Socratic Seminar #6

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.

Tentative list of discussion topics:

Bitcoin PRs
Disable nlocktime-based anti-fee sniping
https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2019/01/15/

Overhaul importmulti logic
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14565

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

Allow connections from misbehaving banned peers
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14929

Lightning PRs
Enable plugin flag in c-lightning
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/issues/2244

Heuristic dry run option LND
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/2350

Memory reduction for nodes with many channels
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/2474

Sphinx send
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/pull/2455

Peer management in Joule
https://github.com/wbobeirne/joule-extension/pull/131

News
Weak nonce attack against incorrectly generated ECDSA signatures:
https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023.pdf

Bitcoin IRC logs
https://twitter.com/Snyke/status/1078727327150997504

Grin Launch
https://grinexplorer.net/

ETC Attack
https://medium.com/@slowmist/the-analysis-of-etc-51-attack-from-slowmist-team-728596d76ead

Stats
LN Stats
https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning

Hashrate distribution
https://coinmetrics.io/mining-pool-mapping/

Equal Output Txs
https://twitter.com/nopara73/status/1080371795985874944

Bitmain mining share
https://twitter.com/TradeBlock/status/1078712699360608256