol allow unconfirmed transactions to expire at a given height? (51:00)

Releases and release candidates

• BDK 0.27.1 (52:44)

• Core Lightning 23.02rc3 (53:16)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #24149 (53:57)

• Bitcoin Core #25344 (56:10)

• Eclair #2596 (58:09)

• Eclair #2595 (59:31)

• Eclair #2479 (59:45)

• LND #5988 (1:00:09)

• Rust Bitcoin #1636 (1:00:42)