Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #295 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Dave Harding, Peter Todd, Abubakar Sadiq Ismail, David Gumberg, and Jeffrey Czyz to discuss Newsletter #295.

News

• Disclosure of free relay attack (1:22)
• Transaction fee sponsorship improvements (9:55)
• Mempool-based feerate estimation (34:49)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• What are the risks of running a pre-SegWit node (0.12.1)? (50:30)
• When is OP_RETURN cheaper than OP_FALSE OP_IF? (55:51)
• Why does BIP-340 use secp256k1? (56:33)
• What criteria does Bitcoin Core use to create block templates? (58:08)
• How does the initialblockdownload field in the getblockchaininfo RPC work? (1:04:45)

Releases and release candidates

• Bitcoin Core 26.1rc2 (1:07:34)
• Bitcoin Core 27.0rc1 (1:07:55)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #28950 (1:17:13)
• LND #8418 (1:19:07)
• LDK #2756 (1:23:44)
• LDK #2935 (1:25:55)
• LDK #2419 (1:27:39)
• Rust Bitcoin #2549 (1:32:54)
• BTCPay Server #5852 (1:33:36)