It’s almost time for Bitcoin Socratic Seminar #15!
What is a Socratic Seminar?
Inspired by other BitDevs meetups around the US, our Socratic Seminar events are formatted to foster debate, information sharing and lively discussion.
- Discussion topics are provided ahead of the event
- The event moderator(s) leads the audience through the topics
- Raise your hand to grab the mic and participate in the conversation
- We go to a bar afterwards
Topics List
💎 Ordinals
The ord project has launched on mainnet, which allows users to create “inscriptions” on bitcoin. In other words, it enables something akin to NFTs on bitcoin.
- On February 1, a block with a very large TX was mined by Luxor mining pool.
- The large TX, when viewed through the ord explorer, reveals a nearly 4MB PNG file spoofing the magical internet money wizard.
- This transaction is the second phase of creating an ordinal inscription, the “reveal” procedure as described in the Ord handbook.
- It appears that this must have been an intentional act by Luxor, as it seems approximately 0.1 – 0.2 BTC worth of fees were forsaken to include this TX in a block.
- The bitcoin mempool has been very active in February.
- Anythony Towns proposes an alternate method where data is stored off-chain
Questions to consider
- How do you think this will affect mempool activity in the future?
- How do you think this affects bitcoin’s security model?
⛏ FediPool
- Matt Odell writes an article about creating a mining pool using Fedimint as an alternative to custodial mining pools
- Discussion and debate continues on the Fedimint github repo
⚡️ Lightning async payments work continues
Much has changed since we discussed async payments last year.
- Richard Meyers posts this graphic describing a further developed idea for async payments
- Anthony Towns proposes using signature adapters to enable proof-of-payment for async payments
🙈 Serverless Payjoins
Dan Gould proposes a PayJoin technique that does not require a server. PayJoins are a bitcoin privacy technique where a sender and receiver each contribute an input to the transaction in order to break certain tracking heuristics.
🟣 NIP-57 “Zaps” merged
NIP-57 was merged on the Nostr NIPs repo, which describes “zaps”. Basically, sending lightning payments to other Nostr users. Nostr client projects have been busy implementing NIP57 over the past few weeks.