What is the Current Bitcoin Block Reward? Andrew Chow and Raghav Sood clarify that a block header’s timestamp field is not required to have a greater value than previous blocks. ● Why is block 620826’s timestamp 1 second before block 620825? The requirements are instead that a new block’s timestamp must be greater than the median timestamp of the past 11 blocks but no later than two hours after the present time according to the clock on the computer running the node. Anchor commitment transactions can be fee bumped unilaterally by either party, which is useful because commitment transactions might be broadcast a long time after they commit to their on-chain feerate. Stack Exchange user Darius asks about the interplay between UTXO selection and feerate when constructing a transaction. This week’s newsletter summarizes several questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and describes notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to make statechains deployable on Bitcoin without consensus changes, summarizes a discussion about a schnorr nonce generation function that helps protect against differential power analysis, and links to a proposed update to BIP322 generic signmessa
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87 to update the BIP340 specification for schnorr signatures with a recommended nonce generation function that claims to be more resistant against differential power analysis. BIP340 co-author Pieter Wuille replied with an explanation: in key and signature aggregation where a mathematical relationship is created between the private keys of cooperating users, the attacker-if he’s one of the cooperating users-may be able to combine knowledge of his private key with information learned from power analysis of other users’ signature generation in order to learn about the other users’ private keys. And because these are the same private keys that secure your BTC, this could lead to your BTC being stolen. Bitcoin wallets use special codes called private keys to authorize transactions. However, the propscriptor tapscript would make it possible for an attacker to use the inefficiency to create blocks with transactions that could take a large amount of CPU to verify. Are you TheDAO a
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Because anyone who was ever a delegate can trigger an onchain spend, statechains are designed to use the eltoo mechanism to ensure an onchain spend by the most recent delegate (Carol) can take precedence over spends by previous delegates (Alice and Bob), assuming the trusted third party hasn’t colluded with a previous delegate to cheat. A delegated signer can always spend the UTXO onchain without needing permission from the trusted third party, arguably making statechains less trusted than federated sidechains. E.g., when Alice receives control over a statechain UTXO, a timelock would prevent her from being able to unilaterally spend it onchain for 30 days; when Alice transfers the UTXO to Bob, a timelock would restrict him for only 29 days-this gives a spend by Bob precedence over a spend by Alice. ● Coinbase withdrawal transactions now using batching: Coinbase has rolled check out your url batch withdrawals that they estimate will reduce their load on the Bitcoin network by 50%. Instead of each withdrawal payment generating a single onchain transaction, multiple payments will be combined into a single transaction once every 10 minutes. The standardization of these preimage fields was found to be necscript for miniscript-aware finalizers, though they can be used by any PSBT finalizer needing to satisfy hash preimage challenges (e.g. for onchain LN commitment tra
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With this change, it becomes possible to fee bump commitment transactions that may have been signed days or weeks earlier, when the current feerates would’ve been hard to predict. Outside of the capital of Addis Ababa, home to 5 million, very few have bank accounts or smartphones. Coinbase allows bank accounts, Visa and Mastercard debit cards, and wireless transfers for payments - though one payment solution must be linked to your account before you can make a trade. Does Coinbase work in the USA? Toro USA LLC; Investments are subject to market risk, including the possible loss of principal. Pieter Wuille posted the slides from a presentation he gave summarizing progress, including text indicating he thought the proposal was "nearly ready". Graftroot improves taproot’s flexibility and scalability by allowing parscriptnts in the script to delegate their spending authority to other parties, including allowing the existing participants to iscriptadditional script-based conditions on the delegates-all done offchain and without reducing the scalability, privacy, and fungibility benefits. Replace the 2-of-2 schnorr multisig between the trusted third party and the current delegate (using an adaptor signature) with a single-sig using secure multiparty computation.
