● PR opened for initial BIP151 support: Jonas Schnelli opened a pull request to Bitcoin Core providing an initial implementation of BIP151 encryption for the peer-to-peer network protocol. Currently, discussion appears to be most active on the BIP proposal’s pull request. ● Discussion of resetting testnet: Bitcoin’s first public testnet was introduced in late 2010; a few months later it was reset to testnet2; and reset again to the current testnet3 in mid-2012. A discussion was started on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list about resetting testnet again to provide a smaller chain for experimentation. Cryptographer Tim Ruffing provided constructive criticism of the draft on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list this week that received also-constructive rebuttals from the Coin Viewer blog Schnelli and Gregory Maxwell. Although proposed to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a few weeks ago, several aspects of the proposal were discussed this week. This week’s newsletter includes a reminder to please help test the release candidate for Bitcoin Core’s next version, information about the development of Optech’s new public dashboard, summaries of two discussions on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list, and notable commits from Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

● Allocate time to test Bitcoin Core 0.17RC3: Bitcoin Core has uploaded binaries for 0.17 Release Candidate (RC) 3. Testing is greatly appreciated and can help ensure the quality of the final release. 12775 adds support for RapidCheck (a QuickCheck reimplementation) to Bitcoin Core, providing a property-based testing suite that generates its own tests based on what programmers tell it are the properties of a function (e.g. what it accepts as input and returns as output). The accounts system was added in late 2010 to allow an early Bitcoin exchange to manage their user accounts in Bitcoin Core, but it lacked many of the features desirable for true production systems (like atomic database updates) and it often confused users, so removing it gracefully has been a goal for several years. That said, the volatility of the currency scares people, and including scaring off some of the people that Bitcoin supporters like yourself would probably like to not be so scared off. Binance is also under investigation by the Justice Department for suspected money laundering and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the probe. Since the original 0.1 implementation of Bitcoin, wallets have been allowed to remove certain parts of the unsigned transaction from the hash before signing it, which allows those parts of the transaction to be changed by other people such as other participants in a multiparty contract.

In BIP143, segwit preserved all of the original Bitcoin 0.1 signature hash (sighash) flags but made some minor (but useful) changes to what data wallets include in the hash that made it harder for miners to DoS attack other miners and which made it easier for underpowered devices such as hardware wallets to protect users funds. ● BIP322 generic signed message format: since 2011, users of many wallets have had the ability to sign an arbitrary message using the public key associated with a P2PKH address in their wallet. This PR now provides that information for each peer in the getpeerinfo RPC using the new minfeefilter value, allowing you to easily discover the minimum feerates being used by your peers. This week’s newsletter references a discussion about BIP151 encryption for the peer-to-peer network protocol, provides an update on compatibility between Bitcoin and the W3C Web Payments draft specification, and briefly describes some notable merges in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. It is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money.

12952: after being deprecated for several major release and disabled by default in the upcoming 0.17 release, the built-in accounts system in Bitcoin Core has been removed from the master development branch. The major advantage of Bitcoin press release is that these are extremely cost-effective. Even if they don’t see general adoption, their privacy advantage means they could end up well deployed among niche users. ● LND made almost 30 merges in the past week, many of which made small enhancements or bugfixes to its autopilot facility-its ability to allow users to choose to automatically open new channels with automatically-selected peers. This week, BIP143 co-author Johnson Lau posted some suggested changes to sighash flags, including new flags, that could be implemented as a soft fork using the witness script update mechanism provided as part of segwit. ● Optech dashboard: a blog post by Marcin Jachymiak introduces the live dashboard he developed for Optech during his internship this summer, providing not only an overview of what information the dashboard makes available to you but a description of how he built it for anyone who wants to independently replicate the data or otherwise extend the dashboard using their own full node.