Socratic Seminar #2

Inspired by Bitdevs NY, this is an event for those interested in discussing and participating in the research and development of Bitcoin and related protocols. Unlike the monthly speaker event, the Socratic Seminar events are formatted to foster debate, information sharing and lively discussion.

Discussion topics from a variety of sources are collated by meetup members in the weeks preceding the events. We investigate pull requests in the Bitcoin Core, lnd, grin and other relevant repositories; we study network statistics, research papers, technical blog posts and other interesting content. To complete the meeting, members present open source projects, companies, research and other relevant materials. A feedback and Q&A section follow.

A newsletter is sent out the day of the event which outlines discussion topics. Archives of discussion topics and presentations can be found in the event descriptions of past meetups. The discussion portion of the event is NEVER recorded. It is recommended that you have a firm grasp of the basics of Bitcoin in order to extract the most value from our Socratic events.

Please contact the organizers if you'd like to present at a future Socratic event or have a recommended topic for discussion: leishman3 at gmail. There are different requirements for presentation depending on the type of project.

Potential Topics

Bitcoin PRs:

Group Coin Selection Option
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/12257

Bitcoin Optech Newsletter 8:
https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2018/08/21/

P2P Encryption:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14032

AVX512 intrinsic:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/13989/files

Dandelion Implementation:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/13947

Min relay fee:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/13922

Anti-DoS Locator limit:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/13907

Compact Block Filter:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/12254

Property Based Testing:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/8469

Lightning

Arbitrary Contracts over Lightning
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2018-August/001387.html

LND v0.5
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/milestone/7

C-lightning v0.6.1
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3Av0.6.1

Mimblewimble

Cuckoo Cycles No Longer ASIC resistant
https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo/commit/c809117d84759909a15a504c92435cfda166fe79

Security Vulnerabilities

Cory Fields Vuln from Bitcoin Cash
https://medium.com/mit-media-lab-digital-currency-initiative/http-coryfields-com-cash-48a99b85aad4

Other Stuff

Rust in-memory blockchain store
https://github.com/rust-bitcoin/rust-blockchain-store

Tadge Dryja - Accumulators for UTXO commitments
https://twitter.com/tdryja/status/1030902523077451776
No write up about it, but utreexo is a clue. Anyone have any more information about this?

Pay to Endpoint
https://blockstream.com/2018/08/08/improving-privacy-using-pay-to-endpoint.html

Chia BLS Lib
https://github.com/Chia-Network/bls-signatures

Stats and Events

Xapo UTXO Consolidation
https://bitcoinops.org/en/xapo-utxo-consolidation/

Lightning Network Stats
https://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1&from=1527572205519&to=1532756205519

OP_RETURN
https://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/op_return-statistics?orgId=1

Security

Breaking the Virtual Memory Abstraction with Transient Out-of-Order Execution
https://foreshadowattack.eu/

Homebrew Hack
https://medium.com/@vesirin/how-i-gained-commit-access-to-homebrew-in-30-minutes-2ae314df03ab