Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #305 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Setor Blagogee, Oghenovo Usiwoma, Pierre Rochard, and Alex Bosworth to discuss Newsletter #305.

News

• Light client protocol for silent payments (1:52)
• Raw taproot descriptors (14:56)
• Should overlapping soft fork proposals be considered mutually exclusive? (28:02)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• What's the smallest possible coinbase transaction / block size? (1:13:32)
• Understanding Script's number encoding, CScriptNum (1:14:18)
• Is there a way to make a BTC wallet address public but hide how many BTC it contains? (1:16:04)
• Testing increased feerates in regtest (1:18:05)
• Why is my P2P_V2 peer connected over a v1 connection? (1:20:41)
• Does a P2PKH transaction send to the hash of the uncompressed key or the compressed key? (1:21:58)
• What are different ways to broadcast a block to the Bitcoin network? (1:23:20)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.18.0-beta (43:23)
• Core Lightning 24.05rc2 (1:12:21)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29612 (1:27:11)
• Bitcoin Core #27064 (1:29:59)
• Bitcoin Core #29873 (1:30:55)
• Bitcoin Core #30062 (1:34:15)
• Bitcoin Core #26606 (1:38:17)
• BOLTs #1092 (1:41:41)