BitDevs Amsterdam meeting 030!
It’s time for another BitDevs! A big thanks to Bitonic for sponsoring us with the meeting space. Drinks will be provided, so please ensure you have some dinner beforehand or bring it along to the seminar.
Thursday, July 2nd, 2026 @ 7PM
Doors open at 6:30PM and we will try to start promptly at 7PM. As a reminder, the ground rules of BitDevs are as follows:
- No photos, videos, or recordings.
- Chatham House Rule: you may
reiterate the contents of the meeting without attribution.
These rules exist so that BitDevs participants can speak freely within the event.
Agenda
Bitcoin Core
- PrivateBroadcast IP leak: A privacy bug in Bitcoin Core 31.0 where a failed BIP324 v2 handshake retries over v1 without Tor, leaking the sender’s IP despite
-privatebroadcast; fixed in 31.1.
- Full Libevent removal (Bitcoin Core #34411): Completes the long-running, multi-contributor effort to fully drop the libevent dependency from Bitcoin Core.
P2p
- BIP54 coinbase-locktime compliance over 40%: Over 40% of coinbase transactions now set their
nLockTime per BIP-54 (block height minus 1), reflecting actual compliance rather than mere signaling.
Mining
- BitAxe Stratum V2 support: Adds Stratum V2 binary protocol support with Noise encryption to the open-source BitAxe miner alongside V1, tested at full 1.3 TH/s against an SRI pool.
Post-quantum
- Public key recovery for EC leaves in P2MR (BIP-360): Proposes recovering the public key from the signature instead of revealing it in the witness, shrinking the EC spending path of this post-quantum address scheme from 135 to ~100 bytes.
- Framework for post-quantum outputs: {Never, Later, Now} × {Merkle, Taproot}: Pieter Wuille’s bitcoin-dev framework for reasoning about when to deploy quantum-resistant outputs and whether to structure them as Merkle-based (P2MR) or Taproot-based commitments.
Layer 2 and scaling
- Credible Exit and the Law of Conservation of Blockspace: Argues that the blockspace needed for users to credibly exit to the base layer imposes a fundamental limit on how many users Bitcoin layers can support trust-minimally.
- Ark: offchain transaction batching: A commit-chain protocol where an untrusted operator batches transfers of virtual UTXOs into a near-constant ~200 vB onchain footprint, letting recipients accept payments without pre-locking funds.
- Bark now on Bitcoin mainnet: Second has launched Bark, their self-custodial implementation of the Ark protocol, on mainnet, shipping an SDK and apps spanning Ark, Lightning, and on-chain payments.
Lightning Network
- lnd zero-timestamp gossip DoS disclosure: A validly signed gossip message with timestamp 0 panics and crashes lnd nodes before v0.20.1, which now rejects such messages at parse time.
- Fast Neutrino header sync (lnd PR #10552): Cuts lnd’s Neutrino initial sync from hours to minutes by importing pre-built block and filter headers from files or HTTP before falling back to peer-to-peer sync.
- Scaling the Lightning Network with Practical Set Reconciliation: Replaces inefficient flooding-based gossip with set reconciliation via a new adaptive IBLT scheme, cutting reconciliation from hours to minutes in Core Lightning simulations.
- LNTest: evaluating Lightning-based botnets: A containerized Core Lightning testbed for studying botnets that abuse Lightning for command-and-control, which debunks prior D-LNBot claims by showing fragile topologies and linear rather than logarithmic scaling.