This week’s newsletter summarizes a proposal for an update to the LN gossip protocol. Also included are our regular sections on bech32 sending support and notable changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

Action items

None this week.

News

Bech32 sending support

Week 18 of 24 in a series about allowing the people you pay to access all of segwit’s benefits.

We have heard from wallet providers that a reason for their hesitation to default to receiving to bech32 addresses is concern that they’d see a significant increase in customer support requests. Despite this, some wallets already default to bech32 addresses and others plan to move to use them soon, such as Bitcoin Core.

We solicited input from a number of services including BitGo, BRD, Conio, Electrum, and Gemini regarding their customer support burden from use of bech32 addresses. Most services report minimal issues (“no support requests” and “there isn’t too much confusion”).

One service said, “So Bitcoin address-related customer support tickets increased 50%, but the absolute number of tickets is so small that not sure we can give too much significance. There have never been many tickets on this subject either before or after Bech32 so not sure this is an important point in making the argument for exchanges to make the switch. Instead, I might suggest focusing on fees, which really can add up if you are using an old wallet implementation.”

Electrum has seen some reports though, which are public, such as “strange addresses” and “Localbitcoins does not support sending to bech32”.

While not conclusive, it is reassuring that services opting to support receiving to bech32 addresses have not seen a negative impact on their customer support teams. The suggestion above to consider fee savings likely far outweighs concerns, and is consistent with Bitcoin Optech’s guidance. With few negative reports and significant potential fee savings for those wallets and services that support receiving to bech32 addresses, it may be time for more wallets to begin making bech32 their default address format. If that happens, it’ll be even more important for other wallets and services to support sending to bech32 addresses.

Notable code and documentation changes

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