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@RubenSomsen
Last active June 1, 2024 05:37
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Links to my work, accessible via tiny.cc/somsen

Introduction

I'm Ruben Somsen, Bitcoin Sorcerer. I do protocol design in order to enhance Bitcoin.

I'm sponsored by Spiral, Superlunar/Gemini, HRF, and am currently working on Silent Payments with Josie, assisting Davidson with the implementation of Proof-of-Work fraud proofs into Floresta, and Raj with continuing the work on Teleport (Belcher's Coinswap protocol).

I also help maintain the bitcoin-dev mailing list, co-hosted the Unhashed Podcast, founded the Seoul Bitcoin Meetup in 2014, actively co-organizing BitDevs Amsterdam, and on the layer two funding sub-committee of OpenSats.

You can find me on Twitter, Mastodon, and Telegram. You can also join this Telegram group chat to discuss or ask questions about my work.

Bitcoin Sorcery

Silent Payments

Receive private payments from anyone on a single static address without requiring any interaction or extra on-chain overhead.

Links:

Spacechains

A permissionless method to create trustless blockchains that improve the Bitcoin ecosystem by explicitly not competing as a store of value. It's a combination of two separate concepts: Blind Merged Mining (BMM) – An auction-based method of mining blocks of other chains by paying BTC miners in bitcoin. The Perpetual One-way Peg (P1WP) – Creating a new token without speculative future value (can't act as store of value).

Links:

Statechains

Swap UTXOs off-chain with the absolute minimal trust in a federation (permissionless peg-out). Can interoperate with Lightning for off-chain channel opening and closing.

Links:

Softchains

Trustless two-way pegged sidechains that need to be enabled via a soft fork. Mainchain users verify each softchain via a novel and succinct consensus validation method (~100MB per chain per year) thanks to Proof-of-Work Fraud Proofs (PoW FP), which ensures users can (slowly) come to consensus by only validating blocks which are disputed/forked via Proof-of-Work.

Links:

Succinct Atomic Swaps

Makes it possible to perform an atomic swap in merely two (or three) transactions, instead of four. Can work on chains that have no scripting and don't support timelocks.

Links:

Trustless P2P Lending

A trustless contract to borrow one asset, using another asset as collateral. No oracle or arbitrator is required. Works on any blockchain that has multiple assets and sufficient smart contracting capabilities.

Links:

Other posts

Podcast appearances

Miscellaneous videos

Acknowledgements/references

MuSig-DN paper, WabiSabi paper, Inherited IDs paper, Coins paper, Mercury statechain implementation, DLCs + CTV post

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