Bitcoin Optech #250: PoWswap Protocol
This week’s Optech summarizes a paper about the PoWswap protocol and includes regular sections with the summary of a Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting, announcements of new releases and release candidates, and descriptions of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
- "Paper about PoWswap protocol: Thomas Hartman posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list about a paper he has written with Gleb Naumenko and Antoine Riard about the PoWSwap protocol first proposed by Jeremy Rubin."
- "Powswap allows the creation of onchain-enforceable contracts related to the change in hash rate."
- "The basic idea takes advantage of the protocol-enforced relationship between time and block production plus the ability to express time locks in either time or blocks."
"There are several envisioned applications of this type of contract:
- Hashrate increase insurance: miners must purchase their equipment before they know for certain how much income it will generate.
- Hashrate decrease insurance: a wide variety of problems with Bitcoin would result in a significant decrease in network-wide hashrate.
- Exchange rate contracts: Many people may be interested in trustless contracts related to the future purchasing power of Bitcoin."
Celebrating Optech Newsletter #250
- "Bitcoin Optech was founded, in part, to “help facilitate improved relations between businesses and the open source community.”
- "We quickly discovered that not just business readers were interested in this information. Many contributors to Bitcoin projects didn’t have the time to read all the discussions on the protocol development mailing lists or to monitor other projects for major changes."
- "For almost five years now, it’s been our pleasure to provide that service."
- "None of that would be possible without our many contributors, who in the past year have included: Adam Jonas, Copinmalin, David A. Harding, Gloria Zhao, Jiri Jakes, Jon Atack, Larry Ruane, Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Mike Schmidt, nechteme, Patrick Schwegler, Shashwat Vangani, Shigeyuki Azuchi, Vojtěch Strnad, Zhiwei “Jeffrey” Hu, and several others who made special contributions to particular subjects."
- "We also remain eternally grateful to our founding sponsors Wences Casares, John Pfeffer, and Alex Morcos, as well as our many financial supporters."
- "Thank you for reading. We hope that you’ll continue to do so as we publish the next 250 newsletters."
