Hey everyone,

Dealing with those long Bitcoin addresses is such a pain, and I’m wondering if there's anything like ENS (you know, "yourname.eth") but for Bitcoin something that makes BTC addresses easy to remember and use.

I’ve heard a bit about Bitcoin Naming Service (BNS), but I'm not sure if it's legit or widely adopted. Plus, I don’t really like that the domain expires after 5 years, and you’re always kind of tied to them. Anyone got experience with BNS or know of something better for Bitcoin addresses?

Thanks in advance!

I dont know if there are any flaws with bitcoin but there are definitely flaws with the underlying architecture that bitcoin is used on which are just waiting to be found. Are any issues with underlying software or hardware looked into or are there any measures in place which can make sure that bitcoin wont be compromised through any such ways?

Hosted by: SALT, Kraken, and the University of Wyoming Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation.

The event kicked off with Anthony Scaramucci sharing his cell phone number (917-439-3646) and speaking alongside David Ripley, the CEO of Kraken, an exchange where you can buy and sell digital assets. Ripley, a University of Illinois alum, has been involved in crypto since 2013. He emphasized two key messages:

David Ripley - CEO of Kraken UIUC alum been in crypto since 2013.

His two messages were

1)The U.S. is falling behind in crypto innovation and is no longer a leader in the space.

2. Innovation is crucial for both business growth and development.He believes the cycles are becoming more muted, (not as drastic highs and lows)

Ripley noted that crypto cycles are becoming more muted (less drastic in highs and lows). He highlighted that this year, over 50% of hedge funds have some exposure to the Bitcoin ETF, although their crypto allocations remain small. He anticipates more adoption within the next two years, especially from pension and sovereign funds. Kraken is focused on attracting more institutional and retail investors as they expand their global presence. He also sees the Middle East gradually entering the crypto space and expects another situation like FTX could occur.

Salman Khan, CFO of Marathon Digital (a global Bitcoin miner)

Khan discussed the backlog of large utility-scale projects expected to power data centers and noted increased interest from institutional investors. He predicted that energy harvesting businesses will replace traditional utility-scale Bitcoin mining within the next 4-8 years. Currently, they heat 11,000 homes in Finland through Bitcoin mining.

Amy Oldenborg, Head of Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley:

Oldenborg advised reading the fine print regarding Morgan Stanley's recent announcement allowing registered clients to offer Bitcoin ETFs. This offering is only for taxable brokerage accounts, which represents a small part of their business but is still a significant first step.

Joseph Chalom, Managing Director at BlackRock:

Chalom is part of BlackRock’s small digital asset team and helped grow and scale the Aladdin platform. He emphasized that client demand drives everything they do. While not everyone is interested, BlackRock aims to offer crypto services in safe ways for those who are. He mentioned that clients are interested in tokenizing various assets, including buildings and income streams. Chalom also pointed out the need for a regulator-accepted digital identity solution and stressed BlackRock’s responsibility to educate the industry on crypto.

Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton ($1.6 trillion asset manager):

Johnson is the third-generation leader of Franklin Templeton, which her grandfather founded. They have tokenized a money market fund, participate in staking, and have a venture capital fund investing in the crypto space. She predicts that ETFs will eventually be tokenized. Johnson’s main focus is on blockchain and AI as disruptive technologies and emerging trends.

Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024, or the BITCOIN Act of 2024….

TL:DR The Bitcoin Act is trying to create a Bitcoin reserve to manage the federal government's holdings of Bitcoin. They will provide a transparent purchasing plan for Bitcoin which would be held and potentially be used to reduce our nation’s debt.

“To establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and other programs to ensure the transparent management of Bitcoin holdings of the Federal Government, to offset costs utilizing certain resources of the Federal Reserve System, and for other purposes.” Direct Text from the Bill

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: This will create the SBR or the “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” which includes decentralized secure storage facilities across the U.S. This reserve would be managed by the Secretary of Treasury (which is basically America's money manager) to keep Bitcoin and the private keys safe.

Bill Text “The Secretary shall establish 5 a decentralized network of secure Bitcoin storage facilities 6 distributed across the United States, collectively to be 7 known as the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the cold storage age of Government Bitcoin holdings.”

Bitcoin Purchase Program: The government will buy 200,000 Bitcoin per year for 5 years, with scheduled buying to avoid market disruptions (which they will publish prior). Totaling 1Million Bitcoins.

Individual Sates: States can also store their Bitcoin holdings in the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, keeping ownership of their holdings separate from other accounts. They would also keep any airdrops or forks associated with their Bitcoin.

Funding: The Federal Reserve (which is like the central bank of the United States) sometimes has extra money lying around called surplus funds. The Bitcoin Bill suggests taking some money from this surplus fund to buy Bitcoin and build storage facilities. Not all the surplus funds will be used, just most of it.

The Federal Reserve earns money from investing, and some of this money goes to the U.S Treasury. From 2025 to 2029, $6 billion from these earnings will be used to buy Bitcoin.

The Federal Reserve also will revalue its gold holdings and use the difference in value to fund the Bitcoin program. (no idea how this works or the process but will basically use those earnings to also buy Bitcoin.)

The Goal: Hold onto this Bitcoin for at least 20 years to help reduce our nation's unchecked spending. (Unless they decide to sell some to pay off debt, then they could do that) By diversifying their assets, they can strengthen the U.S. dollar.

Bonus: She is also helping the University of Wyoming establish a Bitcoin College Department.

The One Thing: Consolidation of Government Bitcoin Holdings. The bill plans to consolidate Bitcoin holdings, including approximately 210,000 Bitcoin seized from the illegal dark web site Silk Road, into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. These Bitcoins were seized due to their involvement in illegal activities. People may be split on this; can the government really seize and repurpose your Bitcoin to pay down debt? Idk I’m not a lawyer……

TLDR: Trump is all in on Digital assets, Senator Lummis introduces the Bitcoin Reserve Bill, RFK Jr., and Michael Saylor want the U.S Govt to buy Bitcoin, VP Kamala Harris sends a letter to DNC, and BTC conference 2025 will be in Vegas.

1. Michale Saylor, CEO of a large software company, who started to hold Bitcoin instead of cash gave a speech.

• Says the U.S Govt. should own a majority of the BTC supply.
• He stated that the U.S Department of Justice has custody of 200,000 BTC

2. RFJ Jr. gave a talk as well, who could hold a position in Trump's party.

• He says he’ll make the U.S Govt. Buy $615m in BTC
• Wants it to match the U.S. gold reserves ($543B)
• He has previously said he wants to get rid of BTC Capital Gain Taxes

3. Senator Synthia Lummis or the “Bitcoin Senator” introduces a bill (that has a long way before becoming real) for the U.S to build a Bitcoin Reserve Bill with secure storage vaults, and visible purchase programs and over the next 5 years to own 5% of the worlds BTC supply. She wants to hold the Bitcoin for 20 years to help reduce the US debt.

4. Former and current Republican nominee Donald. J. Trump gave a speech at the conference. He made some bold statements that would be wonderful for digital assets if they became true.

• He wants the U.S Govt to keep 100% of the BTC it owns (not sure how people will feel since the BTC they own was seized)
• Create a National BTC stockpile
• Fire Gary Gensler (SEC chair who’s hurting digital assets in the USA)
• “Mined, Minted and Made in the USA”
• 1st president to accept Bitcoin as a donation.
• Will kill any CBDC plans (CBDC is a government currency that people think is overreaching)

5. Cantor-Fitzgerald's CEO (a longtime New York investment firm that was devastated by 9/11) gave a speech as well.

• He says Cantor-Fitzgerald owns “a shit ton of Bitcoin”
• He stated that Cantor and all of its partners are a fan of Bitcoin
• He argues that BTC should be treated the same as gold

Digital assets are increasingly becoming a political issue, for good or bad. In what seems like a response to the Republican party speaking favorably of Digital assets, Democrats wrote to the DNC party (Democratic National Party, the people behind who’s supporting Kamala Harris who’s running against Trump) asking them to stop being so anti-crypto.

Is this generally correct?

Background: Bitcoin transactions are verified pretty fast, typically around 10 minutes, but at worst take a few hours. The Lightning Network speeds up Bitcoin transactions.

