Bitcoin Developer on 0xB10C's Blog

20 days ago

This is a copy of the 8th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. What did you work on? In November and December 2025, and January of 2026, I primarily focused on building out peer-observer too

Bitcoin Network Monitoring with b10c: SLP707

2 months ago

In this episode, Stephan Livera and I discusses my work in the Bitcoin ecosystem, focusing on the importance of censorship resistance, the role of mining pools, and the implications of OFAC sanctions on Bitcoin transactions. I introduce my peer-observer project aimed at monitoring the Bitcoin P2P ne

Monitoring Bitcoin’s P2P network: Insights from the peer-observer Project

3 months ago

I presented about “Monitoring Bitcoin’s P2P network: Insights from the peer-observer Project” at the Chaincode Labs Bitcoin Research Day 2025. Slides (Google Docs)

OpenSats Work-Log 7

4 months ago

This is a copy of the 7th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. How did you spend your time? Publications & Talks Continued my “Stats on compact block reconstructions”: thread by posting an u

Support from LocalhostResearch for peer-observer

5 months ago

Localhost Research supported my peer-observer project by sponsoring three servers for a demo instance, which can be found on demo.peer.observer. Compared to the public.peer.observer instance, this allows everyone to explore the metrics and data extracted from two Bitcoin Core nodes, while no informa

OpenSats Work-Log 6

7 months ago

This is a copy of the 6th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. How did you spend your time? In May, June, and July of 2025 I finished mainnet-observer up and launched it, gave a talk on my p

peer-observer: A tool and infrastructure for monitoring the Bitcoin P2P network for attacks and anomalies

7 months ago

Over the past few years, I’ve been working on monitoring tools for the Bitcoin network. One of these projects is peer-observer: A tool and infrastructure for monitoring the Bitcoin P2P network for attacks and anomalies. This post describes the motivation for starting yet another Bitcoin network obse

Notes on 'DoS due to inv-to-send sets growing too large' from May 2023

8 months ago

In October 2024, the Bitcoin Core project disclosed a Denial-of-Service due to inv-to-send sets growing too large, which I authored, for Bitcoin Core versions before v25.0. I have a few notes and screenshots from my investigation back then that I want to persist here. In early May 2023, my monitorin

peer-observer: A tool and infrastructure for monitoring the Bitcoin P2P network for attacks and anomalies

8 months ago

I presented about my peer-observer project during the BTC Prague dev/hack/day 2025. Slides (Google Docs)

OpenSats Work-Log 5

10 months ago

This is a copy of the 5th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. How did you spend your time? Publications & Talks Continued my “Stats on compact block reconstructions”: thread by posting an u

Bitcoin Mining Centralization in 2025

10 months ago

This post explores Bitcoin Mining Centralization in 2025 by looking at the hashrate share of the current five biggest mining pools. It presents a Mining Centralization Index and updates it with the assumed proxy pooling by AntPool & friends. It shows that Bitcoin mining is highly centralized today,

Invalid mining jobs by AntPool & friends during forks

Looking deeper into @boerst’s recent observation about invalid mining jobs by AntPool & friends to discuss his hypothesis about “selfish mining” and “glitchy template code”. I conclude that it’s probably a bug in AntPool’s coinbase creation code and agree with @boerst’s conclusion that this is anoth

OpenSats Work-Log 4

This is a copy of the 4th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. What did you work on? Publications My mininpool-observer project detected 15 OFAC sanctioned transactions missing from blocks.

Fifteen OFAC-sanctioned transactions missing from blocks

My miningpool-observer project aims to detect when Bitcoin mining pools are not mining transactions they could have been mining. Over the past few weeks, it detected fifteen missing transactions spending from OFAC-sanctioned addresses. This post examines whether these transactions were filtered inte

OpenSats Work-Log 3

This is a copy of the 3rd work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. How did you spend your time? Publications & Talks Block Template Similarities between Mining Pools: Using the Stratum jobs I’ve

Episode 6: Discussing Pre-25.0 Bitcoin Core Vulnerability Disclosures

I joined Gloria and Niklas on the brink.dev podcast to talk about the recently disclosed Bitcoin Core pre-25.0 vulnerabilities. Episode 6: Discussing Pre-25.0 Bitcoin Core Vulnerability Disclosures

Block Template Similarities between Mining Pools

Different mining pools sending out the same or a similar block template to miners is an indicator for proxy pooling. Knowing about proxy pools is important when discussing mining pool centralization. To find similarities between mining pool block templates, I compare the Merkle branches pools sent i

Monitoring Bitcoin P2P network attacks and anomalies with eBPF and USDT tracepoints

I spoke at the eBPF Summit 2024 about how I’m using eBPF and the USDT tracepoints in Bitcoin Core to extract P2P network events to use them for, for example, anomaly detection. Recording (YouTube)

Bitcoin Core Development

At the “Bitcoin Burg Academy” I talked about Bitcoin Core development to an non-technical audience. Often when I talk to non-technical Bitcoiners, they don’t really know much about the Bitcoin Core open-source software project but are very interested to learn more about it. In this talk, I covered t

OpenSats Work-Log 2

0xB10C's Blog: Bitcoin Developer on 0xB10C's Blog

This is a copy of the 2nd work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. How did you spend your time? Publications I’ve been looking at mining pool behavior during forks while building out the stratum

Mining Pool Game Theory during Forks

I have recently been looking at mining pool behavior during forks. Which block does a pool choose to mine on during a fork? Do they behave rationally and mine on their own block? In this post, I’ll detail the mining pool game theory during forks and give some recent examples of pool behavior. I’ve a

Mining Pool Behavior during Forks

I have recently been looking at mining pool behavior during forks. Which block does a pool choose to mine on during a fork? Do they behave rationally and mine on their own block? In this post, I’ll detail the mining pool behavior during forks and give some recent examples of pool behavior. I’ve also

OpenSats Work-Log 1

This is a copy of the 1st work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant. Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted. How did you spend your time? Publications ViaBTC’s mutated blocks without witness data: Last year, errors like ERROR: AcceptBlo

Invalid F2Pool blocks 783426 and 784121 (April 2023)

My notes on the two bad-blk-sigops: too many sigops invalid blocks, 783426 and 784121, mined by F2Pool in April 2023. On April 1st, 2023, F2Pool mined an invalid block at height 783426. Bitcoin Core nodes rejected the block with the reason bad-blk-sigops and the note too many sigops. On April 6th, 2

Update on LinkingLion: Reduced activity and a statement by LionLink Networks