Satuxi Weekly Review | Will Bitcoin be issued more? Will Ethereum change its PoW algorithm? These rumors are not to be trusted!

Preface: Last week, rumors about "Bitcoin issuance" and "Ethereum switching to the ProgPoW algorithm" were brought out again to mislead everyone, so in this issue, we will first clarify these things and tell everyone what happened and the real development progress of these projects in the past week.

As for academic content, at the Stanford Blockchain Conference held last weekend, scholars from well-known institutions such as Stanford University, MIT, Princeton University, and the Ethereum Foundation shared many interesting research results.

In addition, the bZx protocol attack, the Fcoin incident, and the whale theft incident also triggered a wave of discussions on smart contract security and private key custody.

(Photo from: tuchong.com)

Let’s start with Bitcoin.

1.1 Rumors about “issuing additional Bitcoins”

Recently, former Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd once again proposed the idea of ​​issuing more Bitcoins. He said:

“The 21 million supply cap is really just a religious belief.”

Then, after this sentence spread to China, it was adapted into "Why does Core persist in trying to issue more BTC?"

The key point here is that Peter Todd has actually lost his identity as a Bitcoin developer a long time ago. The last time he contributed code to the core project was in February 2017.

This is like an employee of a company who resigned three years ago. His current remarks can only represent himself and cannot be considered an internal proposal of the company.

So what is the attitude of the real Core members towards the issuance of additional Bitcoins?

After the last rumor of "additional issuance", Wladimir van der Laan, the current chief maintainer of the core project team, had to refute the rumor:

“This is bullshit, and sadly it needs to be made clear, no one in their right mind would propose a change to Bitcoin’s monetary policy. If a piece of software claiming to be ‘bitcoin core’ proposed this, I would recommend running the software without this change, because it is broken.”

Another core maintainer, Peter Wuille, holds the same attitude, so remember not to believe similar rumors.

1.2 What are real Bitcoin developers discussing?

So what were actual Bitcoin developers working on last week?

1. The lightning network client C-Lightning has been upgraded to version 0.8.1: This version adds several new features and fixes multiple vulnerabilities. For a detailed list of updates, see the change log.

2. A discussion about taproot and alternatives: A group of anonymous developers (let’s call them Anon) wrote a critical article about taproot, comparing it to alternatives for enabling MAST and schnorr signatures in Bitcoin. Anon ended their criticism with five questions, and several Bitcoin developers responded to these questions respectively. If you are interested, you can see the original discussion post;

3. Lightning Network developers are working on detailing a protocol for interactive financing transactions. Last week, Lisa Neigut published her analysis of the PoDLE interactive financing concept, where she also described an attack method and proposed mitigation measures;

4. Discussion about decoy nodes and lightweight rendez-vous routing. For more information, see Teinturier's solution document.

Notable code and documentation changes

Last week, Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, Eclair, LND, libsecp256k1, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning Network BOLTs all saw notable changes, including:

1. As part of the Bitcoin Core release process, Bitcoin Core #18104 ended support for building 32-bit x86 binaries for Linux. The corresponding 32-bit Windows binaries were removed a few months ago. Of course, 32-bit Linux binaries are still built as part of Bitcoin Core's continuous integration testing, so users can still build them manually, but due to lack of use and actual developer testing, these binaries will no longer be distributed by the project;

2. C-Lightning#3488 standardizes C-Lightning requests for Bitcoin data, enabling it to run on something other than Bitcoin Core (as a backend);

3. C-Lightning#3500 solves a problem that can make it difficult to send channel funds through a simple solution. Developers proposed another solution in C-Lightning#3501, but it is currently awaiting further discussion by developers;

For more development updates, readers can refer to: https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2020/02/19/.

After talking about Bitcoin, let’s look at another rumor.

1.3 Rumors about Ethereum ProgPoW

Last week, a foreign media outlet also broke the “big” news that Ethereum developers unanimously agreed to implement ProgPoW, which caused panic among Ethereum mining machine manufacturers and also attracted much attention from miners.

The source of this rumor is the 81st video conference of the Ethereum Core development team, which mainly discussed the following:

1. Review of some EIPs: including changes to EIP-2200, updates to EIP-1962, EIP-2315, EIP-2242, EIP-1057 (ProgPoW);

2. Discussion on the time of next upgrade;

3. Open RPC;

4. Test updates, etc.

Among them, EIP-1057 (ProgPoW) is the focus of everyone.

The so-called ProgPoW is an alternative implementation of Ethereum's existing PoW algorithm Ethash. Its purpose is to resist Asic mining machines. The audit of this algorithm scheme was announced in September last year. However, its existence is very controversial. Its proposers and supporters believe that ProgPoW can effectively resist ASIC mining of the Ethereum network, thereby promoting the decentralization of the network. However, this is not the only voice in the Ethereum community. There are actually many opposing voices.