On-chain vs Off-chain, what’s the difference?

On-chain: Transactions that happen on the original Bitcoin Blockchain. Slower, more expensive, more secure, and has transparency.

Off-chain: Transactions that happen on the side of the blockchain. Typically faster, cheaper, not as secure, and has less transparency.

*Off-chain transactions typically use technologies called L2’s or layer 2’s. This just means you have your original Network, like the Bitcoin blockchain that nearly everyone uses. This is a Laye 1 or L1. Then these technologies are built on top of these L1 networks and work with the original blockchain but do most of their transactions on the side on this L2.

The “lightning network” is a technology built on top of Bitcoin. Some smart group created this “thing” or software that basically was built on top of how Bitcoin works. Instead of taking 10 minutes and costing a couple of dollars, it sends in seconds and costs pennies.

How? In short, instead of using the Bitcoin Network for every transaction, you’re kinda transacting on the side, or “off-chain” then eventually going back to the original Bitcoin network.

Now, what’s the catch? It’s technically not as secure as the original Bitcoin network, and it could be difficult to set up.

Heres a very technical explanation of it if you want to dig deeper.

So, The Lightning Network is software built on Bitcoin that is faster and cheaper but less secure, that eventually goes back to the original Bitcoin network.

I discovered Bitcoin in the fall of 2010, when a friend who paid his rent playing online poker, knowing I was something of an alternative currency geek, forwarded me a forum post describing a new “crypto currency” project and concept. I spent a weekend tumbling down the rabbit hole, feeling floored by how it so elegantly solved many of the core issues of previous attempts at online money like (OG) E-gold and Liberty Dollar, and it resonated with my late-adolescent ideological influences of aughts libertarian Austrian economics blended with the more left-leaning anti-authoritarianism of crypto-anarchism. At that point there weren’t really exchanges yet, so we hatched a plan to set up a short-lived online shop that accepted Bitcoin, and I soon had some skin in the game.

The subsequent few years were heady. I co-edited a short-lived virtual business journal with other anonymous participants. I ran a mining script in the background on my laptop’s CPU while working in coffee shops, and, when that became laughably obsolete, bought a Block Erupter usb stick that I half-jokingly treated as an office space-heater. I lost chunks that felt small then (but large now) when the early progenitors of the sleek modern crypto behemoths broke their paths then face-planted, paving the way for exchanges, product marketplaces, and DeFi.

I could go on, but such reminiscing quickly starts to give off the vibe of the Blade Runner C-beams speech. The point is that I spent four or five heady years as a true believer, really in the thick of it. While there was certainly a welcome side-effect that there was money to be made, it was not the core motivation that drove me and many others in the early community.

Years later, I stumbled upon an essay titled The Lonely Old Bitcoin Miner Touches Eternity which, to this day, feels like the most accurate expression of the spirit of that moment. The idea of “infrastructural mutualism”, in which all the participants in this new monetary commons could contribute to, and benefit from, its success, stood in stark contrast to the privileged systems revealed by the 2008 financial crisis referenced in the Genesis block. When I sat in a coffee shop CPU mining in the spring of 2011, I was not just making a few cents off their electricity. I was putting my shoulder to the wheel for a future that, if not utopian, was a hell of a lot better than what we were living through in the days when the precursors to the Occupy movement were simmering toward their boiling point.

I first really felt the loss of that spirit while traveling in 2014. Previously, when I’d found other Bitcoin people, there was an instant sense of comradery of folks working on bootstrapping a shared project with intelligence and hacker zeal. When I dropped by the NYC Bitcoin Center near Wall Street, I found something different. Rather than finding a nest of nerds with a shared enthusiasm, the welcome was not hostile, but cool, and it quickly became apparent that this was a financial-first scene. I quickly made my exit after exchanging a few pleasantries, and that marked a turning point for me.

While I still held the vision and architecture in high regard, my sense of belonging to a community that I valued in the Bitcoin space quickly dissipated. I became more of a passive ride-along than an active advocate, and my hope for Bitcoin as a possible driver of real positive structural change dwindled. As the markets swung up and down over the years, I would use the bull runs to liquidate a portion of my holdings, and downturns to stock back up, motivated into a disciplined approach by the desire to make donations and impact investments into things that were more in alignment with the world I wanted to see as my brain, worldview, and politics continued to mature.

