The most important Bitcoin news of 2022

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2022 has been a rough year for bitcoin news, as a series of industry implosions have seen the price of the coin plummet roughly 63% year-to-date. (To be fair, Bitcoin hasn’t fared worse than the broader crypto sector, which has grown from $2.3 trillion to $846 billion this year. Even the NASDAQ stock market is down -29% ).

Fortunately, several big events have moved the Bitcoin network forward and given it a stronger foundation for the future. Of course, many challenges remain.

Below is a brief overview of the top headlines telling the story of Bitcoin in 2022.

Jack Dorsey backs legal fund to defend Bitcoin developers against litigants like Craig Wright

On January 12, 2022, Jack Dorsey, Alex Morcos, and Martin White announced a new Bitcoin legal defense fund to help support developers targeted by frivolous lawsuits. A notorious and contentious plaintiff was probably the main motivating factor: Craig Wright.

Dorsey’s post on the Linux Foundations bitcoin-dev mailing list cited numerous lawsuits against Bitcoin Core developers who are often unpaid volunteers or underpaid maintainers of open source code repositories.

Jeremy Rubin offered a quick try for a miner-activated soft fork

Bitcoin Core developer and Judica founder Jeremy Rubin has come up with a controversial activation method for his Miner Activated Soft Fork of Bitcoin. So far, his proposal has failed to activate. Rubin was proposing Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 119, also known as CheckTemplateVerify or, simply, Covenants.

Bitcoin Mining and Trading Activity Gains Ground in Africa

Power grids in Africa are much more localized and clustered than Western-style interstate power grids. Challenges include intermittent electricity and internet access.

With an abundance of natural resources locked in by reliable power grid consumption, economically disadvantaged regions in rural Africa have become ideal candidates for modular bitcoin mining operators.

All of these features have encouraged modular satellite-connected rigs to join the bitcoin mining network.

For example, Jack Dorsey plugged in the efforts of Gridless Computes to use excess hydroelectricity to mine bitcoin and reduce electricity rates. Gridless raised $2 million this year for modular satellite-connected platforms.

Three weeks ago, Ghana hosted the largest Bitcoin conference in the history of the continent.

Developer Kgothatso Ngako is working on another internet access problem in Africa with the Machankura system, which allows basic cellphone owners to send and receive bitcoins via SMS.

Contentious discussion on replacing BIP-125 and Bitcoins fees

The developers had a heated discussion about possible replacement models per fee (RBF). With RBF, the sender of a transaction could replace a pending transaction with a new transaction with higher fees. Discussions regarding changes to the RBF, including default settings for wallets, are ongoing.

A formal Bitcoin improvement proposal, BIP-125, proposed a protocol for nodes to accept transactions signaling that they could be replaced by a transaction with the same inputs and higher fees.

Bitcoin Core 24.0.1 gave nodes the ability to configure their RBF policies in this way.

Lisa Neigut Offers Four-Tier Fee Schedules for Lightning Network Node Operators

Lisa ‘NiftyNei’ Neigut has released a proposal to move Lightning Networks’ current pricing model to a four-tier pricing schedule. According to his proposal, users could advertise various tariffs depending on the available capacity of their channels. This could allow Bitcoin Lightning Node operators to dynamically price bitcoin liquidity from their channels without having to constantly transmit new rates through gossip channels.

Read more: Blockchain Developer Offers Fee Schedules for Bitcoin Lightning Node Fees

John Light Releases Report on Bitcoin Validity Rollups

On October 11, Bitcoin researcher and author John Light published a report on Bitcoin rollups as part of the Human Rights Foundation Zero Knowledge-Rollup Fellowship. The Alex Gladsteins Foundation for Human Rights, along with Starkware, sponsored a study to investigate whether ZK-Rollups could help scale Bitcoin.

Bitcoin developers discuss the need for quantum resistance

Bitcoin developers have discussed the possibility that a quantum computer could – decades in the future – reverse engineer a public key to decrypt its private key. A Bitcoin developer, Aronesty, has suggested a method for receiving payments on a public key secured by a new quantum cryptography-resistant algorithm. Lloyd Fournier suggested using Taproot outputs for quantum-safe public keys.

Read more: Lead developer wants to fork Bitcoin for quantum resistance

40 Bitcoin Core developers meet face to face

In Atlanta, around 40 Bitcoin Core developers met at a rare in-person conference. Most Bitcoin Core development is done through GitHub, email, and other online communications.

Brian Bishop transcribed about half of their face-to-face discussions on topics that included the possibility of moving away from GitHub as a repository altogether.

The developers also discussed possible improvements to transport encryption, transaction fees, a proposed Flexible Round Optimized Schnorr Threshold (FROST) signature scheme, and transaction relay rules that could address pinning attack vulnerabilities.

Special thanks to the open-source Bitcoin Operations Technology Group for reporting on the major Bitcoin technical events of 2022 and helping to inform this article.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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