Technical deep-dives authored for DEV Community and Open Bitcoin Africa, covering protocol design, service discovery, and trust-minimized escrow architecture.
Tracing the path from PIP-01 (discovery-only) through PR #12 (standalone service interface) to PR #17 (simplification) — including the working Lightning escrow POC, its NIP-98 auth architecture, a 50-test integration suite, and what building against an evolving spec teaches you about protocol design.
Expanding PIP-01 from discovery-only into a standalone service interface — the `service` block, schema_url vs. event bloat, NIP-98 authentication, split_decision release vocabularies, escrow state machines, deadlock prevention, and the security trade-offs across the lightning_hold_invoice, custodial_escrow, and cashu_escrow subtypes.
Advertising Pontmore escrow service capabilities directly on Nostr — extending PIP-01 with an optional `service` block (PR #12) so standalone, non-swap applications can discover, parse, and invoke a published escrow service via HTTPS endpoints, NIP-98 authentication, and declared release-decision formats without out-of-band coordination.