Notable issues and merges on Bitcoin Core, LND, c-lightning and libsecp256k1 Originally published by BitcoinOptech on newsletter #19 Bitcoin Core #14451 Allows optionally building Bitcoin-Qt without support for the BIP70 payment protocol and adds a deprecation warning indicating the default support may be removed in a future release. The CEO of BitPay, which is the largest user of BIP70 (but which wants to use a different version of the protocol), indicated that they supported Bitcoin Core removing BIP70.

Electrum Wallet Founder Thomas Voegtin discussed in an interview during the Bitcoin Wednesday Amsterdam, the current state of Lightning Network integration in its wallet which used to account for 10% of all Bitcoin transactions at some point.

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.

On the Lightning Network, cheating is punishable by a total loss of funds. But how is cheating defined? In order for a LN user to cheat, they have to broadcast and incorrect balance. In some cases, the user could be attempting to hoodwink the user on the other end of the payment channel. In other cases, it could be a software bug or a network delay.

This is where Eltoo channels come into play. Eltoo essentially functions as a buffer, which uses “timelocked transactions” to maintain synchronization on a payment channel.

Currently, developers are designing trustless, blinded WatchTower for eltoo channels as described by ZmnSCPxj via Lightning-dev: