Topic suggestions

[harding]

Please post a comment with any suggested new topics. I'll add them to the list below if I plan to write a page for them eventually. Anyone can also open their own PR suggesting to add a topic.

• Proof of reserves (see BIP127 and earlier versions of BIP322)
• Betterhash / Stratum v2 / Braidpool
• v3 transaction relay
• X-only public keys
• LN pathfinding; instead see Missing entries around payment flows in the Topics list #1298
• LNURL
• Something like "efficient invoice encoding" to capture things like optimal QR encoding
• Annex
• CISA
• CLTV expiry delta
• OP_CAT (separate from OP_CSFS topic)
• Stuck funds problem
• BIP129 Bitcoin Secure Multisig Setup (BSMS)
• Weak blocks
• Data carrier transactions
• Ordinals
• BIP21
• Blind signing / ecash

Stretch goals: #721 (comment)

Original post: Including the mention in upcoming newsletter 187, it looks like we have at least a half-dozen mentions of proof of reserves, so it seems to warrant a topic page. See also, BIP127 and earlier versions of BIP322

[harding]

We should have a topic page for Betterhash (even though dead now) and Stratum v2. Maybe also Braidpool.

[harding]

v3 transaction relay

[harding]

x-only public keys

[LarryRuane]

v3 transaction relay

v2 I think you mean? https://bip324.com/

[murchandamus]

I think @harding may have been referring to @glozow's version-3 transaction proposal, not the v2 P2P transport protocol

[harding]

LN pathfinding (or some other topic where we can put pickhardt payments, LND mission control stuff, etc...)

[harding]

LNURL

[harding]

Something like "efficient invoice encoding" to capture all the times we've talked about encoding for QR codes and other stuff, including maybe LN invoices.

[harding]

Taproot annex (when we have three mentions; I expect we'll have two mentions as of the 2023-06-14 newsletter).

[harding]

Cross-input signature aggregation

[murchandamus]

I’ve gotten some requests to write “a BIP” about coin selection. Since that’s not something that different implementations need to coordinate on, I think it might be better to backfill the corresponding Optech topic page. I’d like to elaborate that page ~sooonish. What do you think?

[harding]

I’ve gotten some requests to write “a BIP” about coin selection. Since that’s not something that different implementations need to coordinate on, I think it might be better to backfill the corresponding Optech topic page. I’d like to elaborate that page ~sooonish. What do you think?

Sounds great! Our longest page currently is soft fork activations, which is pretty darn long, so you should feel comfortable writing long and detailed if you want. I don't think we currently have a way to add footnotes to topic entries; if that's something you're gonna want, let me know and I can add that to the layout.

I'm currently just starting the process of doing a general refresh of our topic pages, so both for @murchandamus and everyone else, here are some of the things I'm thinking about in case they would affect your work or you just have opinions about them:

• Adding an RSS feed to every topic page. So, for example, if you don't want to read every optech newsletter but you do want to learn about news related to a certain set of topics (e.g. coin selection), you can just subscribe to those topic's feeds. Before doing this, I have several topics I want to rename.
• Adding an RSS feed for each of our categories. Same thing as above, but a single feed will include all updates to any entry within that category (e.g., you can subscribe to the Privacy Enhancements feed to get info about both coinjoin and payjoin). Before doing this, I want to significantly rework our categories
• Adding category overview pages. Sort of like topic pages but covering a whole category, it will provide a summary of the category and links to important information. Again depends on a recategorization of existing topics
• For longer topic pages, I think we need a way to separate highlights from deep details. I don't have an exact endpoint in mind for this, but I'm thinking about starting out by allowing topic pages to have sub-pages, e.g. /en/topics/soft-fork-activation/history. A summary of the sub-page will be listed on the main page along with a link to the details.
• Integration with our podcasts, such as listing each episode where that topic was discussed in detail with a subject-matter expert

[harding]

• We seem to have mentioned "headers-first sync" a fair number of times. It's not something I would have thought to create a topic about (the work on it was done years ago), but if we're going to keep mentioning it, it might be worth a topic. Also, I wrote a bunch about it for Bitcoin.org and that content is currently hard to find, so I'd kinda like to resurface it.

• One or more topic pages for the John Law family of LN protocols. We've mentioned his stuff more than three times, with more mentions expected, but I'm not currently sure how to either group all of that together or how to split it into separate topics that each have three mentions. Anyway, putting it here so I think about it as part of my ongoing topics update initiative.

[murchandamus]

It was pointed out to me by Xavier Fiechter that we don’t have BIP329, and it looks like we have mentioned it in a few different newsletters already

[harding]

It was pointed out to me by Xavier Fiechter that we don’t have BIP329, and it looks like we have mentioned it in a few different newsletters already

https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/wallet-labels/

I went with a more generic topic (wallet labels versus BIP329 wallet label export), but that topic was created primarily to capture the discussion about BIP329. A PR is welcome to add BIP329 as an alias.

[harding]

CLTV expiry delta. See newsletter 274 for a list of many (but not all) previous places we've mentioned it.

[harding]

Separate OP_CAT into into own topic (its currently combined with OP_CSFS

[harding]

LN stuck funds problem, see:

https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2023/05/31/#eclair-2666
https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2020/02/19/#c-lightning-3500
Newsletter 276

[harding]

BIP129

[harding]

Weak blocks

[bitschmidty]

"data carrier transactions" via #1462

[bitschmidty]

"Ordinals" via #1364

[harding]

topic page for something like "Specification management" to track BIP and BINANA meta discussion

[harding]

DNS payment instructions as specified in BIP353, with relation to some other documentation (e.g. for LN).

[harding]

txid malleability (second party and third party), may be able to simply copy text from MB3E when its license switches to CC-BY-SA in November.

[harding]

DNS seeding and (hardcoded) seed nodes