Socratic Seminar 73

Announcements

Please join us for our next Socratic Seminar! A special thanks to Strike for the event space.

Doors open at 6pm with discussion starting shortly after!

Lopp’s 2025 Bitcoin review

https://x.com/search?q=-Venezuela%20-bailout%20(from%3Alopp)%20until%3A2026-01-04%20since%3A2025-12-31%20-filter%3Areplies&f=live&src=typed_query

BIP 360 - Pay to Tapscript Hash (P2TSH) ((previously Pay to Quantum Resistant Hash (P2QRH)))

This document proposes a new output type: Pay-to-Tapscript-Hash (P2TSH), via a soft fork. P2TSH outputs operate with nearly the same functionality as P2TR (Pay-to-Taproot) outputs, but with the key path spend removed.

Through this modification, P2TSH outputs allow developers to use tapscript in a manner that is:

resistant to long exposure attacks by Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers (CRQCs), and
resistant to future cryptanalytic approaches that may compromise the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) used by Bitcoin.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1670

BIP 353 - Human Bitcoin Addresses

Human Bitcoin Addresses (HBAs) bring the familiar, intuitive payment experiences of apps like Cash App, Venmo, and PayPal to bitcoin. Instead of dealing with long, intimidating wallet addresses, HBAs make sending bitcoin as simple as sending an email.

https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/making-bitcoin-speak-human https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0353.mediawiki

Cluster Mempool Merged

Here is a summary of the mempool policy changes:

Enforce two new limits governing the size of clusters in the mempool, the number of transactions and the number of vbytes.
Drop the existing ancestor and descendant limits.
Update the replace-by-fee rules, so that replacement transactions are accepted to the mempool if and only if they would result in a “strictly better feerate diagram” (explained below).

By bounding cluster sizes, we are able to achieve more optimal orderings of transactions in the mempool for mining leading to two additional behaviors that would be modified by this proposal:

Update the mining code to take advantage of the more optimal sorting
Update mempool eviction to always evict the last transactions to be selected by the mining algorithm.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/33629
twitter thread overview - https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1854678133896626293
delving overview - https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/an-overview-of-the-cluster-mempool-proposal/393

Venezuela… Secret Bitcoin Superpower?

Alex Saab may control $60 billion in Bitcoin for the Maduro regime. As Trump’s naval blockade tightens, the real battle is being fought on the blockchain.

https://whalehunting.projectbrazen.com/the-60-billion-question-is-venezuela-secretly-a-bitcoin-superpower/