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Adam developed Babylonia to address standard CoinJoin vulnerabilities, where change outputs are easily linked to inputs via subset sum analysis. Babylonia uses probabilistic payments to obscure exact transaction amounts and break ownership heuristics.
Adam traces the concept of statistical micropayments to a 1997 paper by Ron Rivest proposing lottery-style digital cash payments. Later, Tadge Dryja proposed probabilistic payments for Lightning to economically handle sub-satoshi transactions.
Babylonia utilizes adapter signatures and zero-knowledge proofs to let parties execute a trustless, on-chain bet that reveals outcomes atomically. To prevent amount correlation, Adam updated the protocol to split single bets into multiple secret, unequal portions.
Silent payments preserve receiver privacy but require scanning every block transaction. Rob explains that lite clients must choose between trusting an index server with their scan key or downloading heavy block filters to detect payments locally.
Rob analyzed all 255,000 blocks mined since the Taproot activation to measure silent payment client bandwidth. Downloading full block payloads requires 15 gigs compared to 7 gigs for taproot-only block filters, representing a two-fold difference.
BTC Pay Server version 2.4.4 hardens security by completely removing legacy BitPay-style API keys. It also migrates to hashing API keys in database storage and eliminates plaintext API secrets from management page URLs to prevent history logging.
BTC Pay Server PR 7559 expands the Lightning payment monitoring window to match the on-chain window. This prevents merchants from manually reconciling Lightning payments that occur slightly after the standard payment deadline.
Non-custodial payment processor Swiss Bitcoin Pay temporarily shut down its servers following a data breach that leaked customer emails, Bitcoin addresses, and IBANs. This event follows recent security breaches at both Revolut and hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor.
Electrum Rust Server 0.12 introduced a new indexing library requiring a full reindex, while Fedimint patched a critical gateway payment vulnerability. Q and A also updated his open-source Bitcoin Seed Tool to support seed XOR splitting.
Stefan Livera predicts mainstream retail adoption of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is 15 to 20 years away. Consumers prefer high-convenience fiat systems like Apple Pay, meaning Bitcoin's near-term growth will remain concentrated in store-of-value vehicles like ETFs.
Concord streamlined its relay permission flow to prevent connection request overload and introduced key backup discovery. The client also fixed Cashu proof backfill truncation and added search indexing for event titles and names.
Mostro version 0.18.5 defaulted to NIP-44 encryption for gift wraps and added pre-signature checks on incoming events to mitigate expensive signature-validation attacks. It is also refining its two-out-of-three Cashu escrow system.
Recent NIP updates allow relays to signal that more filter results exist post-authentication. Additionally, the Nostr Wallet Connect specification clarified that the list transaction API must return actual transaction counts instead of raw database rows.
The Rhysida cybercrime group hacked the Berlin Department of Public Works and Department of Transportation, accessing data on 4 million residents. They published 1.4 million files on the dark web after the city refused a 30 Bitcoin ransom.
Albi released version 1.9 of the Nostr Wallet Connect ecosystem map. Keon explains that NWC leverages Nostr relays as public turn servers, providing a highly efficient method for connecting external web apps to Lightning wallets.
The host notes that Bitcoin Cash maintains a substantial 4.5 billion dollar market cap. This valuation is sustained by unclaimed, dormant coins and early promotional efforts by Roger Ver in the global payments market.
Both speakers argue that real-world retail crypto payments have deteriorated since 2014. Even in El Salvador, merchants and hotels actively request paper US dollars over Bitcoin, demonstrating a significant regression in merchant adoption.
India launched its Demat 2.0 pilot to tokenize corporate bonds and settle them using its wholesale digital rupee. David Bennett notes that Indian regulators are only embracing blockchain tech because they can maintain strict control over the infrastructure.
Monero users Ape and Arrow donated $10 each in XMR, prompting the Ungovernable Network to add an XMR entry field option to their value-for-value page.
Stripe launched Profiles, a landing page system resembling PayPal.me. The platform allows peer-to-peer connection to bypass traditional card fees, presenting a potential funding option for podcasters using funding tags.
Adam Back announced the Liquid network peg will remain one-for-one. Blockstream and its partners are plugging the remaining 600 BTC deficit after the hacker returned 3,400 BTC through encrypted OP_RETURN negotiations, keeping 15 percent as an unsolicited bounty.
Steak 'n Shake reported a 19% increase in quarterly same-store franchise sales after integrating Lightning Network payments. David Bennett remains skeptical that Bitcoin adoption alone is responsible for the double-digit growth.
Brian Armstrong states that traditional payment rails cannot support agentic commerce because 76% of AI agent transactions are under $0.30, while standard debit or credit card transactions impose a $0.30 flat fee minimum.