This week’s newsletter describes the bip-anyprevout soft fork proposal, summarizes a few technical talks from the Magical Crypto Friends conference, and includes our regular sections on bech32 sending support and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

None this week.

News

  • ● Proposed anyprevout sighash modes: two weeks ago, Anthony Towns posted a proposed BIP to the Bitcoin-Dev and Lightning-Dev mailing lists for consideration. The idea, bip-anyprevout, provides two new signature hashing (sighash) modes that allow a signature to commit to fewer details about the funds being spent than the default bip-taproot and bip-tapscript sighash mode. This enables the functionality previously described by BIP118 with modification so that it works with Taproot and reduces the risk of accidental misuse. One of the new sighash modes is directly compatible with the proposed Eltoo layer for LN, requiring only modifications for Taproot and the addition of a chaperone signature (described later). A second sighash mode commits to more data than necessary for Eltoo in a way that may make it useful for atypical commitments in Eltoo or for use in other protocols.

    A significant advantage of this proposal over BIP118 noinput is that it can make use of Taproot cooperative spends, allowing the two or more parties to an LN channel or other contract protocol to optionally spend their funds without revealing any of the contract terms (including that anyprevout was in use).

    For a quick look at anyprevout, we consider it in the context of a two-party Eltoo-based LN channel. As a reminder, the key feature of Eltoo is that each balance change in a channel (state update) can be spent by any later state update, so there’s no risk of publishing an old state to the block chain like there is with the current penalty-based LN channels. Eltoo calls this capability rebinding and BIP118 proposed to make rebinding available by allowing signatures to skip committing to the input part of the spending transaction—allowing anyone to modify that part of the transaction to bind any later state they knew about.

    The SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUTANYSCRIPT mode (any previous output, any script) defined by bip-anyprevout works similarly to BIP118 noinput, with the following changes. To use anyprevoutanyscript, the public key to which a signature is compared will need to use a special prefix (0x00 or 0x01; not to be confused with the pubkeys used for bip-taproot’s output key that uses the same prefix in a different context). Additionally, the script being evaluated will need to contain at least one signature that doesn’t use anyprevoutanyscript or the other new sighash mode described later. This non-anyprevout signature is called the chaperone signature because, under reasonable assumptions, it prevents an anyprevout signature from being misused. (See Newsletter #34 for details about the replay problem.) With the correct prefix and a chaperone signature, anyprevoutanyscript allows the signature to skip committing to the identifier for output being spent (the outpoint), that previous output’s scriptPubKey, and the hash of the executed taproot leaf (tapleaf). The transaction digest to which the signature commits still includes some details about the prevout, such as its bitcoin value.

    Additionally, bip-anyprevout also defines another sighash mode: SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT that also requires the same special pubkey prefix and chaperone signature, but it includes the prevout’s scriptPubKey and tapleaf hash in the signature. Whereas anyprevoutanyscript can allow Eltoo-like rebinding where any later state can bind to any earlier state (but earlier states can’t bind to later states), there may be alternative protocols (and times within the Eltoo protocol) where the participants want to ensure that state n can only bind to state n-1 and not any other state.

    The proposal has begun receiving feedback on the mailing lists, so we’ll provide updates in subsequent newsletters summarizing any significant discussions.

  • ● Talks of technical interest at Magical Crypto Friends conference: Bryan Bishop provided transcripts of about a dozen talks and panels from the MCF conference two weekends ago, and the conference organizers have uploaded most videos. Although only one of the talks described any specific new developments, several of them did discuss details and implications of technology such as confidential transactions, taproot, schnorr, and other ideas related to Bitcoin. We found the following talks particularly interesting:

    • ● A talk by Andrew Poelstra about the cryptography used in cryptocurrencies. In particular, he focuses on the difficulty of building systems where everything needs to be done correctly in order to resist attack.

