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.
It might be a bear market or whatever, but coders gonna code. B-) Here’s a rundown of what the Voltage crew worked on last week.
Engineer Bob continued work on his “world-famous” mining calculator that he’s been working on for several FossFridays now. The calculator aims to measure how profitable mining is compared to other methods of obtaining bitcoin, such as buying and “hodling” bitcoin from a certain date, or dollar cost averaging (DCA).
This week, Bob made a preliminary UI where people can plug in data, like when they started mining, and how much they’re spending on electricity. He is also in the process of deploying it to AWS so people can start to use it.
Engineer Taylor is working on The Eye of Satoshi project again. It’s a “watchtower,” a necessary piece of the lightning network, helping to secure it. He’s starting work on the integration tests since the project doesn’t have any yet.
Frontend engineer Paul is working on designing an app for MiniMint, which offers a new way to custody bitcoin where users have more control than in most custodial apps. In short, it gives users more privacy and splits the custodians into a federation. The custodians are arranged into a multi-sig, so that if one of them tries to run off with the funds, they can be thwarted by cryptography.
Engineer Sam has been playing around with LDK and BDK, rust lightning and bitcoin development kits. He tested sending payments and keysends between LDK and LND, and explored the python bindings for the project.
Frontend engineer Adrien focused on education this week, reading about “stuff,” a concept in the web app framework Sveltekit. And he is reading The Bitcoin Standard, a book exploring monetary history, and bitcoin’s place in it.VP of Engineering Justin “won a battle” with networking that he’s been waging for a while so that he can run a Core Lightning node on his home network so he’s not advertising his public IP. He also started playing around with liquidity ads, a neat and relatively simple way to broadcast whether you have liquidity to sell to other Lightning Network nodes.
