Miners, pools, difficulty and the upgrades that need their attention.
6 publications
Work has resumed on a specification and experimental Bitcoin Core support for TCP hole punching, which could help home nodes behind routers accept peer connections. A draft BIP also proposes shared spending-policy formats for co-signers used to emulate covenants.
Bitcoin Optech
Eclair's feature-bit parser allocated over 300 MB while handling a single maximum-length message, Matt Morehouse says on the #425 recap, and the fix cut that to roughly 200 KB. Gustavo Flores Echaiz and Brandon Black go on to wallet label synchronization, PQC output types, BIP54 time warp bounds and covenant proposals for vaults.
Bitcoin Optech
Utreexo's accumulator takes less than 1 kB where a node otherwise keeps a UTXO set of roughly 11 GB, Davidson Souza explains on the #423 recap, at the cost of more bandwidth. Eric Price of MARA and PortlandHODL are also guests, with vardiff controllers that strand slowing miners and a draft BIP for unspendable internal keys on the list.
Bitcoin Optech
Mining pools can strand a slowing miner on a share difficulty set for its old speed, Eric Price argues on Delving Bitcoin; his remedy is a timer that lowers difficulty after an interval with no shares. Davidson Souza wants the SwiftSync hintsfile to remove Utreexo deletion proofs during initial block download, and NTL has drafted a BIP for unspendable taproot internal keys.
Bitcoin Optech
Miners have until block 419328 to act: the CSV soft fork locked in at block 417312 after 1946 of 2016 blocks (96.53%) signaled for BIP68, BIP112 and BIP113. All mining and backup nodes must run Bitcoin Core or Knots 0.12.1, and anyone hardcoding the block version has to unset bit 0.
Bitcoin Core
BIP9 lets miners signal readiness for up to 29 concurrent soft forks through bits in the block header. A proposal locks in when 95% of blocks in a 2016-block window signal, then activates one retarget later, or fails at its timeout. Unlike IsSuperMajority, it won't orphan a non-signaling block that obeys the new rules.
Bitcoin Core
