Kickoff

On-chain Price Interferometry

The UTXOracle project introduced a method for detecting the USD price of Bitcoin directly from on-chain data. This talk suggests we call this new discipline "on-chain price interferometry.” The idea is simple. To measure the declining purchasing power of the dollar, we can look at the average checkout amount at the grocery store. Over large sample sizes, supply and demand fluctuations average out, revealing the underlying depreciation of the currency itself. Now imagine the reverse: average checkout amounts that shrink over time. That pattern would indicate a currency gaining purchasing power. This is exactly what we observe with Bitcoin transactions on-chain. As Bitcoin’s purchasing power has risen, the average output amount has fallen because each transaction behaves like a checkout in a store. The relationship is so consistent that one can estimate the USD price of Bitcoin purely from the average output amount. From there, the estimate can be refined further: clusters of outputs form around round USD values such as $50 and $100. If we know how much Bitcoin corresponds to $100 in a transaction, we know the price used in that transaction. This talk will walk through how the method works, the results it has achieved so far, and the broader implications of having a reliable, purely on-chain measure of purchasing power.

Hashpools: One Year Development Update

Hashpool is an accountless mining pool that uses ecash to represent mining shares. Unlike account databases, ecash cryptographically blinds the user's identity, eliminates minimum payout thresholds, and creates a free market for trading mining shares. Hashpool's layered mining pool stack unlocks small community mining pools without sacrificing regular payouts. Reimagining the mining software stack from the ground up introduces a world of new design decisions. Learn about the project goals, engineering tradeoffs, open questions, and current state of development.

The Bitcoin Renaissance: A Miner's Perspective

The 2023 introduction of ordinals and BitVM ignited innovation across the Bitcoin network. This new wave of development was dubbed the “Bitcoin Renaissance” and reflects a definitive transformation of the protocol's underlying functionality and future scalability. This movement has sparked a surge in developer activity and a greater focus on enhancing utility—which, as a result, has caused Bitcoin to evolve rapidly and led to a proliferation of new use cases. Two years into the Renaissance, is it time to take a step back and consider the long-term implications for protocol users and miners.

Covenant Soft Forks

An overview of institutional custody technology and the need to improve security with opcodes like CTV

Open Source Mining

Skot is joined by Eco and Ryan from the 256Foundation to talk about their open source mining projects

Basics of Bitcoin Mining Firmware

A Bitaxe code tour, and the potential future goals of the Bitaxe project and some ideas for contributions.

Emulating covenants while minimizing trust

confidential-script-lib is a Rust library for emulating Bitcoin script by converting script path spends to key path spends. Intended for use inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), the library validates unlocking conditions and then authorizes the transaction using a deterministically derived private key. This approach enables confidential execution of complex script, including opcodes not yet supported by the Bitcoin protocol. The actual on-chain footprint is a minimal key-path spend, and it is compatible with rust-bitcoinkernel, or a fork thereof.