Research Blog

TxWithhold Smart Contracts

2022-06-28

In this article, we attempt to design smart contracts encouraging miners to withhold a certain transaction, to better understand how practical such smart contracts are.

The joyful journey of building Bitcoin

2021-02-22

It’s 11th May in NYC. Even if the end of the world did happen, the streets of Manhattan are at peace for reasons of the sacred local commodity, coffee, still being fairly available. Equipped with your own dose, you’re jumping on your keyboard to browse the busy streets of the Bitcoin hive. It’s Monday and you have a lot to get down to. There is this Core PR to rebase for the thousandth time. A weird bug showed up in your payment channels implementation making them purple and you still have to grasp this musky mailing post about curve point 1080 hard flips.

Mitigating Channel Jamming with Stake Certificates for HTLC Traffic

2020-11-26

In this post, we explore a different approach to channel jamming mitigation. We’re suggesting using UTXO ownership proofs (a.k.a. Stake Certificates) to solve this problem. Previously, these proofs were only used in the Lightning Network at channel announcement time to prevent malicious actors from announcing channels they don’t control. One can think of it as a “fidelity bond” (as a scarce resource) as a requirement for sending HTLCs.

CoinPool, exploring generic payment pools for Fun and Privacy

2020-06-11

We think that a wide range of second-layer protocols (LN, vaults, inheritance, etc) will be used by average Bitcoin users. We are interested in finding and addressing the privacy issues coming from the unique fingerprints these protocols bring.