Open source is an important piece of Bitcoin. Our bitcoin-focused team loves open-source, and we want to give back to the open-source realm. So, every other Friday, the Voltage crew spends the day working on open source projects, as our CEO Graham explained in an earlier blog post
Without further ado, here are the projects the Voltage team worked on this week.
Nigiri is an easy way to set up a testing environment for working on Bitcoin, since it allows users can spin up regtest Bitcoin nodes in Docker containers, as well as other projects that live on top of Bitcoin, such as Liquid and Electrum. Recently support for Lightning was built on top of it, so users can spin up LND or Core Lightning nodes on the platform.
Frontend engineer Paul and engineering VP Justin are working on adding another Lightning implementation to the platform: Sensei. Sensei is another newer Lightning implementation that builds on top of LDK. Paul also submitted a few issues to the Nigiri Github relating to issues he and Justin encountered with the CLI.
Frontend engineer Adrien worked on button components that are keyboard-accessible and viewable to screenreaders as a regular radio group, so it’s possible to tab from button to button for someone who is visually impaired.
Engineer Bob continued work on his project to show how profitable mining is versus other bitcoin investing methods over a particular time frame, open sourcing it on Github. The project spits out a graph of profits under different scenarios based on a user’s inputs. The obvious caveat here is that past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Voltage’s frontend engineers have been looking into generating xpub keys client-side for users, but the current methods of doing so are a mess. Engineer Alex found a way to generate xpubs in programming language Rust in the browser using WebAssembly. “It’s a dream come true,” frontend dev Paul said about the project. Alex plans to release the project as an npm package at some point.
The Eye of Satoshi is a lightning watchtower for securing funds if a lightning node goes offline. Engineer Taylor submitted a PR to the project to allow the public API to be run behind a Tor hidden service, shielding the API’s IP address.
Operations Manager Kim has been diving into the book Master Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, which explains bitcoin’s technology in detail. She read about elliptic curve cryptography, at the cornerstone of proving ownership of one’s bitcoin.
Engineer Alyssa was on vacation for the last FOSSFriday, and was sad she missed it, so on her self-proclaimed FOSSSunday, she worked on basic authentication for connecting to The Eye of Satoshi’s RPC API. She got it and the testing working, and she hopes to submit a pull request to the project soon.
