Latest Strikes 21 - Jan. 23rd-29th 2023

Hello it's a me! Welcome to the 21st edition of Latest Strikes, your weekly recap in the turmoils of the Lightning world. Last week was a bit like a Super Mario level: full of exciting stuff and with plenty of Goombas to smash!

Ecosystem

Lightning 🤝 Nostr

If you've been following up with the Bitcoin ecosystem lately, there are good chances that you've heard about nostr, a novel yet simple protocol for exchanging signed text messages in a decentralized fashion. I'm quite a nostr fan myself and, even if I try to keep Latest Strikes as Lightning-focused as possible, I realized crawling back in the archives that I mentioned it a few times already - the earliest mention being in October 2022.

This week was, like many others before, a great illustration of the synergies between Lightning and Nostr:

• River showcased how seamless it is to send sats to someone on Damus, an iOS (and MacOS) nostr client, using the River app. This also works with a variety of Lightning wallets, including Strike, CashApp, Phoenix, Breez, Zeus, Blixt, and many more. You'll have to choose which one to use the first time, but can setup a default for ease of use as shown in the video ;
• speaking of Lightning wallets, Breez's CEO Roy is calling for Flutter devs who want to implement some nostr functionalities into Breez, such as a login method (a bit like LNURL-Auth, but with nostr keys), podcast comments or even a full nostr client ;
• Kollider showed how nostr can be used as a notification mechanism, here to let you know privately when you've received a payment on your account ;
• one of the great use cases of Lightning (microtransactions and tipping) comes in very handy when integrated into social media apps. We already saw a few lines above how seamless it can be thanks to wallets integrations and deep links, but some devs want to bring it a step further with Zaps, a new nostr note type representing a Lightning invoice receipt that is sent by the receiving node once the payment settles. This allows for various use cases, such as:
  • displaying sats tipped to a specific post or profile,
  • showing whether an invoice has already been paid or not (pretty useful to prevent preimage stealing),
  • commerce over nostr,
  • etc.

Edward Snowden seems to agree, as he stated on nostr that he had never seen Bitcoin "feel as powerful as it does on Nostr". And Snowden to add:

The instant, effectively-free transactions that spring from having so many people on Lightning Addresses is like arriving on a different planet.

I couldn't agree more. By the way, in case you hadn't guessed already, you can find LN Markets on nostr at npub1lnm0ac8ft8r3jhddchekledgwvqrkwy7wqejjwcxq47gy87te8zs6utnnn (and myself at npub1fanjsgy7jghu7d3l5hfq79a3c9kt959x638d5qhjmeeseyr7xp2qert4f0).

More Lightning Payments In Brick And Mortar Businesses

Lightning is a payment technology. We should hence celebrate every piece of Lightning adoption in real-life commerce, and last week saw some good improvements in this regard.

Strike just announced the beginning of a 90-days open pilote in partnership with Clover. Clover sells Point-of-Sale (POS) hardware and software, and Strike's integration into their terminals allows for any merchant using Clover's system to receive Lightning payments, from any wallet (e.g., not just Strike wallets).

During the 90 days trial, voluntary merchants can contact Strike to be onboarded to the Strike integration ; while the speed, cost and ease of payment, as well as actual customer demand for Lightning payment, will be closely monitored by Clover and Strike in order to assess whether Strike could join Clover's apps marketplace, or even be directly integrated into Clover's products.

👉 More on this in Bitcoin Magazine.

On a slightly smaller scale, I was happy to see that Bitcoin-themed NYC bar PubKey finally accepts Bitcoin, thanks to Zeus' POS software, and that people already use it. Neat!

Bitcoin In Super Mario On NES

Christian Moss literally put Bitcoin into the NES: each time you collect a coin in Super Mario, it instantly sends you 10 sats over Lightning. Very cool, and I can't wait to see what this enables for conferences, venues or even esport tournaments.

Wallets & Tools

Channels Of Prominent Wallet Vanish Into The Blue

Seems like BlueWallet faced some trouble with their Lightning node last week. The situation isn't clear because BlueWallet didn't make any public statement and even deleted their tweet in response to this node runner experiencing forced channel closures.

Taking a look at gossip data (for example on Amboss), we can see that both channel count and capacity heavily dropped on January 29th, and are now starting to increase again.

The now deleted tweet stated that this channel force closes were due to BlueWallet's LND node crashing. What's certain is that a public announcement would be welcomed, as many node runners might have some funds in limbo right now.

