Quarterly Update Q1 and Q2 2024
Perhaps our best Spiral newsletter ever, this extremely late post covers all the bases: weather-induced spirituality, cosmic Jerome Powells, and, most importantly, the phrase “senior technical fungus.”
🌀 The Latest Spiral Newsletter Ever
In the past, we’ve gone on tangent after tangent about how late our newsletters have become, but the truth is, they were never really all that late. A day here, half a week there—nothing special, really. But now that’s all that’s changed with this EIGHT MONTH BEHIND SCHEDULE MONSTROSITY. Did we just outright forget to publish one at the end of our last quarter? You bet we did. Did we hope our boss wouldn’t notice? Oh yeah. Big time. To those of you new to your professions, this is called setting expectations. You don’t want your boss thinking they have a right to any.
But the admittedly less cool bottom line is that our tardiness is directly proportional to our productivity. The busier we are, the lower priority bookkeeping projects like this become. And hooo buddy have we been busy.
We started this quarter with an offsite at the Lightning Summit in Tuscany. @moneyball presented about BOLT12, @_tnull participated in discussions at the Lightning Spec meetup, and we sat in a side room where people loudly played Chain Duel. Oh, and our creative director had a euphoric, almost out-of-body experience akin to touching the face of God during the drive from Rome to Viareggio. He described it as the “most powerful emotional experience” of his life. Only on the Spiral team can such a thing be included in a corporate newsletter.
Then, at the end of June, the Spiral team met again, but this time at the Chaincode office in NYC. During the offsite, several engineers joined forces with folks from c= and worked on an LDK Server hack week project. Our creative director collaborated with @GBKS to produce a set of Nostr headlines inspired by the 500 Headlines About Bitcoin project. No spiritual epiphanies were had, though our pizza party got rained right off his rooftop by a sudden summer storm, which was spiritual in its own way.
Steve testified at the CSW trial in London (woo!), where Judge Mellor (woo!) definitively ruled that Craig Wright is not Satoshi (woo!), the new BOLT12 website launched thanks to King of Fun Websites @StephenDeLorme, and Spiral turned five despite the entire team aging 20 years in that time span, making several team members’ souls eligible for social security benefits.
Finally, Spiral had its first departure ever. Don’t worry, he didn’t join the Devil over at Chainalysis. In fact, he went across the street and joined Block’s Bitkey, makers of every geologist’s favorite hardware wallet. We haven’t removed Wilmer’s profile from spiral.xyz, and probably never will, because he still lives in our hearts if not our Discord.
Speaking of headcount, we plan to hire another Bitcoin Wizard (or witch). Check out our original, one-year-old post for the role here. There’s an email address at the bottom that you can use to really try and wow us. And wow us you’d better because this is full stop one of the best gigs in bitcoin.
🌀 Here Comes Bitcoin
In case you missed the greatest video we’ve ever published since our last one, we also recently launched a derivative, open-source initiative to make bitcoin more fun, friendly, and accessible. It’s just illustrations and gifs, yet they’ve become our most successful creative project ever. Check them out, all 64 of them and more, over at herecomesbitcoin.org.
These open-source Bitcoin “stickers” cover a variety of interests, archetypes, and collaborations with leading bitcoiner businesses and personas. Our latest batch features Jack Mallers, Puppet Jack, Rockstar Dev, HRF, OpenSats, Brink, BTC Tokyo, and Stacker News. Another round is coming soon. Want your brand or famous person persona included among them? Email hello@herecomesbitcoin.org. Our Twitter and Nostr DMs are also, foolishly and regrettably, wide open.
For the big news: FURRY, HUGGABLE PLUSHIES BASED ON THE SEVEN-FOOT TALL PUPPET FROM “WHO IS BITCOIN?” are on their beautiful way. Plushies will be available through www.uncute.com’s online store and at a booth shared with @PlaySHAmory at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville. Until then, elevate your Telegram and Signal chats with herecomesbitcoin.org, stickers, and join the billions of people getting down with Bitcoin over at GIPHY.
🌀 LDK
Meanwhile, the Lightning Development Kit chugs along in an ultimately more important but less riveting corner of Spiral’s bitcoin multiverse. This year, @ConorOkus, the man with many hats and just as many nebulous titles (senior technical fungus, kangaroo wrangler, astrology business partner), expanded his repertoire even further and orchestrated the first-ever LDK Hackathon at Advancing Bitcoin. People say that a virtual hackathon will commence in the fall, but whose fall, and on what world?
