Reading room

Socratic Seminar 022

in 2 daysPubKey DC, 410 7th St NW, Washington DC 20004
Doors 5:30pm ETSeminar 6:00pm ETDepart 8:30pm ET
corelightningminingpolicyinfoseccovenantsprivacy
RSVPSuggest a topic

Ground rules

  1. No photos, videos, or recordings.
  2. Chatham House Rule: you may reiterate the contents of the meeting without attribution.

These rules exist so that BitDevs participants can speak freely within the event. Questions are encouraged, including basic ones!

Full chapter rules: Ground rules. Suggest topics: Suggest topics.

Location

PubKey DC, 410 7th St NW, Washington DC 20004.

Thank you to PubKey DC for hosting.

Schedule

  • 5:30pm – 6:00pm ET — Doors open and social half hour
  • 6:00pm – 8:30pm ET — BitDevs Socratic Seminar
  • 8:30pm ET — Departure

Parking / transport

  • Metro — Gallery Place–Chinatown (Red, Green, Yellow), one block from the venue; or Metro Center (Silver, Orange, Blue), about a 10-minute walk
  • Parking — multiple garages in Penn Quarter

Technical / Protocol

Bitcoin Core 31.1 + v32 Preview

Coldcard RNG Defect + HWI → Maintenance Mode

Formal Verification of Bitcoin Consensus

Equal-weight reading on parallel efforts — none is the “official” approach:

Covenants — CTV, OP_CAT, BIP 448

Governance / Mining

BIP-110 Failure, Ocean Split, Luke Dashjr Removed

Mining — Stratum V2, Poolin Bankruptcy

Lightning

LND, Core Lightning embargo binary, Taproot Assets

Policy / DC

CLARITY Act — Cloture Failed (Sept 15, 2026)

Senate cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 was rejected 49–50 (60 needed). The bill never reached floor debate on substance.

Suggested reading on why: ethics provisions around officials’ crypto profits; illicit-finance / non-custodial developer liability; stablecoin yield vs banks; state AG preemption — not primarily the SEC/CFTC split.

Alternative Implementations

Core derivatives

Longstanding alts

  • btcd — Go; mostly Lightning / infrastructure today (caveat: not a competing full-node culture)
  • libbitcoin — impressive IBD times recently; no UTXO model; still no node release

Independent engines

Privacy

Shielded Bitcoin — [[alloc] init], September 24, 2026 (critical reading)

Authors: Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov, Aleksei Moskvin.

Claim: Zcash-style private transfers on Bitcoin L1 with no soft fork — encrypted notes, nullifiers, ZK proofs published as Bitcoin carrier data; indexers deterministically replay state.

Critical take:

  • The paper only specifies the interior transfer protocol. Peg-in / peg-out are out of scope — i.e. the bridge between real BTC and the shielded inventory is deferred to PIPEs v2 (experimental witness encryption / AADP). That is where custody, inflation, and liveness risk concentrate.
  • Bitcoin consensus does not validate metaprotocol envelopes. Invalid blobs can confirm; “validity” is a software convention among wallets/indexers.
  • Indexers cannot steal keys under the model, but can censor, delay, or lie to clients that do not self-replay. Most users will not run full local replay.
  • Timing, fees, arity, and carrier metadata remain public; peg edges are the anonymity-set failure mode.
  • “No soft fork” reframes enforcement into exotic cryptography rather than Script — it does not make the hard problem go away.

Sources

Slides

Reading-room deck: /presentations/socratic-022/

Suggest topics for the next meeting

Use Suggest topics — submit a primary-source link via the form.