I remained in that mode for the better part of a decade, but a sense of dissonance was growing. It recently came to a head when, following the run-up to Super Tuesday primary, I decided to poke around in the prediction market space. Prediction markets were one of the ideas breathlessly discussed in the early days, and I found one running on the Polygon network that seemed quite active. This, in turn, led me down a rabbit hole on Ethereum and its developments, which I’d never followed too closely.

I ultimately ended up at the realization that the Ethereum ecosystem has actualized many of the “infrastructural mutualist” dreams that animated the early Bitcoin community. Where Proof-of-Work mining became a capital-intensive arms-race that excluded the vast majority of users from participating after a few years, Ethereum staking is accessible to anyone willing to put some financial skin-in-the-game without having to run incredibly specialized hardware.

Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake also deals with the somewhat dystopian energy-use reality of PoW mining in a world where energy consumption is one of the existential questions for our species. I’ve come to recognize the arguments about spare renewables capacity utilization as cope. If the only way to secure a network to your satisfaction is to burn so much energy that it pushes the world towards one of the more horrifying climate models, one should question whether such true trustlessness is desirable, or if we should look to more nuanced models of trust and power.

Finally, the Ethereum ecosystem (including layer 2s, etc.) seems to be where the actually interesting applications that were dreamed of in the early bitcointalk.com days are becoming reality. For the first time in a long time, crypto feels again to me like a place where fascinating, creative new things can be built, not just a place to make money and watch the line going up and down.

So. After a 14 year run, this lonely old Bitcoin miner has decided to bid farewell. I’ve learned a huge amount, made some good money, and would do it all again. Now, though, Bitcoin’s utility to me has reached its limits, and it’s time to explore new horizons.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Hello everyone,

We've been working on a project for the last two years, and we're finally launching pretty soon! The app, called "Workit," is arguably the best Bitcoin earning platform out there. You can earn sats by walking, running, cycling, rowing, or just exercising. Also, by watching ads and shopping at partner shops. What sets our project apart are the unique "Challenges," where you can compete with thousands of users and win Bitcoin if you complete the challenge milestones.

It's possible to double your Bitcoin stack every week! Workit is also a complete Lightning Wallet, offering both custodial and non-custodial solutions. On top of this, you can get into the best shape of your life with Workit, as we offer comprehensive workout programs and nutrition plans, including options for personalized plans.

We're pretty excited about this. We've been working under the radar, so there's no buzz at all—we are bootstrapped. We would really appreciate it if you guys could give us a follow on Twitter. We'll be doing a Bitcoin giveaway quite soon to celebrate our mainnet launch!

Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/Workit_LN
App Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workit-earn-bitcoin-fitness/id1570096202

Our app can also be downloaded from the App Store (but it's still on Testnet), if anyone wants to get a feel of what Workit is like.

Thanks in advance!

After listening to some podcasts at bitcoin audible, I realized that a lot of bitcoin maxis have a libertarian mindset (totally anti-government)
Is this the way to go? Is it a good idea to have no state and organize everything by the "market"? Social Darwinism? Does this kind of thinking really provide more freedom/benefits for the people? For me, it sounds like chaos and the informed early adopter will form an Elite. The rest will get rect.
I also realized that libertarian economists like Hans-Hermann Hoppe are connected to far right parties like the German AFD.
As European, a government without social securities (healthcare/education/ unemployment benefit/...) sounds like survival of the fittest.
What are your thoughts?

