Thats right, your favorite bitcoin education company Base58⛓🔓 released a Summer Series of open-source project deep dives. They have just finished up the first two weeks and are both full of incredible information.
Thats right Base58⛓🔓 has started a series of videos to showcase open source projects teaching devs how to contribute to the project. The first one they kicked off was Core-Lightning with @niftynei. Nifty is a Core-Lightning maintainer and does an incredible deep dive on how CLN works. She goes over the gossip_store, decode some wire messages, look at the process tree, use the startup_regtest.sh script, write an RPC call and even fix an issue! All in under two hours.
But wait there is more...
The second one was the main contributor to the Chaumian E-cash project, Mr. Justin Moon who did a deep dive on what Fedimint is and how it works. So what is a Chaumian Mint?
One of the (if not the) earliest e-cash schemes were Chaumian mints or banks. They use blind signatures to allow the anonymous transfer of backing assets held by the mint. The basic idea is that a user can give the mint some amount x of an asset and the mint in turn blind signs x IOUs that allow the user to either withdraw the asset or exchange them for new IOUs or products. The small word “blind” does the heavy lifting here, it means that the user and mint run a cryptographic protocol that allows the user to acquire a digital signature on some data without the mint learning anything about the message or the signature so that when the mint sees one of its signatures for some message it can no longer tell to whom it was issued. This means trading these IOUs is completely anonymous.
What is a Federated Mint?
In a federated mint the required trust is split over multiple parties. It employs a consensus algorithm and threshold cryptography to guarantee both safety and availability even in the case that some parties are compromised. That means if the participants are sufficiently distributed not even a nation state level attacker can harm the federation. Running it anonymously also becomes much more attractive since there is no single party anymore that could run away with the backing funds.
🌊 We have seen the mint wave here in Austin especially around Bitcoin++. Nice to see the education continue.
Check out all the Base58⛓🔓 videos on BitcoinTV and YouTube and stay tuned for when the next class announcement.
