a big dark cloud is lifted... it was starting to get scary out there
Bitcoin miners be like
So how do you decentralise block template construction?
Possible answer: https://www.radpool.xyz/
📣 HRF gifted 1 billion sats from our Bitcoin Development Fund for our Q2 grant cycle
These focus on education, privacy, decentralized communications, and financial freedom tools for those in authoritarian regimes 🌐 🎉
🧵 on the projects 👇
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/hrf-grants-10-btc-to-worldwide-projects-advancing-bitcoin
🇰🇪 The Core promotes Bitcoin education in Kenya. Funding will facilitate meetups, course creation, and student rewards, fostering financial freedom in East Africa.
💻 Terry Yiu works on three Nostr-related projects: the Nostr SDK, Comingle, a conference app; and Damus, a decentralized social platform. All aim to strengthen freedom of speech and communication. This grant supports his work across these Nostr-related initiatives
🤖 Robo Sats—a Tor-only platform enabling peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, especially helpful under authoritarian regimes, via the Lightning Network. Funding will enhance development, performance, and building an Android app
🇮🇳Bitshala’s Internship Program, empowering aspiring Bitcoin devs in India. Funding will support these internships and help Bitshala establish a hackerspace and community center in Bangalore
🌉Building Bridges to Bitcoin by Ideas Beyond Borders, empowering youth in the Middle East & North Africa with Bitcoin education in Arabic. Funds will support translation, publishing, and operational costs 💡
🤲 Open Sats supports open-source projects, education, and research in the Bitcoin ecosystem. HRF will support the Open Sats’ day-to-day operations budget 🌐
⚡️ Flash aims to connect Caribbean economies with Bitcoin. Funding will bolster its development, educational efforts, and adoption campaigns, bringing financial inclusion to historically marginalized regions. 🏝️
🇰🇷 Bitcoin Seoul, a conference that took place in May in Korea. Funds supported open-source initiatives and collaboration with North Korean defectors on human rights work
⛏️ Margot Paez’s research explores Bitcoin mining's impact on human rights and sovereignty. This funding will support her study on energy efficiency, decentralization, and civil liberties 📊
🔒⚡️ Validating Lightning Signer (VLS) enhances Lightning Network security by separating private keys. Funds will be used to hire a Rust developer to ensure user protection and accessibility
🇧🇷 Paulo Sacramento studies Brazil's digital payment systems for insights into Bitcoin adoption. This grant supports his research on open-source options for financial inclusion
🔐 Blockchain Commons develops FROST, improving private key security. Funding will support the organization of two FROST roundtable meetings among members of the FROST ecosystem ❄️
🌞 Summer of Bitcoin offers internships for students in Bitcoin development. This grant supports stipends, mentorship, and operations, empowering builders from over 50 countries, with a strong emphasis on authoritarian regimes 🌐
With these grants, HRF continues to push the boundaries of financial freedom, education, and human rights through Bitcoin. Stay tuned for more updates on these exciting initiatives.
Hopeful applicants can find the BDF application here:
hrf.org/devfund
The second FROST roundtable is happening on Dec 4th. I'll present my progress on FROST Federation https://github.com/pool2win/frost-federation
The federation work is motivated by Radpool - an effort to decentralise mining template construction and FPPS like payouts for miners. https://www.radpool.xyz/
Roundtable announcement: https://x.com/ChristopherA/status/1861047373419491661
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Finished reading http://radpool.xyz
Cool stuff. Lots of fun thing combined.
I think the incentives align correctly and could encourage adoption of this protocol.
I also think it's going to be a heavy lift to implement.
More complete thoughts here: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/radpool-decentralised-mining-pool-with-futures-contracts-for-payouts/1262/2
The cool thing, I think, is that we are not inventing new crypto or new distributed systems protocols. There is lot of engineering effort, yes, but we can do it. I believe it is doable. 😃 Have to believe!
The threat is legit.
tbh, I am using the federation for a mining pool design, where the payout is a DLC contract. The federation acts as an oracle, and voila, the miner gets a unilateral exit, with DLC backed payout guaranteed as long as 1) miner produces hashrate and 2) federation remains honest and signs the attestation.
I have been wracking my brains to see if we can do anything with the federation for an L2 payment mechanism.
I see two problems, a) without PoW how do you keep federation honest and not start sybil attacking b) does it really do anything useful at all, as you asked the question too. I have this uncanny feeling someone somewhere will figure this out. Threshold signatures are way too cool to not give us an interesting future.
> TLDR someone needs to find a kickass off chain (L2 if you like) protocol that could 50x the usage of bitcoin using covenants, *without centralization *, then needs to write code and deploy it on say Liquid and signet.
A Federated L2 could be interesting where the federation is not limited to Liquid where the federation is limited to regulated parties.
Instead, what if we have a federation managed by a threshold signature that could grow to 50-100 parties to help execute state changes for coinpool.
Such an federation is possible using a Schnorr Threshold Signature. I am building one for a mining pool, where the federation membership is backed by PoW. How such a federation can minimise trust without PoW is a question I am thinking about these days.
Meanwhile - unashamed link share to my repo: https://github.com/pool2win/frost-federation
Radpool - a new design to decentralise bitcoin mining.
You give me hashes, I'll give you bitcoin.
Chris Belcher described a payout construction for P2Pool back in the day that allowed P2Pool to scale. There was a problem, the construction required a central hub. Wth FROST we can replace the centralised hub with a federation. That was an intuition I had for almost a year now. I finally found the time and I think I have it figured out. Will share something soon.
Meanwhile here's Belcher's construction: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2135429.0
The second time round you might find yourself doing even a better job.
Don't run closed source software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
Mining pools right now are running closed source software as a service. We need to work to change this.
Don't run closed source software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
Braidpool development update:
1. Add Connection management
2. Add channels and queues for broadcasting to connected peers
3. Improvements to config parsing
Lesson: A lot of rust crates have poor test coverage and aren't maintained well.
https://blog.opdup.com/development-updates/2024/01/29/talking-to-peers.html
Without comment
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Now imagine we tell them with braidpool and hashrate futures they can guarantee their future earnings from those miners!
That's the dream. #BuildingBraidpool
Bitcoin peer to peer mining. #anarchy
We don't need a hierarchy!
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