Exploring Innovations in Bitcoin's Tech Stack

I came across a really cool article on Medium that highlights all the recent updates in the bitcoin protocol. For those of us who aren't super tech-savvy, it’s a solid overview of the advancements within the Bitcoin tech stack. I thought it’d be great to create a reference thread here for each of these technologies, if there’s any info available. I started to fill in some details, but please chime in with any better references you might know. Exploring Innovations in Bitcoin's Tech Stack Layer 2 Lightning Network: Basics of the Lightning Network The Lightning Network FAQ Omni Data Identity Data Anchors Sidechains (RSK) Rootstock: Rootstock (RSK) Smart Contracts for Bitcoin Drivechain Drivechain is it a scaling solution? Elements Elements Project testnet sidechain alpha released Liquid [10/10/2018] Blockstream Liquid Sidechain Solution for Bitcoin Network Goes Live Mining FIBRE: How (and why) pools (and all miners) should use the Relay Network BetterHash BetterHash Mining Protocol BIP Stratum [Stratum] Overlay network protocol over Bitcoin Stratum protocol documentation Mining Derivatives Gauging Interest: Difficulty Derivatives? Miners lock in future Diff. Privacy Coinjoin: CoinJoin: Bitcoin privacy for the real world Dandelion [Discussion] Dandelion A protocol to hide transaction origin Confidential Transactions Confidential Transactions, Content privacy for Bitcoin transactions Coinswap CoinSwap: Transaction graph disjoint trustless trading Tumblebit Smart Contracts ChecktemplateVerify: CoinCovenants using SCIP signatures, an amusingly bad idea. tBTC MAST/TAPROOT Smart Contracts ..where are we now?

Today Aaron van Wirdum (twitter @AaronvanW) published a good recap of potential bitcoin protocol innovation expected in 2020. It's a good read to get a better, not ubertechical grasp at the picture in the OP. 2020 and Beyond: Bitcoin’s Potential Protocol Upgrades

An intresting recap about Taproot upgrade proposal: Bitcoin's Taproot/Schnorr upgrade proposal is 'nearly ready' as it moves through developer feedback phase.

He missed out statechains old thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5153301.0

Regarding Tumblebit, from this week Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #81:

Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #94 is out. BTCPay implemented PayJoin Executive summary: What is a Payjoin?

As usual, privacy feature are more useful when their use is widespread, otherwise you could end up having the opposite effect (e.g. when you are alone doing coinjoin), as beautifully put here by Giacomo Zucco. So yes, adoption trough appropriately simple interfaces are a nice thing to see in the future.

Simplicity is moving a little bit closer to production, even if in the Liquid Sidechain, not on Bitcoin Mainnnet. I opened a new thread here, to discuss this: Simplicity - A new advanced programming Language for Bitcoin I linked in that thread a very interesting article from LongHash and a link to a Webinar by Adam Back. Added reference in the OP too.

An interesting read by Aaron van Wirdum on the way Taproot could be implemented in the Bitcoin Protocol. BIP 8, BIP 9 Or Modern Soft Fork Activation: How Bitcoin Could Upgrade Next If you are interested on technical discussion specifically about Taproot activation, I suggest you to follow this thread : Technical: Taproot: Why Activate?

Minsc added to the Bitcoin Scripting Language branch, with a new thread started: New "Tier Three" Programming Language: Minsc

Aaron Van Wirdum goes on detailing Taproot future: Payment Pools. Building On Taproot: Payment Pools Could Be Bitcoin’s Next Layer Two Protocol This could it thought as a Layer-1 scaling alternative to complement the Layer-2 solutions? Or rather to oppose? Privacy-wise, I also wait how the Regulators will react to this, totally negating their heuristic-based-chain analysis efforts.

Containerise everything!  a work in progress https://github.com/NGUtech/bitcoin-stack Docker setup for Bitcoin, Elements/Liquid, LND, C-Lightning, & Eclair in regtest mode

A very good news for everyone running a bitcoin node. Due to patent expiry, from next bitcoin core major release the activation of a new technology to cryptographically verify signatures will enable an improved performance of about 10% (conservative estimate) in the IBD and block verification. This feature has always been present in bitcoin libraries, but it was defaulted off just to avoid patent litigations. Hal Finney’s Proposal for Optimizing Bitcoin to be Enabled in Bitcoin Core Interestingly enough, this technique was originally proposed in a bitcointalk post

As additional references, it's also discussed at [validation performance] ECDSA GLV endomorphism patent expires Sep 25th 2020

I don’t know if there is a reference thread here on the forum about CISA, but I want to highlight this aper, summarising the current situation of the project: This is the website gathering all the informations https://cisaresearch.org