Introduction
I'm Ruben Somsen, Bitcoin Sorcerer. I do protocol design in order to enhance Bitcoin. I also help maintain the bitcoin-dev mailing list, am co-host of the Unhashed Podcast, and I’m organizer/founder of the Seoul Bitcoin Meetup.
I'm sponsored by Spiral, Superlunar, HRF, and am currently working on spacechains with Dhruv and Silent Payments with w0xlt and Josie.
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:
- Video 2 (newer, more to the point)
- Video 1 (older, longer/more detailed)
- Article – P1WP
- Technical – BMM
- Podcast
- Spacedollars write-up
- Spacechains mining demo (see end of video 2)
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
- Limitations of RGB/Taro: 1, 2, 3, podcast
- Wagner's Blind Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
- List of all L2 protocols of interest to Bitcoin
- Segregated Message Signature Scheme
- Practical 2-of-3 Seed Splitting Protocol
- PoW derivative contracts article (and follow-up tweet)
- Article examining SNARKs for Bitcoin
- Guiding transaction fees towards a more censorship resistant outcome (on bitcoin-dev)
- Limichat: Lightning Network chat app article (app here)
- Enabling relative timelocks for Mimblewimble
- Scriptless DLC
Podcast appearances
- ZKPs and Bitcoin (zk-rollups, STARKs)
- Stewart Mackenzie Indaba (spacechains, drivechains, SNARKs/rollups, Simplicity)
- L2 scaling in Ethereum and Bitcoin (w/ Eric Wall)
- Wasabikas Podcast (sidechains, ecash, spacechains)
- The Bitcoin Onion (statechains, spacechains, softchains)
- Lightning Junkies Podcast #1 (statechains)
- Lightning Junkies Podcast #2 (anyprevout, statechains, spacechains)
- Block Digest Podcast #1 (statechains, bmm)
- Block Digest Podcast #2 (softchains, spacechains)
- Guy Swann Podcast (statechains, succinct atomic swaps, p1wp)
- MintGox Podcast (NFTs, spacechains, statechains, ICOs)
- Stacks altcoin debate with CEO Muneeb
- Bitcoin Beginner Podcast – Bitcoin's value, volatility, energy use, PoS
- Why Bitcoin matters and how it will scale
- Drivechains explanation
- RGB explanation
- Discreet Log Contracts explanation
- Utreexo explanation
- Ecash explanation
Miscellaneous videos
- Beginner explanation of Bitcoin
- Self-sovereignty in Bitcoin
- Sidechains and banking
- Ambushed by Roger Ver
Acknowledgements/references
MuSig-DN paper, WabiSabi paper, Inherited IDs paper, Coins paper, Mercury statechain implementation, DLCs + CTV post