May 13Part I: Bloom FiltersIntroduction As bitcoin adoption grows, so has the growth of light clients, i.e. nodes on the network incapable of independent transaction verification. To ensure that these clients can verify transactions related to them, the concept of bloom filters was proposed for usage in what is known as simple payment verification. The…Bitcoin7 min read
May 5Building a lightning node server and command-line interface (CLI)I spent the two weeks working on LN-Node — a CLI and server built on top of the Lightning Developer Kit (LDK) sample lightning node. I wanted to understand some of the inner workings of a lightning node and thought the best way to learn was to dive head-first into…Lightning Network7 min read
Apr 25Lightning Network: Establishing direct payment channelsIn the lightning network, payment channels define a financial relationship between network-connected peers, within which peers can make multiple fast, cheap, and private off-chain payments, by distributing the funds from a 2-of-2 multisignature address constructed with the public keys of the channel peers. Visually, a payment channel can be thought…Bitcoin6 min read
Apr 19Randomness, signature scripts, and transaction malleabilitySegregated witness brought along with its activation a host of changes including fixing transaction malleability — the ability of a transaction’s identifier, a SHA256 hash of the transaction, to change without the underlying transaction changing. A transaction object typically contains the following fields: version, transaction inputs (containing previous hash, previous…Bitcoin5 min read
Apr 11Signature Hash FlagsA digital signature is a “mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a message” (Antonopoulos, 2017). It finds use in bitcoin transactions where it proves that transactions have been created by “known” senders, that “known” senders cannot repudiate broadcast transactions, and that the transactions have not been changed from source…Bitcoin6 min read
Mar 14Lifetime Specifiers in RustLifetimes, ownership, and borrowing are some of the fundamental concepts to grasp if I must write fluent rust. Lifetimes, in particular, ensure that functions, closures, structs, enums, and structs that own certain objects remain their owners after other variables have borrowed and/or returned them. …Rust5 min read
Mar 3Serializing Public KeysSerialization refers to the transformation of an object or a data structure into a format that can be transmitted across a network, saved to disk, or to memory, to be reconstructed/parsed for later use. …Bitcoin6 min read
Feb 14Elliptic Curves and the Discrete Log ProblemTwo weeks ago I started reading Programming Bitcoin by Jimmy Song with a goal to build a utility library alongside learning. The first few chapters cover the basic mathematics that underpins the asymmetric cryptographic scheme — elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) — that bitcoin uses. …Bitcoin8 min read
Aug 16, 2021Interning with Zuri/HNGi8I have spent some months learning how to build and deploy software, yet, confident as I am in my ability to write and research, I have never done this as part of a team. Writing software, for majority of the use cases, is inherently collaborative. Good software, used by millions…2 min read
