Socratic Seminar 79

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!

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CBC/F&C events

https://www.chicagobitcoincollective.com/

Bitcoin Core version 31.1rc1

Bitcoin Core version 31.1 release candidate 1 released.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v31.1rc1/doc/release-notes.md

Mined in America Act

The Mined in America Act would distort the overall economic incentives of the Bitcoin network and capture U.S. based miners in a situation where dependence on associated loan or grant programs makes it economically non-viable for them to deny government demands.

https://www.therage.co/mined-in-america-act-bitcoin-at-risk/

Silent Payments Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later Attack

https://conduition.io/cryptography/hndl-silent-payments/

Lightning Async Payments

This post describes the async payments protocol, which LDK implements to allow an often-offline node to receive payments without trusting a third party to custody funds, and without anyone encumbering network capacity with long-lived HTLCs.

https://x.com/lightningdevkit/status/2070513005465342300
https://lightningdevkit.org/blog/async-payments-receiving-while-offline

First Stratum V2 Block Mined

https://x.com/StratumV2/status/2070131857459429484

Cloudflare Monetization Gateway

Monetization Gateway will allow you to charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. The charges will settle in stablecoins over the x402 open protocol.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/

Secp256k1 Maintainer Steps Down

7+ year Secp256k1 maintainer Jonas Nick steps down.

https://x.com/fanquake/status/2072012656530059707
https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/pull/1884

Marmot Encrypted Group Messaging

Marmot is a protocol for end-to-end encrypted group messaging.

https://github.com/marmot-protocol/darkmatter/blob/master/spec/README.md

GitHub Bans LDK

https://x.com/TheBlueMatt/status/2068726534941364593

Libevent Dependency removed from Bitcoin Core

https://x.com/fanquake/status/2069841641842544900
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/31194

BIP95: Testnet 5 Merged

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0095.md

Blockstream Lattice-based Signatures Post

https://blog.blockstream.com/schnorr-but-with-vectors-lattice-based-signatures-explained/

Quantum Tripwire Proposal

Triggering EC disabling with a NUMS point spend or hashrate majority

https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/aWYtPLVPZ3U

BIP448 - Taproot-native (Re)bindable Transactions Resources Posted

https://github.com/bip448
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0448.md

IP -> AS lookups fully in the browser

0xb10c posts ASMAP local browser tool to lookup the Autonomous System Network for IP addresses.

https://x.com/0xB10C/status/2073070583504392557
https://0xb10c.github.io/asmap-web/?ip=1.1.1.1,8.8.8.8,9.9.9.9&asmap=2026/1772726400_asmap.dat

Bird of Prey 2: non-malleable Schnorr + PQ signatures

Pieter Wuille posted to Delving Bitcoin about a EuroCrypt 2026 paper on constructing hybrid strongly-unforgeable signature schemes from a schnorr-like scheme and an arbitrary post-quantum signature scheme.

https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/bird-of-prey-2-non-malleable-schnorr-pq-signatures/2514

Digital Panopticon News