Apropos of nothing, here's a thread of recently published research focused on #bitcoin and Lightning.

I don't know if these researchers submitted their work to the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC), or if SBC denied their applications. But it's clear they're researching! "zk-PCN: A Privacy-Preserving Payment Channel
Network Using zk-SNARKs"

Published Aug 20, 2022 by researchers from Shandong University, Indiana University, Purdue University, and the Singapore University of Technology and Design
arxiv.org/abs/2208.09716

On platform risk:

Smart contract platforms have seemingly found PMF with DeFi over the last year. App devs are flocking to said platforms in hopes of launching the next COMP, UNI, SNX, etc. and cashing out life-changing money after a few months of work.

Too good to be true? 🧵 The canonical platform risk case study is Facebook vs. Zynga. Zynga built a $10B company on Facebook's platform, until March 2011 when Facebook cut off Zynga's access to their APIs and cratered their business.
venturebeat.com/2016/06/30/fac…

I've had a lot of people reach out recently and ask what's been driving the #LightningNetwork's latest exponential growth phase.

I think I'd attribute it to four main sources:
🧵👇

https://twitter.com/VetleLunde/status/1414935599321124864

1) The combo of @getumbrel, @RaspiBlitz, and @voltage_cloud with the host of node & liquidity management guides produced by @LeoAW and @hmichellerose have made it stupid easy to get a node online and connected.
docs.lightning.engineering

Recently, I've been thinking about this chart from @hasufl and @nic__carter concerning the changing #bitcoin narrative. I think the recent focus on NgU has been misguided, and we've lost sight of the true common thread tying all of these together:

#Bitcoin is freedom money. One thing I've learned from watching DeFi over the last year is that NgU tech is not unique to #bitcoin. Supply side liquidity crunches can be programmed in a few lines of Solidity.

But true monetary freedom cannot. #Bitcoin is the money chosen by people seeking to be free.

So I have a lot of thoughts about this. History is definitely rhyming as we build the Internet of Value today in a similar manner to how the Internet of Communications was built from the 1970s to now. But many people are applying the wrong lessons from the past to the present!

https://twitter.com/zackseward/status/1316418497078063104

Email (SMTP) was invented in 1982, and was the Internet's (TCP/IP) killer app for 30+ years and arguably still is. When @ChairmanHeath says "Internet" he's prob referring to HTTP, invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and popularized by the browser, the Internet's second killer app

So now that we all agree that globally available blockspace is not scalable for actual computation, but is best used for verification of off-chain computation instead, here are some thoughts on Ethereum's approach to scaling vs. Bitcoin's.

~👇~Thread~👇~

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1311921668005060608

First, definitions:
1) broadcast txs: all-to-all gossip comms that succumbs to the scalability trilemma (all L1s)
2) unicast txs: 1-to-1 direct comms that occurs between two peers only (LN)
3) multicast txs: 1-to-many comms between a subset of peers (rollups, sidechains)

0/7 I just released a new post about the Lightning Network as a utility for Web3 development. Web3 has typically been owned by the non-Bitcoin community (ETH, DOT, etc.), but I argue here that LN brings it firmly back into BTC's domain.

multicoin.capital/2020/05/05/lig… 1/7 Multicoin defines Web3 as “the unbundling of data and application logic.” Rather than focusing on storing user data on a blockchain, LN takes an incremental step towards that vision: "strong decoupling of authentication and payment logic from application logic" h/t @roasbeef

0/3 @mattshap1 and I just published "Privacy is a Feature, Not a Product"
multicoin.capital/2019/09/24/pri… 1/3 In the essay, we argue that privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself. Users should not have to take balance sheet risk (e.g. by selling some BTC or ETH for ZEC) on less valuable and less secure cryptocurrencies

As predicted, now that the summer is officially over the pace of whitepapers is picking up! Here are four new additions to the #CryptoArchives:
0/8

github.com/multicoincapit… First, @LefKok, @dahlia_malkhi, @ittaia and Sasha Spiegelmann implemented a fully asynchronous DKG based on a novel "eventually perfect" common coin abstraction. 1/8

eprint.iacr.org/2019/1015.pdf

It's been a slow summer for the #CryptoArchives, but I think this autumn is going to bring a torrent of new papers and insights for us to include.

Today I made a new commit with a few of my favorite papers from the last month, let's dive in! 👇0/7
github.com/multicoincapit… First up, we have a new addition to the Zero Knowledge Argument Systems section: PLONK from @aztecprotocol!