This guy thinks that it will, and that in turn will destroy Bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZHGBUMMrCo

I understand that many people are frustrated by ordinals raising fees on the bitcoin blockchain.
I suspect that that is not the case.
Take a look at what the ordinal people have to say for themselves.
https://ordpool.space/block/00000000000000000002a92452e76276c040517078bf71e1a0a8f0071d546b3d
Most of the big nasty transactions which should have $1000 "mouth-watering" jpeg art are actually just wasted transactions.
I'm going to define wasted transaction as one of three things:
A split of a large UTXO into hundreds of smaller UTXO's that aren't for an exchange.
A joining of several small UTXO's into one or two large UTXO's.
A transaction where the fees spent is more than the bitcoin received.
Someone alerted me to https://mempool.space/mining/pool/ocean so I took a look.
Here is their known address: 37dvwZZoT3D7RXpTCpN2yKzMmNs2i2Fd1n
Note that they only have received four block rewards which is over $1 million dollars at the time of writing.
Now I'm going to be lenient on miners because they do need to spread out their rewards to their pool members so the first type of transaction is out.
This is a very bad transaction that is being sent to the miner:
aa9264b9f8d1bcb91309c626ea1b6af257b2287f2ebcc7648ffdb589b2c41e61
Note that it is the third type where more than 90% of the sent value go to fees. I thought it was a wasted transaction. However it was actually a note within an ordinal:
-------
Dear Luke Dashjr, here’s why I want to join the u/TaprootWizards:
With each halvening, Bitcoin's future will depend more and more on transaction fees. Use cases which support transaction fees (and miner revenue) are ultimately good for Bitcoin and will drive additional innovation to L2s and other types of scaling solutions. Ordinals did not create this problem, it merely highlighted it. The Taproot Wizards understand that better than most, and I believe in their mission and Bitcoin's future.
Thanks for storing our wizard JPEGs on your node forever! 🧙‍♂️
u/marshallmixing
P.S. Please stop eating cats
-------
These two transactions are actually wasted and also are related to the Ocean pool:
64f96a2597168ee377a281add7a1d1e354ae55796f4ffeaabe7583b3a4f69e4c
fa455634ad8bb647bbbab5b2837d4e65abadc2ad3f0b4ce9d73025b535e75ad6
-------
Conclusion: It would be worthwhile for a chain analyst to actually see if many of these wasted transactions are coming from mining pools. If small miners can figure out which pools are not colluding then they can join those pools that aren't wasting their precious revenue on increasing fees. They can also form new pools that do not perform wasted transactions. Small miners leaving large pools could be also good for decentralization.
Hopefully this can become a temporary phenomenon and fees can come back down.

How will proof of reserves be done when the US bitcoin spot ETF's get approved? How can one trust that "paper" bitcoin is not being sold instead of the real thing?

I have experience with building on top of Ethereum and I want to learn how to build on top of bitcoin. I have searched on Google regarding it, but the only thing I get is tutorials on how to be rich with it. anyone who can provide any good resource or a roadmap to do it. (related to Bitcoin lightning network preferable)

‎S‎o‎ I‎'‎m co‎m‎‎pletely n‎‎ew to the cryptocurr‎ency scene and aft‎er reading‎ onli‎ne resour‎ces for d‎ays I still can‎'t ‎wrap ‎my he‎ad around it. So I get that i‎t's d‎ecen‎tralised, so does that me‎an every singl‎e devi‎ce that use‎s bitcoin‎ has the entire set of‎ ledger‎s ev‎er created? Wouldn't that be h‎ugel‎y inef‎‎ficient and i‎mpractical? How are updat‎es roll‎ed out? If >‎50‎% of‎ bitcoi‎n users just‎ decide not to adopt a new up‎date, does it just ‎fail? And back ‎to the topic of hosting every sing‎le ledger in every d‎evice that uses bitcoin, ev‎en if the blockc‎hains are insurm‎ount‎ably sm‎all and even a million‎ blockchai‎ns would somehow be‎ as large as a small image‎ file, what about ordin‎al ‎N‎FT‎s, the b‎itcoin equ‎ivalent of the ether‎eum N‎FT‎, how are they going‎ to be host‎ed? So‎rry if‎ I see‎m‎ incred‎ibly du‎m‎‎b f‎or a‎skin‎‎g‎ th‎is, I just suck at lea‎rn‎ing n‎ew thi‎ngs I guess.‎‎

We all now know that Ledger has a way of extracting our private keys from our hard wallets, im sure any hard wallet can do the same just by changing the code, how dumb have we been to trust ledger when the entire crypto market is supposed to be trustless.

