If someone knows only your Bitcoin address, it’s virtually impossible to figure out what the private key was. You mostly have to read blog articles, original whitepapers, and Wikipedia pages and figure it out as you go. Because the probe was an invalid payment that can never be redeemed, visit the following post sending node can immediately treat it as a timed out payment with no risk of loss. Probing in LN is sending an invalid payment to a node and waiting for it to return an error. It won’t return now until the specified wallet has finished being unloaded. If you ever used an affected version of Bitcore (0.1.28 to 0.1.35), Copay (0.4.1 to 0.4.3), or other vulnerable software, you should create a new wallet file, send all of your funds from the old wallet file to an address in the new wallet, and discontinue use of the previous wallet file. About 97% of the faulty signatures found in the paper are compatible with Maxwell’s Copay hypothesis, and the paper provides plausible explanations for most of the remaining 3% of signatures, indicating that users of modern wallets are probably safe provided they do not continue to use addresses whose bitcoins they spent using earlier vulnerable programs.

They use modern ASIC chips from BitFury deliver the maximum performance and efficiency possible. This week’s newsletter suggests helping test a Bitcoin Core maintenance release candidate, provides a link to a modern block explorer whose code has been open sourced, and briefly describes a suggestion for signature hashes to optionally cover transaction size. For example, Alice has elements 1, 2, and 3. Bob has elements 1 and 3. Despite neither knowing which elements the other has, Alice can send Bob a sketch the size of a single element that contains enough information for him reconstruct element 2. If Bob instead has elements 1 and 2 (not 3), the exact same sketch allows him to reconstruct element 3. Alternatively, if Bob sends Alice a sketch based on his two-element set while Alice has her three-element set, she can determine which element Bob is missing and send it to him directly. 9. One result of that research is a new standalone library they’ve released, libminisketch, that allows transferring the differences between two sets of information in roughly the byte size of the expected differences themselves. This week’s newsletter describes the new libminisketch library for bandwidth efficient set reconciliation, links to an email about Schnorr/Taproot plans, and mentions an upcoming LN protocol specification meeting.

This week’s newsletter announces a security upgrade for C-Lightning, describes a paper and additional research into wallets that accidentally revealed their private keys, and lists some notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. Also included are a list of notable code changes in the past week from popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. Notable code changes made in the past week to popular infrastructure projects are also described. 797 changes the way payment routes are calculated. The vulnerability allowed a peer to crash your C-Lightning node by trying to get you to accept a payment with a smaller timelock than your node allows. ● Upgrade to C-Lightning 0.6.3: this release fixes a remote DoS vulnerability that could be used to crash C-Lightning nodes and potentially steal money. 2214 fixes a remote crash bug which could lead to loss of funds. From there, the bug propagated to software such as BitPay Copay that depended upon Bitcore. Independent code archaeology by Gregory Maxwell indicates that the main culprit was probably the BitPay Bitcore software which introduced a bug around July 2014 and released a fix about a month later.

This release also includes other less critical bug fixes and new features. Plugins may be re-enabled by default for a future release when the entire plugin API has been implemented. It provides function decorators similar to those used by the popular flask library that can be used to tag functions as providing particular plugin interfaces, and this information is automatically used to generate a plugin manifest. 2161 adds a small Python library and framework that can be used for writing plugins. The fast analysis method employed by the authors of the paper took advantage of users who engaged in address reuse, but even keys for addresses that have not been reused are vulnerable to attack if the nonce generation is biased or too small. Some users look to mine them while others look to earn rewards from staking their tokens. 2039 adds the ability to get the status of the autopilot functionality as well as allowing enabling or disabling it while the program is running. 762 adds limited probing. ● Description about what might be included in a Schnorr/Taproot soft fork: Bitcoin protocol developer Anthony Towns has posted a well-written email describing what he thinks ought to be included in a soft fork that adds the Schnorr signature scheme plus Taproot-style MAST to Bitcoin.