Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #309 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by René Pickhardt to discuss ⁠Newsletter #309⁠.

News

• Estimating the likelihood that an LN payment is feasible (1:04)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• How is the progress of Initial Block Download (IBD) calculated? (31:25)


• What is `progress increase per hour` during synchronization? (33:50)


• Should an even Y coordinate be enforced after every key-tweak operation, or only at the end? (34:45)


• Signet mobile phone wallets? (37:28)


• What block had the most transaction fees? Why? (39:01)


• bitcoin-cli listtransactions fee amount is way off, why? (41:48)


• Did uncompressed public keys use the `04` prefix before compressed public keys were used? (44:57)


• What happens if an HTLC's value is below the dust limit? (46:34)


• How does subtractfeefrom work? (47:11)


• What's the difference between the 3 index directories blocks/index/, bitcoin/indexes and chainstate? (51:19)

Releases and release candidates

• LND v0.18.1-beta (52:18)


• Bitcoin Core 26.2rc1 (53:02)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #29575 (53:29)


• Bitcoin Core #28984 (56:38)


• Core Lightning #7388 (1:00:28)


• LND #8734 (1:03:24)


• LDK #3127 (1:03:59)


• Rust Bitcoin #2794 (1:05:39)


• BDK #1395 (1:07:05)


• BIPs #1620 (1:08:55)


• BOLTs #869 (1:11:57)