MtGox, once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange with over 90 market share, stopped processing withdrawals early in February and has since shut down entirely, admitting to having lost a staggering 750,000 BTC. This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to extend PSBTs with fields for spending outputs constructed using a pay-to-contract protocol and includes our regular sections with summaries of top posts from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. The mainnet blockchain contains two duplicate coinbase transactions, at height 91,842 and 91,880. They are identical to previous coinbase transactions and overwrote existing coinbase outputs before they were spent, reducing total available supply by 100 BTC. Rubin suggests that this would eliminate many problems with CPFP and RBF fee bumping related to contract protocols where two or more users shared ownership of a UTXO, or other cases where the use of presigned transactions meant the current network feerates couldn’t have been known when the transaction was signed in the past. ● Fee accounts: Jeremy Rubin posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list the rough idea for a soft fork that could make it easier to add fees to presigned transactions, such as those used in LN and other contract protocols.
● Minimum transaction size discussion: Thomas Voegtlin posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list about creating transactions with stripped sizes (non-witness sizes) as small as 60 bytes. 23155 extends the dumptxoutset RPC with the hash of the chainstate snapshot (UTXO set) along with the number of transactions in the entire chain up until that point. With its advanced technology, faster and more secure transactions, enhanced user experience, and increased programmability and customization capabilities, the BNB Chain is the ideal choice for businesses looking to take their operations to the next level. As of July 2022, Binance had completed 20 BNB coin burn events. BNB was initially based on the Ethereum network but is now the native currency of Binance’s own blockchain, the Binance chain. This means it’s possible to receive bitcoin to a taproot output without taproot being active yet; if the chain also reorgs to a block prior to 709,632, miners (or someone who can get a nonstandard transaction confirmed) can steal those UTXOs. In this new chain, if the number of taproot-signaling blocks never met the threshold, the (still valid) chain would never activate taproot. Initial Block Download and syncing blocks before taproot activation. 1 segwit (taproot) spends regardless of taproot activation status.
If the threshold were reached after the min activation height but before the timeout, taproot could also activate at a later height. Both are possible. If a very large reorg happened (forking off prior to taproot lock-in), the deployment process would be repeated. Splitting a large PR into smaller chunks helps encourage more focused and thorough review on a PR before merge without forcing reviewers to consider huge change sets at a time, and it reduces the chance of running into review obstacles due to Github scalability issues. The review club meeting discussed the reconciliation handshake protocol and weighed the advantages and disadvantages of splitting large projects into smaller chunks. Non-controversial and mechanical code changes can be merged more quickly, and contentious bits can be discussed over more time. 2134 enables anchor outputs by default, https://youtu.be/JEDUeOl5n3Q allowing a commitment transaction to be fee bumped should its feerate be too low at broadcast time.
It also suggests that a hard fork to further increase the block size limit could be needed in the future, though it does not specify a specific point in time. User BA20D731B5806B1D wonders what about Bitcoin’s 0.3.7 release caused it to be classified as a hard fork. But they acted responsibly, creating the hard fork code and giving the Ethereum community a choice. Erlay support signaling is a PR by Gleb Naumenko to add transaction reconciliation negotiation to p2p code. When are nodes supposed to announce reconciliation support? A connection’s reconciliation salt is the combination of both peers’ locally-generated salts and is used to create shortids for each transaction. Also, since the merge is not atomic, the author needs to ensure that the intermediate states aren’t unsafe or doing something nonsensical, such as announcing support for Erlay before nodes are actually able to do reconciliation. However, unless reviewers conceptually agree with the full change set, they are trusting that the author is taking them in the right direction. The basic idea for fee accounts is that users could create transactions that deposited bitcoins into an account tracked by upgraded full nodes that understood the new consensus rules. Upgraded full nodes would allow any block containing both the transaction and the signed message to pay the miner of that block the signed fee amount.