And since there is a finite number to be accounted for, there is less of a chance bitcoin or fractions of a bitcoin will go missing. SWIFT, to a world of stablecoins, MetaMasks and Layer 2 protocols, the state will have to develop new ways to control financial flows. But as the service is built-in, the company holds on to the private keys, which in crypto terms means control over your assets is in the hands of the exchange when you deposit funds into the exchange account. Because hardware wallets never expose their private keys, even computers that may be compromised by malware do not have a vector to access or steal them. In some cases, free VPNs aren't even able to bypass geo-blocked services since they might be blacklisted. Taproot further improves MAST scalability, privacy, and fungibility by allowing even the used conditional branch in a script to be left out of the block chain in the common case. MAST improves scalability, privacy, and fungibility by allowing unused conditional branches in Bitcoin scripts to be left out of the block chain. He also notes that education plays an important role in getting users to accept and adopt several of these techniques, and points out that it can also help reduce user interaction costs such as providing customer support for stuck transactions during fee events.

Note that this only affects people using the new sighash flag; it doesn’t affect unrelated transactions. The discussion this week on the bitcoin-dev and lightning-dev mailing lists was about naming the sighash flag so that developers don’t use it accidentally without realizing its dangers. For example, in the Eltoo smart contract protocol aimed augmenting Lightning Network (LN), Alice and Bob sign each change of balance in a payment channel with this new sighash flag so that, when they want to close the channel, either one of them can use the transaction with the final balance to spend from the transaction with the initial balance. As a member of our new organization, you can expect to see regular newsletters from us covering Bitcoin open source development and protocol news, Optech announcements, and member company’s case studies. ● BIP174 discussion: as mentioned in last week’s newsletter, mailing list discussion continues surrounding this proposed BIP for an industry standard to make it easier for wallets to communicate with each other in the case of online/offline (hot/cold) wallets, software/hardware wallets, multisig wallets, and multi-user transactions (e.g. CoinJoin).

● Continuing discussion about Schnorr signatures: no faults have been identified with the proposed BIP described in last week’s newsletter, but two developers have proposed optimizations, one of which has run afoul of security considerations and another one of which will likely not be added as its minor optimization comes at the tradeoff of removing different minor optimization. This service comes with a 45-day money-back guarantee. The ability to receive LN payments supported that goal, and he believes they were the first service on mainnet to sell real items for LN payments. No new action items, but follow-up related to the following previously-published items is still recommended. A summary of relevant action items, dashboard items, and news from the broader Bitcoin open source community. The Catcoin Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides quality services and assistance to the Catcoin community. Optech community and communication - optimizing Optech for business’ needs. As announced previously, Bitcoin Optech Group is organizing our first workshop July 17 in San Francisco.

Welcome to the second Bitcoin Optech Group newsletter! As always, please feel free to contact us if you have feedback or comments on this newsletter. Please contact us if you would like to be involved in this or future workshops in other regions. ● Transaction fees remain very low: as of this writing, fee estimates for confirmation 2 or learn more about youtu.be blocks in the future remain at roughly the level of the default minimum relay fee in Bitcoin Core. This includes: better fee estimation, better coin selection, payment batching, using segwit, UTXO consolidation, patient spending, Replace-by-Fee (RBF) fee bumping, Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP) fee bumping, and Lightning (as a future technique). He then describes several techniques services can implement in order to reduce their fees, and he roughly quantifies how much improvement can be expected from each technique. The federally-regulated exchanges require clearing services that effectively remove credit risk for both the buyer and seller.