This week’s newsletter summarizes several questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange and describes notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

None this week.

News

No significant news about Bitcoin infrastructure development this week.

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin StackExchange

Bitcoin StackExchange is one of the first places Optech contributors look for answers to their questions—or when we have a few spare moments to help curious or confused users. In this monthly feature, we highlight some of the top-voted questions and answers posted since our last update.

● Why does the banscore default to 100? User Anonymous describes some history behind banscore , which protects nodes from misbehaving peers. Although some offenses result in a 100 point increase—and thus the immediate banning of the offending peer under the default banscore setting—other offenses detailed in net_processing.cpp have different scores.

● Where can I find the miniscript policy language specification? Andrew Chow and Pieter Wuille explain that there is not a specification for how the miniscript policy language is compiled to miniscript and that both the current C++ and Rust implementations effectively try every possibility and choose the miniscript resulting in the smallest scriptWitness size.

Notable code and documentation changes

Notable changes this week in Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, Eclair, LND, libsecp256k1, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), and Lightning BOLTs.