Jonas Nick retweeted
Bitcoin Core v32.1: a deeper look
First, why no 32.0?
It was tagged on October 21 but never fully announced or released. A remotely triggerable TCP crash was reported on October 23 and 32.1 shipped on October 27 (yesterday) with that fix and two others.
I'll dig into the security updates, but this release also represents months of testing, maintenance, and work to make Bitcoin easier to verify and use.
What went into these v32.1 changes and what do Bitcoin users get from them?
First, why no 32.0?
It was tagged on October 21 but never fully announced or released. A remotely triggerable TCP crash was reported on October 23 and 32.1 shipped on October 27 (yesterday) with that fix and two others.
I'll dig into the security updates, but this release also represents months of testing, maintenance, and work to make Bitcoin easier to verify and use.
What went into these v32.1 changes and what do Bitcoin users get from them?
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Congratulations to the authors of the "Google quantum paper" from April on winning this year's @ChaincodeLabs Bitcoin Research Prize. The paper had an enormous impact and gave the whole space a much clearer picture of the challenges ahead. Very well deserved!
In Adam's acceptance talk it was obvious that he genuinely cares about Bitcoin. I suspect that authenticity is why quite a few people in the room revised their quantum timelines during the talk.
Congrats to Ryan Babbush, Adam Zalcman, @CraigGidney, @tanujkhattar4, Hartmut Neven, Thiago Bergamaschi, @drakefjustin and @danboneh.
In Adam's acceptance talk it was obvious that he genuinely cares about Bitcoin. I suspect that authenticity is why quite a few people in the room revised their quantum timelines during the talk.
Congrats to Ryan Babbush, Adam Zalcman, @CraigGidney, @tanujkhattar4, Hartmut Neven, Thiago Bergamaschi, @drakefjustin and @danboneh.
JUST IN: “Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities” announced as this year’s winner of @chaincode’s Bitcoin Research Prize 2026
The paper, produced largely by Google’s Quantum AI (@GoogleQuantumAI) group, provided new resource estimates for liptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem, the core of modern blockchain cryptography.
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Silent Payments let you share one static address while every payment lands somewhere new and unlinkable. Making that work for multiparty wallets is a harder problem.
@olkurbatov of @blksresearch takes it on at @btcplusplus Seoul, November 5-6. 🇰🇷
@olkurbatov of @blksresearch takes it on at @btcplusplus Seoul, November 5-6. 🇰🇷
🍎: Oleksandr Kurbatov (@olkurbatov) of Blockstream Research has been working on a difficult problem: Silent Payments for Multiparty Wallets. Join us in Seoul next month for the deets
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At 15:30 today on @LuganoPlanB’s P2P stage, we’ll cover significant cryptography developments from the last few months and a concrete plan for a new Bitcoin signature scheme.
Some security work has to start long before it's urgent.
@n1ckler, Director of @blksresearch, takes OP_CHECKSHRINCS, a proposed opcode for post-quantum Bitcoin built on hash functions, to the technical stage at @LuganoPlanB.
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Jonas Nick retweeted
PISA is here: Watch the Payjoin + CISA integration demo we built at @LuganoPlanB with the support of @cypher_tank. See the code, spec and more at pisa.payjoin.org. This is a joint effort by @payjoindevkit and @bitcoinbrink.
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Jonas Nick retweeted
An update to Bitcoin Core's security policy
via @darosior on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list
via @darosior on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Bitcoin is built to last. Keeping it secure is long-term work.
We're excited to share our work this week at @LuganoPlanB: @adam3us on lessons from the cypherpunk movement, @n1ckler on post-quantum signatures, and self-custody workshops with our engineers.
We're excited to share our work this week at @LuganoPlanB: @adam3us on lessons from the cypherpunk movement, @n1ckler on post-quantum signatures, and self-custody workshops with our engineers.
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Jonas Nick retweeted
This is so fun. The mystery is unravelled. If you have not seen the episode on security cryptography whatever, it is the time to watch it.
youtu.be/xOzr4OIOnv4?is…
youtu.be/xOzr4OIOnv4?is…
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
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In August 2019 I met with Tamás Blummer. He told me about his terminal illness, and we spent most of our time talking about what he called his legacy: side memory and defiads (defiant ads).
I've always thought it was a missed opportunity that nobody picked that work up. Maybe the idea is just hard to get across, and I rarely succeed at it.
defiads is a peer-to-peer network in which every node stores the same fixed-size pool of advertisements, 1 GB by default.
Every ad is a byte-blob whose place in the pool is backed by a time-locked Bitcoin UTXO, bound to the content via pay-to-contract.
Ads are ranked by sats locked per byte. When the pool fills up, the lowest-ranked ads are evicted.
So the advertiser pays nobody. The cost of an ad is the opportunity cost of the locked capital.