You’re missing out if you haven’t been following LDK’s releases. Forget the feature improvements, which are gibberish; the titles include better copy than anything found in this quarterly update so far: “BOLT12 Dust Sweeping,” “That Which Is Untested Is Broken," “Unwraps are Bad,” and “Spring Cleaning for Christmas.” Meanwhile, LDK Node took a frankly (and fittingly!) less exciting approach to usability and naming. Its third major release is called… 0.3.0. Meh. Developers.
A benefit of being months behind on your newsletter is that you can resurface blog posts that have happened in the interim and deserve another shout, like these: @TheBlueMatt explaining why building non-custodial Lightning applications in mobile environments is so hard, @JohnCantrell97 writing about the LSP spec and lightning-liquidity crate, @jkczyz diving into the nuts and bolts behind BOLT12, and @mattcrv describing how @Synonym_to used LDK to build @bitkitwallet.
The LDK section of our newsletter is always the hardest to write, even when you have an eight-month headstart.
🌀 New Grants and Renewals
Our grant program is still growing. Know someone with the know-how and ambition to improve bitcoin but without the time and resources to go full-time? Send them our way: grants@spiral.xyz.
Here’s who received a grant or renewed one since the last newsletter:
New grantees:
Renewed grantees:
- @WalletScrutiny
- @somsenruben
- @VLSProject
- @vir7u
- @GBKS
- @the_charlatan_
- @BitcoinZavior
- Matt Morehouse
- @summerofbitcoin
🌀 Some Grant Updates
Two of our grant program’s biggest success stories, the Bitcoin Development Kit and The Bitcoin Design Community, have followed the framework for open-source bitcoin development and become independent foundations. If you want to know what they’re up to, we unsurprisingly have more links here and here. BDK and the BDC are both monumental success stories, and some of the best examples of how you can make ends meet while making massive contributions to bitcoin.
There are only five paragraphs left until you’re free.
Stratum V2
As you’ve probably heard, mining is more centralized than a supermassive black hole filled with Jerome Powells. Currently, most mining pools use Stratum V1 software and firmware, which lets them select transactions to mine in blocks, giving pools ultimate power over the bitcoin network. If you didn’t get goosebumps from “ultimate power over the bitcoin network,” you’re probably an XRP person.
There is now a solution to this problem courtesy of the Stratum Reference Implementation (SRI), which launched in Q1. With Stratum V2, the miners control transaction selection instead of the pools. Noted Euro fashionista @pavlenex has onboarded SV2 contributors, created a 2024/2025 roadmap and adoption plan, and increased engagement with external stakeholders.
Still, the industry has been slow to change. Read Matt’s post on MEV (miner-extracted value) or attend his talk in Nashville to go deep on the risks of mining centralization and how SV2 shapes bitcoin’s future. If you’re interested in joining the cause, or even if you aren’t, ping @pavlenex. Just because he’s beautiful doesn’t mean he isn’t lonely.
LNDK
Last year, @mehmehturtle started helping out with LNDK, a standalone daemon enabling LND to support BOLT12 functionality by leveraging LDK. (One sentence, four acronyms!) Over the past year, she has been adding support in LNDK to pay BOLT12 offers. This required a variety of PRs across LND and LDK, as well as custom forks to fedimint’s version of tonic_lnd. She’s also been doing a lot of regtesting of paying BOLT12 offers across implementations and has open-sourced some of her scripts and Polar networks
🌀 Conference and Media Appearances
Check out spiral.xyz’s media page where all of our team’s talks, recent and ancient, are archived for the real Spiralheads.
UPCOMING APPEARANCES AT NASHVILLE 2024
July 26th at 9:30 AM: Open Source Marketing in Bitcoin
@HBerkoe is speaking on a panel alongside Mike Germano, Mayur Gupta, and Renata Rodrigues.
July 26th at 1:30 PM: Open-Source Mining
Murch is moderating a panel with Matt Corallo, Kulpreet Singh, and Skot 9000.
July 27th at 11:00 AM: Mining Centralization Pressures
Steve Lee will be moderating a panel with Matt Corallo, Fred Thiel, and Rachel Rybarczyk.
July 17th at 10:30 AM: Decentralize or Die: A Brief History of Bitcoin’s Future
Matt Corallo will speak about the importance of mining decentralization.
July 26–27: Satoshi Summer Camp
If you’re bringing your kids to the conference, stop by and take a photo with a life-size version of Bitcoin, grab a Bitcoin coloring sheet and make some bitcoin art, or buy a plushie.
July 26–27: Bitcoin Bazaar
Stop by the Here Comes Bitcoin / SHAmory booth near the Maker Hub to purchase a grumpy Bitcoin plushie for your friends, family members, or @pavlenex.
🌀 Until Next Time, Whenever That Is
Technically, the next quarterly update should drop in a few months. If it doesn’t, well, less reading for you and less writing for us. If it does drop, more work for us both. Here’s to tardiness.
