Satoshi Scoop Weekly, 20 Dec 2024

Crypto Insights

Insights From the 2024 Developer Report

This report provides an overview of the 2024 crypto developer ecosystem, focusing on developer trends, global adoption, chain diversification, and use-case diversify. Key findings include:

🧑‍💻 Developers

• 1/3 of active developers are based in Asia, with Europe maintaining second place since 2015, and North America dropping from first to third.

• Developers with more than two years of experience in crypto have increased by 27%, contributing 70% of code commits.

• The top five countries in terms of developers share are the US, India, the UK, China, and Canada. The US remains in the lead but has seen its share drop from 38% in 2015 to 19%, followed by India at 12%.

  

🟠 Bitcoin

• Roughly 1,200 active monthly developers continue to work on Bitcoin.

• 42% of Bitcoin developers focus on scaling solutions.

⛓️ Ecosystems

• Ethereum ranks first across all continents, followed by Solana.

• Third place varies: Polygon (Asia, South America), Polkadot (Europe), Base (North America), and Dfinity (Africa).

• Solana is the top choice for new developers.

Read the full report.

Bitcoin Miniscript: Clearer, More Cost-Effective, and Verifiable Scripts

This guide introduces Bitcoin Miniscript, another separate programming language that simplifies Bitcoin scripting while retaining core features. It offers clearer, more verifiable, and cost-efficient scripts for developers.

Praetorian: A Self-Custody Solution for Sovereign Bitcoin Reserves

So far, governments often rely on third parties to manage financial systems. Praetorian, a military-grade self-custody solution, enables sovereigns to securely manage strategic Bitcoin reserves by holding their own private keys.

Accountless Mining Pools with Stratum V2

Hashpool (GitHub repo) is an accountless mining pool forked from the Stratum V2 Reference Implementation. It replaces traditional share accounting with eCash minting, where mining shares are represented by eCash tokens.

Vulnerability Disclosure: Stealing Lightning Network Funds with Miner Assistance

David Harding revealed a vulnerability in earlier versions of Eclair, LDK, and LND with default settings that allow a channel opener to steal up to 98% of the channel’s value. Core Lightning remains affected if the non-default --ignore-fee-limits configuration option is used.

The vulnerability takes advantage of the LN protocol allowing an old channel state to commit to more on-chain fees than the fee-paying party controls in the latest state.

Crypto AI Agents: First-Class Citizens of Onchain Economies

While bots in crypto so far have been fairly rudimentary, bots outside of crypto have started to evolve into robust AI agents thanks to the rise in large language models (LLMs), with the end goal of autonomously handling complex tasks and making their own well-informed decisions. Cutting-edge applications include AI agent-enabled wallets, gaming agents, enhanced toolkits for AI trading, and more.

2024 Global Crypto Regulation Landscape

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic's 2024 overview highlights key crypto regulatory developments across dozens of countries, focusing on:

• EU’s MiCA sets a precedent for comprehensive crypto regulation

• Expansion of the Travel Rule to crypto transactions, requiring user identity verification for transactions over a defined value threshold.

• Growing focus on stablecoin-related regulations worldwide

Download the full report.

Top Reads on Blockchain and Beyond

One Year With Eclair

A firsthand account of operating a Lightning node with Eclair, covering topics like choosing enterprise-grade hardware, Eclair’s unique features, and troubleshooting. While Eclair may not be the most popular implementation, its reliability makes it a solid choice for dedicated operators willing to invest time in technical setup and maintenance.

How Stablecoins Could Revolutionize Payments

Today’s payment systems are dominated by intermediaries charging high fees. Stablecoins, as the cheapest way to send USD, could disrupt the industry by reducing costs to near zero. Analysts predict initial adoption among businesses hurt by current systems, with broader adoption driven by benefits like composability and programmability.

Mainline DHT: Censorship Resistance Explained

Mainline DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) serves as a distributed database across a P2P network for data storage and retrieval, and is commonly used to provide torrents and pubkeys. But due to its open nature, DHTs are vulnerable to eclipse attacks. This article explores the attack conditions and how Mainline DHT handles this attack.