Therefore, in the last Istanbul fork upgrade, EIP-1057 (ProgPoW) was not included, and then its supporters expected to include it in the next hard fork upgrade Berlin (Berlin, which will take place around June-July this year).

But in reality, it still encounters a lot of resistance. For example, developer Marius Kjærstad wondered:

“Why are people still pushing for ProgPoW? It has already been rejected by the community.”

If this isn’t enough, here’s what Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said:

“Hey, this thing was gone before and now, oh my god, it’s scheduled for the next hard fork???”

Vitalik said he would remain neutral on the proposal and only criticize the decision-making process.

Well, this is the situation. As to whether ProgPoW will be included in the next Ethereum hard fork, there are currently huge differences among developers. It is not "consensus has been reached" as some developers say. I personally tend to think that it will not be accepted in the short term.

Satoxi's brief comment: The two rumors about Bitcoin and Ethereum last week actually belong to different situations. The former is groundless, and the latter has not yet been determined. As for this kind of development progress news, the author recommends that everyone pay attention to the two websites bitcoinops and weekinethereumnews, rather than one-sided reports from individual media.

2. Academic Achievements Exhibition at Stanford Blockchain Conference

After refuting the rumors, let’s take a brief look at some of the blockchain academic research content from last week.

The 4th Stanford Blockchain Conference was held as scheduled from February 20th to 22nd, Beijing time. The conference focused on security engineering and risk management methods in blockchain systems, and explored ways to improve the security of blockchain systems through the application of encryption technology, decentralized protocols, formal methods, and empirical analysis.

In this conference, scholars from well-known institutions such as Stanford University, MIT, Princeton University, Cornell University, New York University, UC Berkeley, Facebook, and the Ethereum Foundation shared some academic achievements, such as:

1. Stefan Dziembowski shared "The Boundaries of Off-Chain Protocols: Exploring the Limits of Plasma Technology";

2. Assimakis Kattis shared "Proof of Necessary Work (PoNW): Concise State Verification and Fairness Guarantee";

3. Florian Tramer shared "Linking Anonymous Transactions via Remote Side Channel Attacks";

4. Matteo Maffei shared “Atomic Multichannel Updates with Fixed Collateral in Bitcoin-Compatible Payment Channel Networks”;

5. Joachim Neu shared "Boomerang: Redundancy technology improves latency and throughput of payment channel networks";

6. Brick: Asynchronous State Channels by Georgia Avarikioti;

For more information, please see here: https://cbr.stanford.edu/sbc20/

Related reports:

1. Live from Stanford Blockchain Conference Day 1: Can new attacks break the anonymity of Zcash or Monero?

2. Vitalik's latest speech: 51% attacks are a fatal threat to PoW blockchains, PoS may be the only way out

3. What is Prism, a new protocol created by MIT and Stanford to achieve 10,000-fold expansion of Bitcoin?

Satouxi's brief comment: Overall, this academic conference focused on research on scalability, privacy, consensus mechanisms, blockchain economy, and off-chain solutions. These are some of the hottest topics in blockchain research. Interested readers can read the original papers themselves.

3. Security discussion triggered by bZx protocol attack, Fcoin incident and whale theft

After focusing on academic content, let’s take a look at some blockchain security incidents that have occurred in reality.

Last week, the bZx protocol attack, the Fcoin incident, and the whale theft incident became the focus of attention in the cryptocurrency community, which also triggered a wave of discussions on smart contract security and private key custody.

For example, these two articles from PeckShield provide detailed analysis of the specific process and vulnerabilities of these two attacks:

1. Hard-core technical analysis | The whole story of the bZx protocol being attacked by hackers;

2. Analysis | The technical weakness behind the bZx protocol being hit by two consecutive attacks by hackers;

The threat posed by flash loans is not limited to the bZx protocol. For example, Dominik Harz, a scholar from Imperial College London, analyzed how to use flash loans and Maker's governance flaws to launch attacks, in order to remind project owners to defend against potential hackers.

In addition to these attacks, smart contracts may also encounter four types of censorship attacks: (1) forking, (2) dodging, (3) interference, and (4) quick attacks. In order to prevent these potential attacks, Ed Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, wrote an article titled "How to Prevent Censorship Attacks on Smart Contracts?"

The above security issues are aimed at smart contracts, and the Fcoin incident and the theft of 260 million digital currency assets from whales remind people to keep their own private keys and how to keep them safely.

For example, Yike’s article “The Easiest Way to Make a BTC Cold Wallet” introduces three methods of making cold wallets using different wallets (bitcoin core, bitcoin wallet, electrum). Big coin holders can take a good look at it.

In addition, Wang Yishi wrote a "Guide to Safe Internet Access", reminding everyone about the impact of privacy on the security of digital assets and providing some practical suggestions on how to avoid asset losses.

Satoxi's brief comment: Security issues have always existed in the blockchain industry and are also the issues that ordinary users pay the least attention to. The recent security incidents have once again reminded everyone that we might as well start with private key security and privacy security.