This paper presents a universal fully-succinct zk-SNARK with significantly improved prover run time compared to fully-succinct Sonic. 1/7

https://twitter.com/aztecprotocol/status/1164947086913232897

So I know scalable consensus models are a very 2017-2018 topic, but I wanted to write 3500+ words on them anyways. Enjoy! 0/5 multicoin.capital/2019/07/16/the… The more I studied consensus models in blockchain-based systems, the more I became convinced that @nic__carter is right: it's #timechain, not blockchain. Bitcoin's timechain provides an easily verifiable, trustless clock to new validators joining the network. 1/5

It's been while since I tweeted about the #CryptoArchives, but good news: we have a new commit! Two brand new papers came out yesterday and today that I'm very excited about. 0/4 First, @bramcohen and Krzysztof Pietrzak posted the Chia Green Paper! They describe Chia's security properties as alternating proofs of space and verifiable delay functions replace PoW. You can see it here:
github.com/multicoincapit… 1/4

Banner week for the #CryptoArchives as we've seen 7 (!) commits from 3 (!!) different organizations adding excellent content to the repo. Thanks @EhabBZaghloul and @zkCapital, and @riabhutoria and @ResearchCircle!!

Let's dive in 👇🏻 0/
github.com/multicoincapit… Ria started us off on Tuesday by adding the Cuckoo Cycle (developed by John Tromp) to our Hashing Algorithms section. Cuckoo Cycle is "memory bound", or hard to develop an ASIC for, and used today by @grinMW and @beamprivacy. 1/
github.com/tromp/cuckoo

So excited to announce @zkCapital as a new partner to the #CryptoArchives! @EhabBZaghloul and @kasstawi produce a phenomenal weekly newsletter (zk.capital) focused on academic blockchain research, and I'm thrilled that they'll be adding their findings to our repo 0/3 I just merged their first pull request where they added @pwuille, Gmax, Gleb, et al's Erlay paper by to the P2P Communications section. This section focuses on network-layer optimizations and could use some more content so I'm pumped they started there 1/3
github.com/multicoincapit…

@telegram just released their documentation, which lets me highlight the most awkwardly titled section of the #CryptoArchives: Interpreters, Runtimes, and Virtual Machines!

(if you have a better catch-all title for this, please share!) 0/

github.com/multicoincapit… All blockchain-based systems perform some sort of computation when processing transactions. This section contains technical descriptions of the different computation models allowed by each system, from Bitcoin Script to the Telegram Open Network VM 1/
test.ton.org/tvm.pdf

My Memorial Day Weekend gift to crypto twitter is another #CryptoArchives commit!

Today's entry comes thanks to a new paper from Srinath Setty @MSFTResearch - Spartan. He presents the first zk-SNARK construction that does not require a trusted setup 0/3
eprint.iacr.org/2019/550 Spartan joins one of the most complex and powerful sections of crypto: zero knowledge argument systems. These mathematical constructs allow for the creation of proofs that can be verified without the verifier knowing what the inputs or the outputs are 1/3
github.com/multicoincapit…

The latest commit to the Crypto Archives added 5 excellent papers from 2019 into the Layer 2 Scaling section: 0/n

github.com/multicoincapit… The Arwen Trading protocols @arwensecure from @Ethan_Heilman, @goldbe and Sebastian Lipmann, enabling non-custodial, cross-chain exchanges with payment channels 1/n

https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/1090264309169442816

Although last night's Binance hack was an unfortunate event, it provides an excellent opportunity to highlight one of my favorite areas of the Crypto Archives: Vulnerabilities, Bugs and Hacks! 0/5

github.com/multicoincapit… You'll be able to find Binance's announcement of their hack at the bottom of the Successful Hacks and Post-Mortems subsection, right alongside the details of The DAO Hack, Parity Multisig #1, and the EOSBet Transfer Hack, to name a few. 1/5

github.com/multicoincapit…

Super excited this repo is finally publicly available for the community to contribute to! When I first started at Multicoin in July of last year, I probably read and took notes on 10-20 papers per week trying to get up to speed in our crazy industry. 0/8

https://twitter.com/johnrobertreed/status/1123979316956672001

@KyleSamani had the great idea of creating an internal knowledge base of my notes and conclusions so that new hires could quickly get a surface level understanding of the technical topics I was diving deep into. We experimented with several different formats. 1/8

What bitcoin can actually realistically do is provide an uninflatable, unseizable commodity money that allows anybody to verify the total supply and lack of double spends. This depends on a large, diverse, well educated group of full node runners to check/balance miners and devs

https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1123210603936583681

That's pretty good! But it's not the impossible dream of BTC-Apple Pay.
If demand spikes to Dec 2017 levels soon, we will see LN users frustrated with multi-hop payment failures, furious about high channel opening/closing fees, and disillusioned with bitcoin.