Dmitry Petukhov published a detailed article on cover address swap. We present a summary and explore covert swaps, how they can affect Bitcoin users and a few simple solutions wallets (or even you!) can implement to protect themselves.
LN Splicing Proposal
Last week, a formal proposal was suggested on the Lightning mailing server by developer Rusty Russell on how we can implement Splicing in lightning channels (“top-up” and “drain” bitcoin from a channel). In this post we explain the concept and briefly review the proposal.
Move bitcoin UTXOs off-chain with Statechains
Statechains author @SomsenRuben gives several different depths of explanations for how statechains work including a short FAQ. Statechain aim to allow users to move bitcoin UTXOs entirely off-chain. Enables instant off-chain creation of Lightning channels, with the ability to easily add or remove funds, and more.
Workshop Summary Scaling Bitcoin V Tokyo 2018

# Introduction

The fifth Scaling Bitcoin conference was held Saturday and Sunday in Tokyo, Japan. In the sections below, we provide brief overviews to some of the talks we think might be most interesting to this newsletter’s readers, but we also recommend watching the complete set of videos provided by the workshop organizers or reading the transcripts provided by Bryan Bishop.

Mast and Schnorr Signatures
Bitcoin’s development effort for the past few years has been focused on a few key concepts, privacy, scalability and efficiency. One of the first improvements was Segregated witness which is ushering in the rest, Lightning Network followed but was an effort in a different direction as it took transactions off-chain rather than optimizing the on-chain process. Some of the upcoming technologies aimed at optimizing this process are Schnorr Signatures and Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees or MAST for short.
A summary of the HoneyBadger conference
The Baltic Honeybadger conference is the first major event in Latvia dedicated to Bitcoin and the technologies built around it. This year’s second edition panelists included major Bitcoin developers like Brian bishop, Matt Corallo and Eric Voskuil, Cryptography specialists like Adam Back and Peter Todd, CEOs like Elizabeth Stark and Eric Lombrozo and many others. Here’s a summary of the two-day panels …
Selfish Mining Prevention

Andrew Karamaoun proposed an idea to discourage selfish mining, which is to allow the block reward get determined by the peak hash rate.

For instance if $$p$$ is the peak hash rate for 365 periods or 1 year, made up of 144 blocks, $$h$$ the hash rate of the last 144 blocks (1 day period), and $$r$$ the base subsidy or reward for mining a block, which is currently 12.5 bitcoin, the maximum block reward can then be calculated using the formula $$0.5r (1 + h/p)$$ , the lowest possible block reward being $$0.5r$$ . At peak hashrate, the miner gets the full 12.5 BTC reward, otherwise the reward is determined based on the hashrate.