IRC meeting summary for 2016-08-18

• Link to this week logs
• Meeting minutes by meetbot

Notes / short topics

• The binary releases of Bitcoin Core are still signed with ‘The Bitcoin Foundation’. Jonasschnelli wonders whether we should try and get new certificates in the name of “Bitcoin Core”. Cfields was looking into this, but got nowhere. His best suggestion was to see if MIT would be interested in helping with a certificate.

Main topics

• core internal binary signing and verification tool
• 0.13.0 Final

core internal binary signing and verification tool

background

After Cobra-Bitcoin posted a safety warning on the bitcoin.org website more people have been asking how to safely verify the Bitcoin Core binaries.

meeting comments

Jonasschnelli proposes to to add a command line interface tool in the Bitcoin Core package for verifying Bitcoin Core. Btcdrak thinks a GUI would bring a wider adoption. It would be a separate executable within the Bitcoin Core distribution. The elliptic curve signatures should be placed in bitcoin/bitcoin, otherwise it would need to be hosted elsewhere, which is a change in the release process. Wumpus notes the GPG keys are already in the repository.

Kanzure thinks “next” is important to include in the name, to make clear the verification tool is to verify the next release. Making it so that once you have a good release you’ll have good releases forever.

It would be a N-out-of-M scheme so there’s some room to tolerate revoked or compromised keys.

Jonasschnelli notes the tool would allow hardware wallets to sign the binaries, though you can already do this with GPG smartcard. A number of people use GPG via yubikey3. Btcdrak notes Ledger Nano S could be programmed to do signing and it also has a GPG module coming, he thinks everyone should be using some kind of smartcard/hardware device for GPG signing.

Btcdrak suggests to mirror downloads elsewhere, like Github and bitcoincore.org. Wumpus notes we already provide torrents for people that don’t want to download from bitcoin.org and extra mirrors doesn’t solve the verification problem. Hosting the binaries on Github also gives another incentive to compromise our Github.

Zooko explains a project called “binary transparency”, which lets you submit your hash to append-only servers. (google-group) Wumpus notes this doesn’t solve the problem of users not verifying the binaries at all, unless the OS would build in support for it.

meeting conclusion

• Jonasschnelli will work on a short design and post it to the bitcoin-core-dev mailinglist.
• Start adding the sha256 hashes with the release announcement as it will ensure a wider distribution of the hashes.

0.13.0 Final

background

The Bitcoin Core team is working towards the 0.13.0 release (full schedule) and RC3 is available since 2016-08-13.

meeting comments

There have been no critical issues reported with RC3, so it could be tagged as final at any time now.

MarcoFalke ran into an issue on testnet, which may be a release blocker. (after the meeting the problem was detected and deemed not a release blocker)

The gitian builds could start over the weekend.

Given 0.13.0 is delayed Wumpus wonders whether we should delay setting up the 0.14 release schedule. Everyone agrees the current 6 month schedule is fine and 0.14 should be scheduled right after the 0.13.0 release.

meeting conclusion

• review the 0.13.0 blog post on bitcoincore.org
• Start gitian building

BIP146

background

BIP146: Dealing with signature malleability. LOW_S and NULLDUMMY have been non-standard on the network for a long time, and do not appear on the chain. As they are both trivial BIP146 proposes to do this softfork together with segwit. Low_S was discussed in last weeks meeting.

meeting comments

The BIP proposal was sent to the mailinglist (after official meeting time:) Bluematt still runs a node which malleates high-s transactions automatically to low-s and he still gets a lot of high-s transactions (about 1 per hour). This could also be someone malleating originally low-s transactions though.

meeting conclusion

• Do BIP146 together with segwit

Comic relief

gmaxwell         If it does https I will nak it so hard keys will fall of the keyboard.

*discussion about different hosting for binaries*
sipa             let's use sourceforge *ducks*

wumpus           however the announcement of cobra this morning felt like someone dropped a bomb on the release process, and 'infected' 0.13.0 in people's minds before it is even released
cfields          wumpus: tag it as 0.13.0.1 :)

Participants

Disclaimer

This summary was compiled without input from any of the participants in the discussion, so any errors are the fault of the summary author and not the discussion participants.