LNBits Release

LNBits shipped version 0.9.6.1 and the subsequent version 0.9.7 (which was a minor release updating Docker images and dependencies version). This brought some bug fixes and improvements to LNBits core components, as well as some new extensions, such as the new Gerty app that connects to this very cute hardware to display information about Bitcoin and Lightning networks (such as block height, network wide Lightning announced capacity, blocks until next difficulty adjustment, etc.).

One day after the new version release, a very cool pull request was merged that will separate extensions from LNBits' core. The LNBits team will still maintain a list of vetted extensions, but users will be able to create their own collections, and all extensions will now live in their own code repository, from where they can be pulled and are more easily and independently maintainable.

Eye Of Satoshi v0.2.0 Pre-Release

Talaia Labs published a first release for the v0.2.0 of their Lightning Watchtower software. This update brings improvements to both the daemon and the client, a notable one being the ability to run the daemon on top of a pruned bitcoind node (no need to keep the entire chain, most of which is useless).

This is a pre-release version, so feedback from testers is welcomed!

BTCPay Smol Release & Plugin Docs

Version 1.7.5 of BTCPay Server was released, with several bug fixes and improvements, as well as a new Greenfield API to manage Lightning Addresses.

The project also published a new documentation page detailing how to setup, but also how to code and deploy a plugin for BTCPay. Plugins for the win!

Zap Revival

When it comes to using your own Lightning node to send and receive sats from your phone, the best wallet in my opinion is currently Zeus. But back in the days, I was also a huge fan of Zap, a very nice wallet connected to your own node, that stopped being maintained last year - or so I thought!

As far as I know, the Zap wallet was first developed by Strike, which halted it's development to focus on Strike's main business and solutions. It seems like former Zap developer and maintainer Michael Wünsch took it upon himself to bring Zap back in the race, with a few new features and fixes. Let's see how this goes!

Spec & Implems

Monthly TARO Update

Interested in Taro? There's a public Taro development update call by Lightning Labs every month, and January's call took place last week! It was brilliantly summed up here by my friend Guillaume, so be sure to give it a read!

anyprevout.xyz Is Out

The anyprevout.xyz domain has expired, and fiatjaf (who owned it) announced that they do not intent on renewing it. Its one page content, advocating for the soft fork and (notably) what it brings to Lightning (Eltoo for the win!) is still visible on this archive.

Security Review of Validating Lightning Signer

Antoine Riard conducted a third party audit of the Validating Lightning Signer, a project that aims at improving Lightning operational security by handling the signing operations in a separate device, where additional security checks can be performed (kind of like an HSM).

Overall, Riard found several vulnerabilities in the verifications performed by the Signer that could lead to theft/loss of funds in attacks of various complexity.

For example, the Signer accepts to open channels with the legacy option_anchor_outputs type, which is considered unsafe (or at least way less safe than option_anchors_zero_fee_htlc_tx) as it opens the way for fee siphoning attacks, where the peer can claim for themselves money that was supposed to pay for the channel commitment transaction fees^[1].

Another example is the exposition to time-sensitive attacks, where money can be stolen in-flight because the Signer doesn't no enforce safe practices in the difference between two consecutive routing hops timelocks.

Other attacks involve an attacker with low hashrate capabilities, where an attacking peer and miner can steal part of the channel value.

Riard's email also describes other attack vectors and the link to the full audit report. A huge and necessary work!

Lightning Address Login

Last week Keyan from StackerNews made an interesting proposal in the LUDs repository. LUDs are the "LNURL Documents", in other words the specifications of the LNURL protocols.

Keyan's proposal consists in using Lightning Addresses to initiate a LNURL-Auth login, in a similar way that they are used today as a proxy to LNURL-Pay payments. The major difference is that, unlike receiving a payment, authenticating to a service would require interaction from the user owning the Lightning Address (else, anybody with knowledge of your address could connect to services on your behalf, which is obviously not expected). Still, this could be preferable to the current LNURL-Auth mechanism (with a QR to scan or a string to copy/paste) in a variety of situations. For example, if the user runs their Lightning wallet on a separate computer with no camera, they might find it more convenient to input their (short) Lightning Address on the website and accept the authentication from the machine running the Lightning wallet when prompted for confirmation, with the click of a button.

Closing Bit

Soudain l'air s'empourpre !
Le vent a levé un banc de sable
Pour que nous puissions nous y assoir.