This week’s newsletter summarizes several questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange and describes notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

None this week.

News

No significant news about Bitcoin infrastructure development this week.

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin StackExchange

Bitcoin StackExchange is one of the first places Optech contributors look for answers to their questions—or when we have a few spare moments to help curious or confused users. In this monthly feature, we highlight some of the top-voted questions and answers posted since our last update.

  • ● Why does the banscore default to 100? User Anonymous describes some history behind banscore, which protects nodes from misbehaving peers. Although some offenses result in a 100 point increase—and thus the immediate banning of the offending peer under the default banscore setting—other offenses detailed in net_processing.cpp have different scores.

  • ● Why is block 620826’s timestamp 1 second before block 620825? Andrew Chow and Raghav Sood clarify that a block header’s timestamp field is not required to have a greater value than previous blocks. The requirements are instead that a new block’s timestamp must be greater than the median timestamp of the past 11 blocks but no later than two hours after the present time according to the clock on the computer running the node.

  • ● Where can I find the miniscript policy language specification? Andrew Chow and Pieter Wuille explain that there is not a specification for how the miniscript policy language is compiled to miniscript and that both the current C++ and Rust implementations effectively try every possibility and choose the miniscript resulting in the smallest scriptWitness size.

Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, Eclair, LND, libsecp256k1, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.

  • ● Eclair #1339 prevents users from setting their htlc-minimum amount to 0 milli-satoshis, which would violate BOLT2. The new minimum is 1 milli-satoshi.

  • ● LND #4051 tracks up to ten errors per peer, storing them across reconnections if necessary. The latest error message is returned as part of the ListPeers results, making it easier to diagnose problems.

  • ● BOLTs #751 updates BOLT7 to allow nodes to announce multiple IP addresses of a given type (e.g. IPv4, IPv6, or Tor). This ensures that multi-homed nodes can better inform the network of their network connectivity. Several LN implementations were already announcing or allowing multiple addresses of a given type, so this change brings the BOLT specification in line with what the implementations were already doing.