This is an application you can build with Bitcoin and not with tradfi: a time-locked UTXO is a commitment of capital that any peer can verify without a counterparty.
What it's best used for is an open question. Ads, whistleblowing, a communication platform for autonomous agents?
Tamás's side memory post on bitcoin-dev: mail-archive.com/bitcoin-dev@li…
Code: github.com/defiads/defiads
I've always thought it was a missed opportunity that nobody picked that work up. Maybe the idea is just hard to get across, and I rarely succeed at it.
defiads is a peer-to-peer network in which every node stores the same fixed-size pool of advertisements, 1 GB by default.
Every ad is a byte-blob whose place in the pool is backed by a time-locked Bitcoin UTXO, bound to the content via pay-to-contract.
Ads are ranked by sats locked per byte. When the pool fills up, the lowest-ranked ads are evicted.
So the advertiser pays nobody. The cost of an ad is the opportunity cost of the locked capital.
This is an application you can build with Bitcoin and not with tradfi: a time-locked UTXO is a commitment of capital that any peer can verify without a counterparty.
What it's best used for is an open question. Ads, whistleblowing, a communication platform for autonomous agents?
Tamás's side memory post on bitcoin-dev: mail-archive.com/bitcoin-dev@li…
Code: github.com/defiads/defiads
The death of Tamás Blummer in January 2020 prompted the launch of his ‘rust-bitcoin’ Memorial Fund 🦀
This was a turning point for the project, the “second era”, where Tobin Harding (tcharding) got involved.
This issue from @darosior is a canonical example of the second era.
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Announcing LayerTree: a new tree-based scaling solution for Bitcoin that permits O(1), independent of the number of users in the system: x.com/lightning/stat…
A single UTXO can hold the balance of millions of users as an off-chain Merkle-sum tree.
Transaction introspection ed exit from the system in a single transaction w/o any pre-signing: layertree.tech
A single UTXO can hold the balance of millions of users as an off-chain Merkle-sum tree.
Transaction introspection ed exit from the system in a single transaction w/o any pre-signing: layertree.tech
Introducing LayerTree, a non-custodial scaling solution on bitcoin that connects to Lightning.
Using covenants, one UXTO can be shared by a million users. Any user can leave at any time in a single transaction. Users don't need to be online to receive. Funds never time out.
LayerTree is the next step in bringing bitcoin to billions.
Learn more: layertree.tech
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Jonas Nick retweeted
The full CUTS paper is now available.
It has the full specification, proofs for the bounds we previously estimated, a reuse analysis that also covers Winternitz and FORS, and some worked examples/test vectors.
Feedback welcome 🤙
It has the full specification, proofs for the bounds we previously estimated, a reuse analysis that also covers Winternitz and FORS, and some worked examples/test vectors.
Feedback welcome 🤙
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Happy to announce that we rebooted the nix-bitcoin project as bitcoinix
Join all the declarative fun here: github.com/bitcoinix/bitc…
Join all the declarative fun here: github.com/bitcoinix/bitc…
0.0.139 is the final version of nix-bitcoin. Really enjoyed these 8 years developing Bitcoin infrastructure on NixOS, very grateful for your support. The code is there, so fork it.
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Stoked to announce this!
Zark is a transfer-of-ownership protocol that collapses offchain histories into compact zero-knowledge proofs.
Previous bitcoin l2 implementations have shown that co-signers can be blinded and unaware of what they’re signing. In some designs, users validate the history of offchain coins they receive.
Zark compresses these histories into recursive zero-knowledge proofs. A side effect is that this removes the need for users to learn who a coin’s previous owners are.
Zark is based on the statechain paradigm. It enables users to transfer ownership of bitcoin UTXOs offchain with the help of a co-signer. In Zark, users can also engage in offchain coinswaps to transfer ownership for bitcoin UTXOs for other bitcoin UTXOs. We’re looking at adding support to swaps against tokens on alternative networks, like we did in our bitcoin dark pools demo with @mercurylayer.
Current research areas for us:
- Leaf splitting while retaining privacy for branches
- Scalability!
- Optimizing zk-circuits and proving system
Circuits are written in @noirlang.
Zark is a transfer-of-ownership protocol that collapses offchain histories into compact zero-knowledge proofs.
Previous bitcoin l2 implementations have shown that co-signers can be blinded and unaware of what they’re signing. In some designs, users validate the history of offchain coins they receive.
Zark compresses these histories into recursive zero-knowledge proofs. A side effect is that this removes the need for users to learn who a coin’s previous owners are.
Zark is based on the statechain paradigm. It enables users to transfer ownership of bitcoin UTXOs offchain with the help of a co-signer. In Zark, users can also engage in offchain coinswaps to transfer ownership for bitcoin UTXOs for other bitcoin UTXOs. We’re looking at adding support to swaps against tokens on alternative networks, like we did in our bitcoin dark pools demo with @mercurylayer.
