Direct Integration with Bitcoin

sounds good. I can’t wait to see the release on that time.

Doesn’t change anything if marketing is as it is right now. People sentiment towards Icp is still as bad. I think 1 thing could really change it is to have a famous Twitter/YouTube influencer that really learn about Icp and promote it (of course after all the goodie updates gets rolled out).

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I have given up on the marketing side of matters. I mean, these are people who thought Internet Computer was a good name for a blockchain and who thought weird URLs could be a selling point rather than a roadblock :grinning: . The IC is built by techies who don’t know what they don’t know outside of their domain. Still, within their domain they are brilliant, and we must hope that will be enough. The first quarter of 2023 should give us an indication if that is the case.

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This only magnifies the importance of small developer + retail participation in NNS governance as well as forums like this. Its nice to see such an active ICP community.

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Hey folks,

Here is a relevant security audits for those interested:

  1. "Threshold ECDSA Integration and Bitcoin Canisters - Security Review" by Trail of Bits (third-party security audit #5)

  2. "Canister Sandbox Review" by Trail of Bits (third-party security audit #4)

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Update

Bitcoin Testnet

The work on the Bitcoin canister has been progressing very well and we want to launch it for Bitcoin Testnet, probably next week. The replica changes for this will be merged this week likely. The rollout will be done as follows:

  • Deploying the replica change that routes the Bitcoin management canister API to the new Wasm canister instead of the replica implementation;
  • Testing on a first subnet whether the transition from the replica implementation to the canister works without problems;
  • Doing a wider rollout following the standard rollout schedule.

The nice thing about this approach is that there is no interruption of service. Until the replica gets upgraded on a specific subnet, Bitcoin requests continue to be routed to the replica implementation, once a subnet has been upgraded, the requests will be routed to the new Wasm canister. The API does not change, so canister smart contracts should not experience any interruption of service.

Bitcoin Mainnet

Meanwhile, work on the Bitcoin canister for the Bitcoin Mainnet launch continues, as there are still some open things to be addressed:

  • Wait for quiet mechanism to only start serving requests once the blockchain is synched to the tip;
  • Unstable blocks should be stored in stable memory, not on the heap;
  • Increasing the stability threshold to 144; most of the hard part enabling this – the performance optimizations to make this fast – have been implemented already;
  • Monitoring / alerting that checks that the Bitcoin canister’s view is in line with the real blockchain; raise an alert to the on-duty team if the tip of the canister does not agree with the main blockchain. This will help us all to sleep better;

Without giving a firm commitment, late November still seems doable for the Bitcoin Mainnet canister.

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This made my day. The community appreciates you :pray:

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Thanks @dieter.sommer for the update. I think every single person in this forum is looking forward to seeing how this works out in practice.
I have one question though: is it too optimistic to expect that the first wave of dapps on IC leveraging bitcoin integration should be in main net in Q1-2023?
Thank you.

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Hi @dieter.sommer A bit quiet lately so I guess everyone is busy with this. Do we still plan to launch the Bitcoin test net “this week”? Thanks.

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What is the probability of Musk/ Twitter adopting ICP tech into Twitter once the Bitcoin integration is implemented? Would DESO and ICP be a good fit to unite and help lure more user and devs integration?

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Indeed, we have all been extremely busy and there was silence here.

tl;dr

Yes!

Testnet

The good news: The Bitcoin Testnet canister has been rolled out onto one subnet already for smoke testing it before the larger rollout.

The better news: The feature is currently being rolled out on the IC. The update that is getting rolled out this week to the subnets contains the code that switches routing over from the replica implementation to the new Wasm Bitcoin canister. People using the feature already should not see any interruption of service. After the update of the respective subnet, the requests will not be routed to the replica of the Bitcoin subnet, but to the Wasm Bitcoin Testnet canister.

Mainnet

For Mainnet, we need to do some remaining implementation tasks. We still think that November is realistic for the Bitcoin Mainnet canister to be ready and be deployed.

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Launching the feature within the next couple of weeks means that projects would have a couple of months to adopt the feature and launch their product in production some time in Q1 2023. So I would see this as realistic, knowing that there are projects already building on the beta version of the Bitcoin feature and have something working.

Different topic, but just to mention it: There are also projects who use the beta threshold ECDSA feature and HTTPS outcalls to integrate with Ethereum.

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Thanks @dieter.sommer for both answers. What an exciting time ahead for the IC network.
Have a good weekend to you and everyone else in the forum.

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Hey everyone, I just wanted to share a quick update that we have open-sourced the bitcoin canister repo in preparation for the upcoming mainnet launch. As @dieter.sommer already mentioned, we’ve been migrating from a replica implementation to a canister implementation, and in the past few days we’ve already started routing all of the bitcoin testnet requests to the canister implementation.

As stated in the README of the repo, it’s still not feature complete. We’re missing some small additions like block validation and the wait-for-quiet mechanism, which will be implemented over the coming days.

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It is amazing to see this, thanks for sharing this. I believe ICP will be the king finally :grin: :grin: :grin:

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Is there any plan to incorporate the BTC integration into the NNS ( native wallets ) now or in the future, or is this up to third party dapps to provide us with wallets etc ?

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That will be awesome!

The current plan is that the NNS dapp would support SNS tokens and ckBTC, but not real BTC directly.

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We want $ghost token as well!! Key part of the ecosystem

You guys should consider implementing BTC into the NNS dapp directly. One of the reasons I personally use the NNS dapp (apart from staking) is that I trust the Dfinity Foundation.

There’s going to be a lot of buzz around this BTC integration and I believe there should be at least one “trusted” foundation approved wallet to hold the BTC in. If someone creates a wallet that has a vulnerability so bitcoin gets stolen but the integration is solid, the integration nonetheless may get blamed.

Furthermore, alot of IC enthusiasts are also BTC enthusiasts. Enabling them to keep all their funds in one wallet (NNS dapp) would be a major convenience.

Food for thought. Lmk your thoughts.

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