Weekly Edition for Thursday, Jul 5

Front
Channel Rebalancing
[lightning]
Tuesday Jul 17, 2018
by Omar Wagih

Dmytro Piatkivskyi started the following discussion on lightning-dev regarding the topic of channel rebalancing.

There has been a lot of discussion on sending cycle transactions to oneself to ’re-balance’ the network. On LN mailing list [1] or numerous places elsewhere. There has been even a paper suggesting a smart mechanism to do the re-balancing (see Revive or Liquidity network [2]). My question is what do we actually get from it? [3] states that the distribution of funds in channels does not really affect the network liquidity. I can see cheaper fees or shorter paths if the network is kept balanced. But don’t you think that a smart fee strategy will do the job?

To save your time, [4] explains the gist from [3].

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brief items
Alert key
[core]
Tuesday Jul 17, 2018
by Omar Wagih

In a previous article we talked about the Alert key retirement plan, the retirement plan originally included releasing the private key to the public but this was only done recently. Any node running Bitcoin 0.12.x or more should have the alert system disable, while this is an ancient version of Bitcoin, about 4% of the current network is still vulnerable.

This made the Bitcoin Core developers create a final alert that overrides any previous alert and shows a warning message to all vulnerable nodes for wich an update is required. Unfortunately this didn’t turn out to be an optimal solution as this alert itself can be cancelled if another alert was to arrive at the node first. There were also fears that some Altcoins could still have the Alert system integrated into their code as a lot of them are just Bitcoin forks, upon further investigation it was found that only a small amount of altcoins on github are vulnerable, and almost all of them are abandoned anyway. Bitcoin developers also offered Altcoin developers a patch that can fix most issues regarding the Alert System, if they still wish to use it in their coins.

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BIP Draft Sighash2
[bips:bip-draft]
Tuesday Jul 17, 2018
by Omar Wagih

A new SIGHASH scheme is currently being discussed, called SIGHASH2, it is said to have more flexibility without introducing much complexity and it solves a few minor issues with BIP143.

Some of the new hashtype definitions are signing fees to make sure they are correct without signing some inputs, decoupling INPUT and SEQUENCE to have a NOINPUT option with a relative lock-time, signing INPUTINDEX, putting NOVERSION, for enforcing BIP68, and NOSCRIPTCODE, in case the public key is being reused, in the second byte some reserved bits for the future and lastly sigversion to avoid any conflict between past SIGHASH schemes and any future ones.

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Bulletin
RFC Updates For Thursday, Jul 5
[core:rfc-updates]
Thursday Jul 5, 2018

BIPS

  • Merged PRs: 0
  • Opened PRs: 1
BIP Title Type
39 Remove erroneous prefix bits from BIP-0039 french wordlist - link Open PR

BOLTS

  • Merged PRs: 1
  • Opened PRs: 0
  • Opened Issues: 1
BOLT Title Type
8 BOLT 8: remove extraneous ). - link Merge PR
✗ Recurring Payments - link Open Issue

SLIPS

  • Merged PRs: 5
  • Opened PRs: 0
  • Opened Issues: 0
SLIP Title Type
44 add ATN for slip-0044 - link Merge PR
✗ added Bitcore Bech32 - link Merge PR
48 slip-0048: add FIC Network (5248) - link Merge PR
48 Update slip-0048.md - link Merge PR
✗ Update bip-0044 - link Merge PR

Bisq Desktop: v0.7.1
[misc:release]
Wednesday Jul 4, 2018

Release notes

This release adds acknowledgment status for trade, offer and dispute messages. This gives the user more information on each message status (message arrived, arrival confirmed, sent to mailbox) during its trade/dispute experience. Besides lots of bug fixes, MoneyGram was added as a new payment method and the account field for Argentinian banks support now non-standard account identifiers.

Trading

Payment methods

Assets

Development

Url of the signing key (Christoph Atteneder): https://bisq.network/pubkey/29CDFD3B.asc Full fingerprint: CB36 D7D2 EBB2 E35D 9B75 500B CD5D C1C5 29CD FD3B

How to verify signatures? gpg --digest-algo SHA256 --verify BINARY{.asc*,} Replace BINARY with the file you downloaded (e.g. Bisq-0.7.1.dmg)

Verify jar file inside binary: You can verify on OSX the jar file with: shasum -a256 [PATH TO BISQ APP]/Bisq.app/Contents/Java/Bisq-0.7.1.jar The output need to match the value from the Bisq-0.7.1.jar.txt file.

Hint for Debian users: If you have problems starting Bisq on Debian use: /opt/Bisq/Bisq

Ledger Live Desktop: v1.0.0-beta.7
[wallets:release]
Tuesday Jul 3, 2018

ledger-live-desktop version 1.0.0-beta.7 released.

Progress on wordings, important bugfixes, better logs.

Critical bug fixes

  • fix a bug that was always “remounting” the elements. For instance, glitch in the confetti animation. It was a fundamental bug in our build tools caused by UglifyJS #782
  • fix edge-cases where the app was crashing at boot: “LOCK” could still have happened / internal process zombie.

Features

  • Refactor settings sections
  • synchronize every 10s when an operation is ‘broadcasting’
  • github link to repo link
  • fix going back on Portfolio after a reset and passing onboarding
  • Disclaimer modal

Other fixes

  • Ethereum gasLimit field to not fallback on empty
  • Bitcoin fees field to handle Custom properly
  • Fix many race conditions in Send step1
  • Fix wrong calculation of the fees in case you input same amount as your balance
  • select will automatically placed either down or up based on the available space
  • polish on Manager: smoother progress bar
  • Polish the device interaction steps
Ledger Live Desktop: v1.0.0-beta.5
[wallets:release]
Friday Jun 29, 2018

ledger-live-desktop version 1.0.0-beta.5 released.

a lot of wording fixes and pixel pushes.

Fixes

  • a lot of wording fixes
  • many pixel pushes
  • many bugfixes

Features

  • firmware update progress
  • new UI for device interaction, integrated on all steps
  • new stepper system for better performance