Crypto Insights
How to Identify Bitcoin Mining Nodes: Difficulty, Methods, and Security Risks
In Bitcoin’s P2P network, identifying mining nodes and their adjacent ones can expose potential attack surfaces. Previous research has demonstrated that influential nodes can be identified by coloring nodes with conflicting transactions. These nodes may not be miners' gateway nodes but can ultimately connect to mining ones.
This study, based on the Bitcoin network environment of 2025, explores the difficulty of finding such nodes. The results indicate that these attacks are viable, and leveraging a set of influential mining nodes makes it easier to carry out mainnet partitioning, pinning, replacement cycling, or other yet-undiscovered mempool and Lightning Network attacks.
Boot Protocol: A Decentralized Block Reward Protocol to Reduce Income Volatility
Boot Protocol is a decentralized protocol designed to address Bitcoin mining variance—the fluctuations in the time it takes to find a block and the rewards received—which leads to income volatility. It enables block reward sharing without tracking actual mining work, offering up to 16x lower variance than solo mining while avoiding centralization issues.
Issue: Centralized mining pools dominate block rewards, leaving small miners with high variance.
Boot Protocol’s solution: A decentralized, low-variance system that mimics solo mining while offering mining pool advantages.
Advantages: Compared to solo mining, it reduces variance by up to 16x and is more resistant to regulatory attacks than centralized mining pools.
Against withholding attacks: The protocol is designed to prevent block withholding attacks by incentivizing miners to submit blocks as soon as possible.
Potential: Boot Protocol has the potential to revolutionize decentralized mining by eliminating the shortcomings of approaches like P2Pool and Braid Pool.
Trustless Coin Flip Game Built on Taproot and Multisig
Coinflip is a two-player coin-flipping game inspired by the concept of "Zero-Collateral Lotteries" and built using Taproot and multisig.
Exploring Duplicate Transactions in Bitcoin
In the Bitcoin blockchain, there are two sets of completely identical transactions from mid-November 2010, where one set sandwiches the other. Since the coinbase transactions have no inputs but newly generated coins, two different coinbase transactions can send the same amount to the same address in the exact same way, resulting in identical transactions.
Because duplicate transactions can cause confusion, developers have been researching solutions for years, but no ideal fix has been found. The next potential duplicate transaction event is expected in 2046. While the current risks associated with duplicate transactions are low, this remains an intriguing and novel issue. This article explores the topic in detail.
A Fee Protocol to Prevent Lightning Network Spam
Lightning Network spam happens when some one floods the network with a constant stream of HTLCs to disrupt legitimate payments. To tackle this, this paper proposes a protocol for assigning and collecting fees in the Lightning Network to mitigate spam risks. It establishes fees corresponding to all significant costs, whereas previous attempts charged fees for delayed and/or failed payments, omitted certain costs or relied on trust to prevent theft.
This protocol introduces a "griefer-penalization" mechanism: if a party suffers malicious behavior (griefing) from a channel partner, they can be made to lose certain funds, but the griefer also bears a corresponding cost. As a result, a party that only selects self-interested partners is unlikely to be griefed.
Cashu Launches Instant Offline Ecash Payments
Cashu has developed a new tap-to-pay feature that enables instant, offline ecash payments via NFC.
As a bearer token, ecash is stored directly on the user’s device rather than on a server. This is why it integrates so well with NFC.
Coinbase Open-Sourced Multi-Party Computation Library
Coinbase has open-sourced its Multi-Party Computation (MPC) engine. Coinbase's cryptography lead, Yehuda Lindell, stated that the library supports two-party and multi-party signatures for ECDSA and Schnorr/EdDSA, as well as tools for DKG, backup, and more.
This release includes the full code stack, including commitments, random oracles, secret sharing, oblivious transfer (basic and extension), and a series of ZK proofs for various threshold signing tasks. All protocols come with complete specifications and theory documents. The team has also conducted full benchmark tests, providing insights into running time and bandwidth consumption from low-level primitives to full protocols.
RISC Zero zkVM Advances: R0VM 2.0 and OP Kailua
RISC Zero is advancing its zkVM technology with the release of R0VM 2.0 and the introduction of OP Kailua to enhance blockchain verifiability, security, and scalability.
RISC Zero uses Picus for formal verification of zkVM components. R0VM 2.0 will be the first formally verified RISC-V zkVM, addressing security risks from insufficient constraints in ZK systems, ensuring provable correctness, and offering stronger security guarantees for developers.
OP Kailua is a zkVM opcode that enables efficient on-chain validity proofs, allowing OP chains to upgrade into ZK Rollups, offering:
Three Blocks Recently Solo-Mined
Three independent miners successfully mined Bitcoin blocks recently, signaling a rise in home mining.
New Book | Principles of Bitcoin: Cutting Through the Noise to Reveal the Core Value
Principles of Bitcoin constructs a holistic framework understanding Bitcoin from first principles. It strips away industry hype, jargon, and superficial analysis to reveal the ingenuity of Satoshi’s creation and its implications for money, governance, and individual freedom.
By examining Bitcoin through technical, economic, political, and philosophical lenses, the author argues that only through this holistic understanding can one grasp its significance. He presents Bitcoin as a tool for individual empowerment and economic sovereignty, showing how it challenges traditional financial systems, and why it is a unique, non-replicable innovation in the digital asset space.
Top Reads on Blockchain and Beyond
Podcast | Can Pricing Solve Congestion? Applying Toll Economics to Crypto
To alleviate traffic congestion, New York City implemented congestion pricing in early 2025. Could similar mechanisms be applied to the crypto? In this podcast episode, congestion pricing expert (and one of its key proponents) Michael Ostrovsky discusses the economics behind congestion pricing and explores its implications for both city blocks and blockchain.
Model Context Protocol: A Unified Framework for Instant, Bidirectional AI Agent Communication
MCP (Model Context Protocol) was introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 as an open standard to enhance the connection of AI agent LLM apps and user data. Unlike traditional AI integrations that rely on fragmented, custom-built solutions, MCP provides a unified framework for bidirectional communication. This allows AI agents not only to pull in external data, but also to send updates back to these systems, enabling more dynamic and autonomous behavior. Additionally, MCP’s open-source nature fosters industry-wide collaboration, contrasting with the more siloed approaches of centralized AI companies.
This tweet offers a summary of MCP’s capabilities and significance.
The Era of Culturementals: Culture is More Fundamental than Technology
This post argues that the crypto space has repeatedly demonstrated that culture trumps technology. This perspective defines the rise of Culture Chains—blockchains shaped not by their technical capabilities, but by the communities they serve. Culture Chains can be seen as an evolution of “vertical blockchains”—designed not for universal adoption but for specific niche groups, such as anime fans, role-playing gamers, or meme lovers. Functioning like digital city-states, these chains build around shared values, language, and interests, offering tailored infrastructure, governance models, and token economies.