I am looking for alternatives instead of ledger and I've come across trezor and they say its open source, etc, but what stops the gov or someone in power from forcing trezor to change the code and they can immediately extract our seeds and take our crypto? Yes its open source, but to change the code and extract our keys and take our crypto can all happen a lot quicker than anyone noticing a change in the source code. There has to be a better way to truly store our crypto without any trust from anyone.

How did satoshi or any of the early bitcoin miners store their bitcoin, what did they do, did satoshi give any hints on how to store our bitcoin?

Planning to go cold storage next payday. I was more or less sold on the BitBox2 until I just learnt about Blockstream Jade which comes at half the price. Why would Bitbox (or other wallet options) be preferable to Blockstream Jade?

[Hodlin since 2020, pre-intermediate level btc knowledge, looking for first hardware device to learn with, planning to sit on my hodlings for at least 5 years, planning to DCA for the next 5 years or until I'm so far in the green that I dont want to lower my average cost any further, confused that Blockstream Jade doesn't have a secure element but still seems highly regarded in terms of security]

At the moment I'm writing this I was checking mempool.space and for my surprise (yeah I'm kinda new to this) there just TWO blocks in the mempool, and less than 1.000 incoming transactions. Actually I'm used to see a lot of transactions. Someone know if this happens due to the upcoming increase in the difficulty in 4 hours or this is just something usual on Bitcoin?

Look this.

Okay I don't know if I'm going to make sense when writing this because I don't know the exact question. But basically, how do you send/receive bitcoin without any of the countless wallet options there are now.

What if I wanted to sign transactions with my private key without using a wallet? Is it even possible?

Hi, this is a question that has been on my mind for a while. Cross-Input Signature Aggregation has been something that Bitcoin will likely eventually get. It'll allow you to only provide one signature for a transaction (instead of one per input), making large coinjoins (or even exchanges consolidating UTXOs) significantly cheaper.

But reading about it, it seems that it would require introducing a new output type, as it will be incompatible with the current P2TR output.

The issue I see is that first of, this would introduce a new output type (compromises privacy). Should Taproot have been perhaps delayed until CISA? That way the incentive for upgrading to Taproot would be greater too (huge fee reductions, switching from legacy->Taproot-CISA would probably have yielded 70-90% fee reduction for exchanges and other users with large amount of UTXOs), which would be a win for privacy since Taproot addresses can be multisig, or script addresses, or just a simple singlesig, so more users using it would lead to more privacy for everybody.

I just finished listening to TIP's episode BTC104, and they brought up how there is speculation on the price of Bitcoin hitting $5mil or more if the globe fully adopts it as a main currency. Assuming the math adds up, I just don't understand how we will get there, specifically because of the few BTC addresses that hold crazy amounts of BTC (the whales).

If many of the governments of the world sign up for putting BTC on their balance sheets, they must realize that with world adoption, they are pumping up these whales' balances to astronomically high values. Like, in the magnitude of quadrillions of dollars in value. That seems like a strong disincentive, if not a deal-breaker, for BTC world adoption. Can anyone fill me in on what the big brains are thinking here?

One class of protocols that I mention in the appendices of http://bitcoinrollups.org are what I call “validia chains”. Validia chains share similarities with both sidechains and validity rollups, with interesting tradeoffs.

I wrote a blog post comparing these different protocols here: https://lightco.in/2022/11/03/validia-chains/

I'd be interested in getting feedback from folks about the possibility of adding support for validia chains to bitcoin, either as higher layers built on rollups, or even as a standalone L2 alternative to rollups.

Today I am publishing "Validity Rollups on Bitcoin", a report I wrote during my participation in the Human Rights Foundation's ZK-Rollup Research Fellowship.

Here's the preface:

Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto first publicly announced bitcoin, its supporters, critics, and skeptics alike have questioned how the protocol would scale as usage increases over time. This question is more important than ever today, as blocks are increasingly full or close to full of transactions. So-called "Layer 2" (L2) protocols such as the Lightning Network have been deployed to take some transaction volume "offchain" but even Lightning needs to use some bitcoin block space. It's clear that as bitcoin is adopted by more and more of the world's population (human and machine alike!) more block space will be needed. Another thread of inquiry concerns whether bitcoin's limited scripting capabilities help or hinder its value as electronic cash. Researchers and inventors have shown that the electronic cash transactions first made possible by bitcoin could be given new form by improving transaction privacy, supporting new types of smart contracts, and even creating entirely new blockchain-based assets.

