Currently, in order to get information on a Bitcoin block or transaction, one has to sync his node with other nodes in a P2P network to be able to query the block for the information required.

Sumit Lahiri presented a BIP proposal to build an API that enables users to “easily query Bitcoin blocks and transactions” without having to sync with other nodes on the network.

One of the issues with the proposal is that light clients like Electrum, Spruned and Bitcore offer most if not all of the functionalities because the “servers are designed to quickly answer the query of light client wallets”.

A proposal was made on lightning-dev for a fee-less, omni-beneficial rebalancing scheme in LN channels.

Rebalancing a Lightning channel is currently a bit of work, to understand what we’re talking about, lets first give an example of what rebalancing a channel is.

Currently bitcoin’s testnet mining is done by mining the entire mempool in every block, this can be relatively annoying to anyone doing development that depends on a fee market like fee adjusting or transaction merging. Recently a developer called on the bitcoin-dev mailing list for the maxBlockWeight of Bitcoin’s testnet to be changed to something less than the entire mempool to help wallet developers in testing. This is a reasonable suggestion as some mainnet wallets have to deal with fee-related problems like stuck transactions and fee bumping. The suggestion is very early but looks promising, we’ll be watching the mailing list for any new updates.

I have been visiting Berlin to attend the second lightninghackday and want to give a brief wrap up about the event. This article will basically cover two topics. 1st as promised within my bar camp session on “Building an automated topology for autopilot features of the lightning network nodes” I will give an extensive protocol / summary of the session itself. 2nd I will talk about an already well known technique called splicing which I realized during the event might be one of the more important yet unimplemented features of lightning nodes.

Reddit user /u/StopAndDecrypt posted the following chart, showcasing the speed of Block Propagation over the Bitcoin Network:

When blocks return to their maximum capacity, we will have normalized data for making better comparisons. StopAndDecrypt describes this as “an efficiency floor of 1-2 seconds and delay may no longer be the scaling bottleneck”.

This data has been retrieved from https://dsn.tm.kit.edu/bitcoin/.

A discussion was started on Reddit’s /r/BitcoinDiscussion that initially wanted to look into the possibility of spam transactions. Much discussion occurred regarding the topic as it is highly debatable. However, out of the discussion one redditor put a quick project together to collect some fee statistics from recent Bitcoin blocks.