Current research areas for us:
- Leaf splitting while retaining privacy for branches
- Scalability!
- Optimizing zk-circuits and proving system
Circuits are written in @noirlang.
Introducing Zark
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Post-quantum transactions that require only 96 bytes on-chain:
@will_wjk (Imperial College) et al. published a very interesting variant of Shielded CSV, called Compact Shielded CSV.
I've always thought the CSV model is attractive in a PQ setting: the blockchain only stores the n't have to verify a signature before it gets into a block. Compact Shielded CSV goes a step further: the on-chain nullifier carries no signature at all, only what they call a "degriefer". Pre-quantum that's more than Shielded CSV's 64 bytes, but post-quantum it's much less.
Unlike Shielded CSV, which operates on top of Bitcoin, Compact is its own blockchain. That matters for the degriefer: a Compact miner who includes a nullifier with an invalid degriefer can't claim the block reward. Shielded CSV could adopt the degriefer, but on Bitcoin there is no such penalty. Anyone who sees your nullifier before it's confirmed can front-run it with bogus copies for ~100 bytes of fees each, and your spending proof then has to show for every one of them that it's invalid. This is something we deliberately avoided in the design of Shielded CSV. With PQ signatures as large as they are, it probably is a reasonable trade-off.
Compact also never discusses reorgs, which are a significant part of the Shielded CSV design. Integrating the degriefer into Shielded CSV would require combining it with the existing reorg handling.
arxiv.org/pdf/2609.32015
@will_wjk (Imperial College) et al. published a very interesting variant of Shielded CSV, called Compact Shielded CSV.
I've always thought the CSV model is attractive in a PQ setting: the blockchain only stores the n't have to verify a signature before it gets into a block. Compact Shielded CSV goes a step further: the on-chain nullifier carries no signature at all, only what they call a "degriefer". Pre-quantum that's more than Shielded CSV's 64 bytes, but post-quantum it's much less.
Unlike Shielded CSV, which operates on top of Bitcoin, Compact is its own blockchain. That matters for the degriefer: a Compact miner who includes a nullifier with an invalid degriefer can't claim the block reward. Shielded CSV could adopt the degriefer, but on Bitcoin there is no such penalty. Anyone who sees your nullifier before it's confirmed can front-run it with bogus copies for ~100 bytes of fees each, and your spending proof then has to show for every one of them that it's invalid. This is something we deliberately avoided in the design of Shielded CSV. With PQ signatures as large as they are, it probably is a reasonable trade-off.
Compact also never discusses reorgs, which are a significant part of the Shielded CSV design. Integrating the degriefer into Shielded CSV would require combining it with the existing reorg handling.
arxiv.org/pdf/2609.32015
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Jonas Nick retweeted
I'm glad to share that our book on zero-knowledge protocols now has a full chapter on post-quantum zero-knowledge proving systems with over 100 pages!
It covers lattice-based Σ-protocols, LaBRADOR, and ZK-STARKs, with all the necessary prerequisites included.
Link below 👇
It covers lattice-based Σ-protocols, LaBRADOR, and ZK-STARKs, with all the necessary prerequisites included.
Link below 👇
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Two forks of nix-bitcoin have emerged:
- github.com/bitcoinix/bitc… by @seberm. They just created a survey about the future direction of the project.
- github.com/naturallaw777/…
- github.com/bitcoinix/bitc… by @seberm. They just created a survey about the future direction of the project.
- github.com/naturallaw777/…
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Jonas Nick retweeted
In case people think I am advocating for not being cautious, or thinking that AI won't be an issue for any cryptography, that's not the case. Let me word what I think would be a balanced approach regarding AI and crypto. 1/n
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Jonas Nick retweeted
📎 Shielded bitcoin protocols like @ShieldedCSV need to post a little data with each payment. Taproot already has a slot for that: the annex. Core just won’t relay it.
Opened a PR to make annexes standard. Policy only, consensus untouched.
Reviews welcome: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoi…
Opened a PR to make annexes standard. Policy only, consensus untouched.
Reviews welcome: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoi…
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Jonas Nick retweeted
Urgent security update: If you’re running version 26.06.7 or earlier, please upgrade to the latest release as soon as possible.
We’ve received reports that attackers are targeting unpatched nodes. Keeping your node up to date is an important step in protecting your funds.
We’ve received reports that attackers are targeting unpatched nodes. Keeping your node up to date is an important step in protecting your funds.
Core Lightning 26.06.8 is out, and every node runner should upgrade.
This release fixes vulnerabilities responsibly reported over recent weeks. There is no embargo period: the release and fixes are available right now.
A number of tests are being held back temporarily to make the underlying issues harder to reverse-engineer while node runners have time to upgrade.
Please upgrade as soon as possible.
github.com/ElementsProjec…
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