Adversarial Thinking And Ways To Attack Bitcoin

A group of Bitcoin Core developers discussed various attack vectors for Bitcoin as well as ways to plan ahead and circumvent nefarious actors.

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The Release Of Bitcoin Core 23.0

The newest update to Bitcoin’s main reference implementation was recently released. The hosts of “Bitcoin, Explained” give important context for the change.

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Bitcoin Core 23.0 Released: What’s New

The newest version of Bitcoin’s original software launched by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 brings improvements on privacy, security and user experience.

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How Taro Brings Assets To Bitcoin Through Taproot And Lightning

Taro, a new protocol proposed by Lightning Labs, leverages Taproot and the Lightning Network to bring new assets and scalability to Bitcoin.

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Bitcoin Transactions COULD be Private, Ever Since It's Last Update - But NO EXCHANGES Are Implementing It...

Taproot, Bitcoin's most recent significant update, is more popular among wallets than among exchanges in the ecosystem.

This version included, among other things, privacy-oriented improvements, implying that legally regulated bitcoin (BTC) exchanges may not be greatly motivated to adopt it.

Taproot transactions, on the other hand, are supported by an increasing number of wallets, allowing users to receive or spend bitcoins. Taproot is used by 17 of the top 32 wallets for transferring or receiving bitcoins.

Exchanges Aren't Crazy About Taproot...

On the exchange side, Taproot's adoption isn't looking good, with one of the top 50 exchanges being a little-known P2P exchange (similar to localbitcoins) named Agoradesk.

Exchanges may be hesitant to accept bitcoin deposits sent to Taproot addresses because this feature of Bitcoin is known to promote user privacy while also preventing blockchain examination.

Why are exchanges avoiding it?

Because exchanges must comply with financial regulations in every nation where they operate, private transactions may put them in a position where they are asked to pass over information on a transaction, and do not have it.

What remains unclear is why some of these exchanges offer other privacy coins but not taproot for Bitcoin.

The best guess explanation I have for this is that privacy coins that have been listed for years don't upset enforcers nearly as much as converting Bitcoin from public to private, which may be viewed as a direct hostile move.

But It's Still Easily Accessible...

Find one of the many wallets that support taproot transactions for Bitcoin, and you'll just need to take the step of transferring your Bitcoin from an exchange, to your wallet, then sending it out. 

You should be keeping your BTC on a wallet you control anyway.

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Author: Justin Derbek
New York News Desk / Global Crypto Press
Breaking Crypto News

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BitMEX Adds Bitcoin Taproot Support

Users of the trading platform can now save in fees by withdrawing their funds into Taproot addresses.

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Litecoin Will Soon Be Capable Of Transactions as Private As Monero!

On the official Litecoin Foundation blog, the Litecoin Core 0.21.2 version was revealed, along with the Taproot upgrade for Litecoin (LTC) and details of the Mimblewimble Extension Block (MWEB).

So, when will the upgrade take place? Unfortunately, not right away. The first step will be a voting process in which each miner will vote on whether or not they support the implementation of MWEB, which requires a 75 percent majority to pass.

Only miners that have upgraded to Litecoin Core 0.21.2 will be eligible to vote.

Privacy You Can Use, or Not...

Countries such as South Korea have outlawed the usage of cryptocurrencies like Monero and ZCash, which allow for anonymous fund transfers thanks to their high levels of anonymity.

As a result, users of Litcoin now have the option of performing an untraceable transaction or a regular transfer as previously.

Private Bitcoin Coming?

The same technology being used to turn Litecoin into a privacy coin years after its release could be applied to Bitcoin as well, it's all open source and available if the community wishes. There's a growing number of Bitcoin users saying they would support it.

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Author: Fernando Perez
Latin America Newsdesk | Mexico City
Breaking Crypto News

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JoinMarket Lead Adam Gibson Sees A Bright Future For Bitcoin Mixing

Adam Gibson, aka Waxwing, is the lead maintainer for one of Bitcoin’s most prolific CoinJoin projects. And he sees a bright future for transaction privacy.

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Lightning Speed: Taproot And The Lightning Network, A Match Made In Heaven

