Making Mining More Reliable — Last Week in Bitcoin (Mar 16 - 23)

Article header image for Making Mining More Reliable — Last Week in Bitcoin (Mar 16 - 23)
Author: btc_insider__
Published:
Format: Markdown (kind 30023)
Identifier:
naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq956vtujdxtt9zyt3zzc3pnllxguq3mdhyw5muxx8rym7sg4xq3xqpq56cttd9hxwt2dd9hxjmn894xk7un994fx2mrfv93xcefdf3shxapd2ajk26edd9hz6snfw33k76tw94xkzu3dxymz6v3n945n2dnhdacsx3tfmf

Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...

Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open-source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent 10+ hours in open-source developer calls in the Bitcoin ecosystem last week. Here is what caught my eye:

  • v1.8.0 of Stratum V2 protocol libraries and v0.3.0 of Stratum V2 applications have been released.
    • During the weekly call, on Tuesday 17th, Stratum V2 contributors announced that the new releases for both the protocol libraries and the applications were ready to be published. The new versions were later released on Thursday 19th.
    • v1.8.0 mainly focused on improving the protocol reliability. A lot of effort was directed towards creating framing benchmarks for the different protocol crates to validate and improve their performances. Fuzz testing has also been expanded. Finally, the channels_sv2 crate has been improved by fixing several issues related to share-accounting.
    • v0.3.0 also improves reliability of the different applications. The Job Declarator Server (JDS) has undergone a major refactoring, the translator proxy and the Job Declarator Client (JDC) have been hardened, more integration tests have been developed, and new monitoring APIs are now available.
  • PR1735 in CDK is implementing the new NUT-XX for efficient wallet recovery.
    • During the weekly call, on Wednesday 18th, CDK developers discussed PR1735 which is implementing the new specifications for efficient wallet recovery.
    • As of today, recovering funds through a backup requires the mint to take into account all possible transaction ever made by a wallet. In fact, a wallet has to keep track of an index to generate new tokens every time funds are sent or received. Thus, a mint will have to check every single transaction up to the latest index, T.
    • The new proposal addresses this limitation with a two-step process. First of all, the wallet has to make sure that all unspent proofs remain in a certain index range d . Thus, if a index is lower that T-d , the wallet automatically triggers a consolidation swap to move the unspent proof to a new index. Then, during recovery the mint leverages binary search to find the correct T for the wallet, allowing it to find the correct index in O(log(N)) queries. Finally, the mint has only to check the latest d indices to recover all funds.

A BIPs Update

In the last days there was some movement in the BIP repository. Specifically, 2 new BIPs have been published, BIP448, and BIP446, and one new BIP has been assigned a number by BIP maintainer Murchandamus.

Published BIPs

A list of recently published BIPs

BIP448: A Taproot-native (re)bindable transaction proposal

Authors: Gregory Sanders, Antoine Poinsot, Steven Roose

Published On: March 17th, 2026

Layer: Consensus (Soft Fork)

BIP448 proposes to deploy three new opcodes bundled together, namely OP_TEMPLATEHASH (proposed in BIP446, which is part of the same PR), OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK, and OP_INTERNALKEY. According to the authors, the proposed opcodes are simple and well-understood and could provide powerful capabilities to improve second layer protocols while minimizing the risk of incurring in unintended behavior.

BIP446: OP_TEMPLATEHASH

Authors: Gregory Sanders, Antoine Poinsot, Steven Roose

Published On: March 17th, 2026

Layer: Consensus

BIP446 proposes a soft fork to activate a new operator for Tapscript, called OP_TEMPLATEHASH. The new opcode could be used to commit to the transaction spending an output, a capability that could replace the need for pre-signed transactions in second-layer protocols. This BIP is being proposed by Core contributors, Gregory Sanders and Antoine Poinsot, and Second CEO Steven Roose.

Numbered BIPs

A list of BIPs that recently got assigned a number

BIP393: Output Script Descriptor Annotations

Authors: Craig Raw

Assigned On: March 17th, 2026

Layer: Applications

PR2099 introduces BIP393, which proposes a new way to add metadata to descriptors to make silent payment scanning more efficient. This metadata would be provided in the form of annotations, expressed as key/value pairs, appended directly to the descriptor string using URL-like query delimiters: SCRIPT?key=value&key=value#CHECKSUM . This proposal by the creator of Sparrow Wallet Craig Raw, also defines three keys for improving scanning efficiency, namely the block height at which the wallet first received funds, bh , the number of unused addresses to derive before stopping scanning, gl , and the maximum label index to scan for, ml .

Other News from the Bitcoin World

  • Splicing Lightning: BOLTs contributor t-bast announced on X that PR1160 for Splicing had finally been merged in the BOLTs repository. Splicing allows spending the current funding transaction and replace it with a new one to change the capacity of the channel, allowing both peers to add or remove funds to/from their channel balance. Its official merge in the specifications represents a huge milestone for the Lightning Network ecosystem.
  • A SHA-256 hash as a valid signature: Robin Linus shared on X his latest project, a SHA-256 hash which is also a valid BIP66 DER-encoded ECDSA signature. He spent $8 and ran ~185 trillion attempts in ~2.3 hours to find a preimage that produces a valid DER-encoded signature when hashed. Linus also shared the repository containing the source code and the explanation behind the work.
  • Working on Bitcoin Core: Long time Bitcoin Core PR reviewer Jon Atack highlights his experience working on the project.

Comments (0)

No comments yet.