Open source is an essential 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 whatever open source projects they want, as our CEO Graham explained in an earlier blog post.
We'll explore the projects the Voltage crew worked on last week in this post.
LnVortex is an early-stage privacy project. Since Bitcoin transactions leave a trail that blockchain analytics companies can follow, CoinJoins offer up a way for users to scramble up their coins into one transaction, making this trail harder to follow. LnVortex executes a new kind of CoinJoin, with the end result being an open Lightning Network channel.
Frontend engineer Paul is working with a few other developers to build out a UI to make this unique type of CoinJoins easier to use. He’s been working on designing the UI for making such Lightning-CoinJoins.
Engineers Bob and Taylor are continuing work on the Mining Opportunity Cost Calculator, a CLI tool that allows bitcoiners to input data around when they mined bitcoin, and how much it cost them. It then spits out a graph of how this fares with other methods of obtaining bitcoin. It’s an open-source tool that people can use today.
This week, Bob and Taylor also laid the groundwork for a server that this data can be sent to, which will spit out the graph.
Also, Taylor’s previous work to allow the option to run a The Eye of Satoshi watchtower behind Tor was officially merged last week!
Engineer Alyssa has been looking into adding an option to pay watchtowers for storing data for other people. Currently, watchtowers operate altruistically, meaning there isn’t an option to pay them for storing data, and watching and responding to bad actors. This probably isn’t a practical long-term solution.
VP of Engineering Justin continued work on his conformance test suite, which uses the testing tool Nigiri to spin up some interacting Lightning nodes, including Sensei nodes.
Engineer Alex is continuing work fixing up issues in Sensei, an alternative Lightning implementation built using LDK. He made it so that the “admin” endpoint redirects properly when the web admin interface is spun up. He also fixed up some linter issues that would be flagged when compiling the project.
CEO Graham also started working on a change to Sensei to allow the port number the root node listens on to be configurable.
VP of Marketing Bobby set up a Voltage node and has been learning about Thunderhub and Amboss. And he’s considering offering liquidity and CoinJoin services for a fee.
Head of Operations Kim has been continuing to read Mastering Bitcoin. This week she explored the ins and outs of vanity addresses.