A little more than two months ago, Taproot went live. What does the biggest update to the Bitcoin network in years bring to the table? How can it help the increasingly popular Lightning Network? That’s exactly what the article we’re about to summarize is about. It starts by informing us that “Bitcoin even has a scripting language,” and that it’s called Script. Related Reading | Number Of Bitcoin Lightning Network Nodes Jumps 23% In Three Months But before we get into that, what is Taproot? “Taproot is a combination of three Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) that enhance this scripting infrastructure: BIP340 – Schnorr, BIP341- Taproot and BIP342 – Tapscript. The key of Taproot that unlocks all the others is the introduction of Schnorr Signatures, which allow for key and signature aggregation. This means that multiple parties are able combine their keys to a single public key, thereby allowing them to sign a single message.” It’s important to know that Taproot won’t allow “fully expressive” or “Turing complete” contracts like in Ethereum and all its related chains. Nor are those kinds of contracts a priority for the Bitcoin network, as our sister site Bitcoinist points out. Also, to curb our expectations, let’s read what Tales From The Crypt podcast’s host Marty Bent warned us about in his newsletter: “It is important to understand that these benefits aren’t going to be immediate. They are going to come to market slowly over time as the software gets implemented into wallets and other services. Many are expecting Taproot to get activated over the weekend and all its potential benefits to be realized immediately. This is simply not the case and it is important that this fact is understood.” Ok, let’s get into the meat and potatoes. How Does Taproot Help The Lightning Network? First of all, every Lightning channel consists of “2 of 2 multisigs”. So, a first benefit of being “able combine their keys to a single public key” is that “we have lighter transactions and therefore cheaper channel openings”. Not only that but “signature aggregation also offers enhanced privacy since its contents are indistinguishable from a single-signature transaction.” To clear up how does this benefit privacy, let’s quote the Binance Academy: “Spending Bitcoin using Taproot could make a transaction in a Lightning Network channel, a peer-to-peer transaction, or a sophisticated smart contract become indistinguishable. Anyone monitoring one of these transactions would see nothing but a peer-to-peer transaction. It’s worth noting, though, that this doesn’t change the fact that the wallets of the initial sender and final recipient will be exposed.” However, this is not quite true… yet. The Voltage article clarifies, “Does this mean that lightning channels are now unidentifiable on the blockchain? Well, the answer is ‘yes’ for private channels and ‘not quite yet’ for public channels.” BTC price chart for 01/04/2021 on Gemini | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com Private And Public Lightning Network Channels What’s the problem? Well, the network doesn’t announce the creation of private channels. The public ones, on the other hand: “Unfortunately, even if we do hide the channel openings on the blockchain, the current specification of the lightning protocol requires nodes to broadcast the details of the funding transactions when announcing their channels. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but it’s also an elegant way to prevent nodes spamming the network with fake channels.” Related Reading | How Big Is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network? The Answer Will Surprise You Also, let’s take into account that surveillance firm Chainalysis already announced a Lightning Network-related service. We should assume there are “sybil nodes surveilling the network”. And that “With enough hostile nodes” a bad actor could paint “a fairly detailed picture of the flow of funds”. Well, Taproot has an elegant solution for that: “Taproot’s introduction of Schnorr signatures paves the way for a type of smart contract called Point Time Locked Contracts (PTLCs). PTLCs operate in the same manner as HTLCs by allowing payments to be identified by nodes, but PTLCs come with a handy feature of being able to randomize its identifier with each hop thereby making it impossible for nodes to correlate the traffic of sending and receiving nodes.” Understand that “Taproot is a door that opens many other doors”. It’s a new toolkit with which developers all over the world will create new features and improvements. The info this article contains is just the beginning, the low-hanging fruit that we can see from our advantage point. Remember what Marty Bent said, “these benefits aren’t going to be immediate.” The Taproot-enabled stage of Bitcoin is just starting. Featured Image by Cooper Baumgartner on Unsplash | Charts by TradingView

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How Taproot Brings Major Benefits To Bitcoin Hardware Wallets

While we’ve explored Taproot before, here we pay particular attention to how the upgrade will impact hardware wallets.

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Upgrading The Behemoth That Is The Bitcoin Blockchain

Bitcoin has undergone many improvements over the years — and not without its share of controversy.

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JoinMarket Vs. ZeroLink And The Road To Decentralized Bitcoin Privacy Through CoinJoin

While ZeroLink CoinJoin implementations are generally more popular, the JoinMarket project has potential to offer decentralized and truly private Bitcoin mixing.

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Taproot Kicks Jevons Paradox For Bitcoin UTXOs Into Another Gear

The activation of Taproot will make bitcoin UTXOs more efficient, and much more widely used.

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Cash App To Add Bitcoin Taproot Support By December

Cash App users will be able to send bitcoin to Taproot-enabled wallets by December 1, 2021.

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Bitcoin’s Taproot is Live. What’s Next for Bitcoin (BTC)?

With the Taproot upgrade now up and running, what should we expect from Bitcoin in the near future?

Continue reading Bitcoin’s Taproot is Live. What’s Next for Bitcoin (BTC)? at DailyCoin.com.

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Taproot-Bitcoin’s First Upgrade in Four Years

One of the greatest improvements is Bitcoin privacy.  Core developer Greg Maxwell suggested Taproot. The Bitcoin network’s largest update in

The post has appeared first on thenewscrypto.com

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Bitcoin’s Taproot Has Been Activated. What to Expect from the Network Upgrade

After a four year wait, on Sunday, November 14th, Taproot was activated at block 709,632, signaling the start of a new era for Bitcoin.

Continue reading Bitcoin’s Taproot Has Been Activated. What to Expect from the Network Upgrade at DailyCoin.com.

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Crypto Flipsider News – Bitcoin Taproot Goes Live, SHIB Gets New Listings, Forte Raises $725M, Opensea’s Volumes Double

Read Friday's breaking news in the daily digest!

Continue reading Crypto Flipsider News – Bitcoin Taproot Goes Live, SHIB Gets New Listings, Forte Raises $725M, Opensea’s Volumes Double at DailyCoin.com.

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Bitcoin's Taproot Upgrade Goes Live: Here are Expected Changes

The Bitcoin Network's Taproot Upgrade has gone live at a block height of 709,632. (Read More)

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First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Drifts Lower After Taproot Upgrade; Ether Drops

Good morning, Here’s what’s happening this morning: Market Moves: Bitcoin’s highly anticipated Taproot upgrade fails to produce any noticeable price pop. Technician’s take: Short-term upside appears to be limited given the loss of positive momentum. Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis. Prices Bitcoin (BTC): $64,514 […]

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