One of the results of the decade-plus research into scaling and expanding the capabilities of blockchains such as bitcoin is the invention of the validity rollup. Given the observed benefits that validity rollups have for the blockchains that have already implemented them, attention now turns to the question of whether they would be beneficial for bitcoin and existing bitcoin L2 protocols such as Lightning, too. We explore this question by examining validity rollups from several angles, including their history, how they work on a technical level, how they could be built on bitcoin, and what the benefits, costs, and risks of building them on bitcoin might be. We conclude that validity rollups have the potential to improve the scalability, privacy, and programmability of bitcoin without sacrificing bitcoin's core values or functionality as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Given the "trustless" nature of validity rollups as cryptographically-secured extensions of their parent chain, and given bitcoin's status as the most secure settlement layer, one could even say these protocols are a perfect match for one another.

You can find the full report here:

https://bitcoinrollups.org

This sounds super cool. Basically sounds like a way to reduce initial block download and sync to 0. Since blockchain storage, UTXO set memory usage, and IBD bandwidth are the biggest througput bottlenecks, this project could be a huge step towards being able to safely increase the block size by potentially 5X-10X.

If the rule is heaviest (most zeros in all of hashes) and not simply longest chain of blocks, doesn't that allow the chain to be reorged from an earlier block with "mega-difficulty" blocks; causing nodes to follow a chain with a lower total block height?

For example, imagine I had a supercomputer (just a thought experiment) more powerful than the entire BTC network and able to compute the entire chain in 1 hour. If I then started mining a 100-long chain that is heavier than the entire 742,818 blocks of BTC on top of block 2, will BTC nodes now jump over to the 103-long chain because it is heavier? Will they all start mining on a "latest block" with a timestamp of "2009-01-11 10:31" ?

If everyone decides to follow a minority chain, it will eventually become the longest (most CPU), so what is the point? Aren't we just following ourselves? What's so special then about Proof of Work then? Can't we just follow ourselves without wasting energy?

Bitcoin uses elliptic curve encryption to produce public keys.

Due to this, addresses for which the public key is known will be very easily cracked using quantum computing anywhere in the next 5 - 50 years.

Solutions to this problem are partial and/or would anyways have a devastating impact on Bitcoin liquidity, price, and potentially to its supremacy as cryptocurrency of choice.

This is true because even if a new encryption mechanism such as XMSS was introduced, and all users moved their funds newly generated quantum resistant addresses, an enormous amount of coins would be left behind, waiting to be unlocked by a quantum attacker.

Even if a hard fork took place to arbitrarily ban addresses that were not migrated on time, this would seriously interfere with the perception of Bitcoin being an immutable store of value.

Transactions are transparently stored on the blockchain.

Since transaction history can be exactly reconstructed, coins coming from tainted transactions remain tainted forever. Transactions can be marked as illicit by any powerful enough external entity (individuals, companies, governments).

Since the concept of "illicit" varies from society to society, not always matching with your idea of good and bad, this characteristic allows external interference to alter the value of specific units of account with respect to other ones.

As an example, Hitler would have been glad to identify "tainted" bitcoins coming from Jews or political enemies, excluding them from commercial activity by law, and punishing anyone who transacted with them.

While some degree of privacy can be optionally obtained using mixers, coinjoin, and other methods, this is far very from ideal. Partial obscurity is never enough (how much partial? how much of the surrounding information would be enough to raise the curtain of uncertainty?)

Ironically, coinjoined transactions can mix untainted coins with tainted ones, so that a user may input a good coin and receive a bad one, and vice versa. Since coinjoin transactions can be identified observing the blockchain, third parties may also refuse to accept sats coming from mixers tout court, just to be safe with regulations (good regulations or hitlerian regulations, doesn't matter).

Hence, 1 btc does not equal 1 btc.

Wether or not this is a good thing remains out of the scope. What I want to say is bitcoin is very weakly fungible. Definitely less fungible than Monero, but also less than gold!