Neutrino: The Privacy Preserving Bitcoin Light Client
Channel: SF Bitcoin Developers
Date: 09/07/2017

Olaoluwa Osuntokun (roasbeef), Cofounder at Lightning Labs, spoke about Neutrino, a privacy preserving Bitcoin light client.

Slides can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vjJUWOZIaPshjx1svfE6rFZ2lC07n47ifOdzpKWqpb4/edit#slide=id.p

"The current widely used standard for Bitcoin light clients (BIP 37) has several drawbacks including: virtually zero privacy for users, exploitable DoS vectors against BIP-37-serving full-nodes, and a lack of client-side verifiability for information received (lies by omission, etc). 

In his talk, Olaoluwa presents Neutrino, an implementation of a forthcoming BIP proposal to address the several drawbacks of existing Bitcoin light client designs. The light client model Neutrino implements provides a greater degree of privacy for users by "flipping" the filtering dependency, meaning filtering instead is conducted on the client side. This new light client model eschews bloom filters in favor of a more space efficient probabilistic set which draws on entropy coding techniques from the area of image/video processing. Additionally, this new mode provides application developers with a greater degree of utility due to the client-side filtering model. 

Olaoluwa details how this new light client mode will be used in the next release of lnd, the Lightning Network Daemon."