    • ● A panel by Rodolfo Novak, Elaine Ou, Adam Back, and Richard Myers about using Bitcoin without direct access to the Internet. Discussion topics included satellite-based block propagation, mesh networking, amateur radio, and physically carrying data (sneakernets) and how they can make Bitcoin more robust for current users and more accessible for users in areas with limited network access. We found particularly interesting a side discussion about the security of relaying Bitcoin data—in short, the Bitcoin protocol is already designed to trustlessly accept data from random peers, so non-net relay doesn’t necessarily change the trust model.

    • ● A conversation between Will O’Beirne, Lisa Neigut, Alex Bosworth with moderation by Leigh Cuen discussing the future of LN, mostly the short-term and medium-term conclusion of current development efforts surrounding the LN 1.1 specification. There are no hyped claims in this discussion, but a simple description of how LN can be expected to improve in ways that make it easier for users and businesses to adopt.

Bech32 sending support

Week 10 of 24 in a series about allowing the people you pay to access all of segwit’s benefits.

Up until this point in our series encouraging wallets and services to support sending to bech32 native segwit addresses, we’ve focused almost exclusively on technical information. Today, this section expresses an opinion: the longer you delay implementing bech32 sending support, the worse some of your users and potential users will think of your software or service.

“They can only pay legacy addresses.”
“Oh. Let’s look for another service that supports current technology.”

Services that only support legacy addresses are likely to become a cue to users that minimal development effort is being put into maintaining their Bitcoin integration. We expect that it’ll send the same signal to users as a website in 2019 that’s covered in Shockwave/Adobe Flash elements and that claims it’s best viewed in Internet Explorer 7 (or see an even more imaginative comparison written by Gregory Maxwell.)

Bech32 sending is not some experimental new technology that still needs testing—native segwit unspent outputs currently hold over 200,000 bitcoins. Bech32 sending is also something that’s easy to implement (see Newsletters #38 and #40). Most importantly, as more and more wallets and services upgrade to bech32 receiving by default, it’s going to become obvious which other services haven fallen behind by not providing sending support.

If you haven’t implemented bech32 sending support yet, we suggest you try to get it implemented by 24 August 2019 (the two-year anniversary of segwit activation). Not long after that, Bitcoin Core’s next release is expected to begin defaulting to bech32 receiving addresses in its GUI and perhaps also its API methods (see Newsletters #40 and #42). We expect other wallets to do the same—except for the ones that have already made bech32 their default (or even their only supported address format).

Notable code and documentation changes

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

  • ● Bitcoin Core #15006 extends the createwallet RPC with a new passphrase parameter that allows creating a new wallet that’s encrypted by default. Existing wallets can still be converted to encrypted with the encryptwallet RPC.

  • ● Bitcoin Core #15870 changes how the importwallet, importpubkey, importaddress, and importprivkey RPCs interact with pruning. Previously they failed if pruning was enabled. However, pruning can be configured for manual operation (prune=1) or be set to a value larger than the current size of the block chain (e.g. prune=450000), providing cases where pruning is enabled but all blocks may still be present. With this merge, the calls only fail if blocks are actually missing because of pruning. Alternatively, users can call the importmulti RPC that will allowing importing any keys or other data even if blocks have been pruned as long as the data’s creation time (timestamp) is within the range of blocks that haven’t been pruned yet.

  • ● Bitcoin Core #14802 speeds up the getblockstats RPC more than 100x (as measured by Optech) by using chainstate undo data—the data that’s used to rollback the ledger to a previous state during a block chain reorganization. This also removes the RPC’s dependency on the transaction index (txindex).

  • ● Bitcoin Core #14047 and Bitcoin Core #15512 add functions required for the encrypted v2 transport protocol described in Newsletter #39. This is only a small subset of the overall changes required; see primary PR #14032 for more details.

  • ● C-Lightning #2631 extends the pylightning utility with three new methods: autoclean configures automatic deletion of expired invoices (by default one day after they expired). check determines whether a command is valid without running it. setchannelfee allows setting the fee for routed payments, either a base fee added to any routed payment or a percentage fee that is applied proportionally to the payment amount.

  • ● C-Lightning #2627 extends pylightning with a deleteinvoice method that deletes all invoices that expired before the specified time.