I got to judge the SATSxSW Hackathon. People have already covered the hackathon. Memorably for me:

I thought it might also be fun to break down the projects a little more ... It's obvious from the breadth of the projects, there's tons of frontier in the lightning/bitcoin space.

Best Overall - pleb.fm It's a lightning powered juke box where you bid for a song in sats. The song with the most sats will be played next.

Imagine you're at a Bit Devs early, trying to get @ODELL to sign your big natties. While you're breathing heavy waiting for odell to notice you, you'd like to listen to Who Let the Dogs Out. You connect to the local Pleb FM server, select the song and pay a high enough invoice that you're sure it will play next. Odell gives you the eye, and it's you, you're the one who let 'em out. Cool right?!

Apparently it was inspired somewhat by SN. It is lightning powered economic ranking in a juke box context. It also was very close to fully working. This got the team of Stephen, Alex, and soon to be Austinite Asher 4 million big ones.

Most On-Theme - Whisper Village It's basically a way for Bitcoin recipients to receive donations effectively to a single address, much like the Canadian truckers wanted to do, but without the censorship risk because each address is unique from the payer's perspective. Each payer gets a unique address to send funds to because the recipient's actual address is added to another ephemeral address using elliptic curve point addition. The private key to this ephemeral address is then sent to the recipient via some communication channel so that they can redeem the funds using their personal private key and the ephemeral one.

It's kind of neat and was a project suggested by @supertestnet. As such, it was on theme and Chris and the other team member kiki snagged 1 million smackers.

Most Usable - graphBTC This was a visual sneak peak of accounting software coming out of Blockstream's clightning team from @niftynei and Dillon. Underneath the hood I believe this is using lnsocket from @jb55 which provides macaroon-authenticated rpc calls over the noise-protocol, ie your talking to your lightning node over the lightning protocol, in addition to some websocket magic to get the visualizations in the browser.

What's particularly cool other than all the neat data clightning is providing about your node, and the slick visualizations of that data, is that you're communicating with your node remotely without having to provide a cert - just a "roon without a mac" and the host and port (I believe).

It just worked and provided some really pretty graphs, so they're sat millionaires now.

Most Ambitious - DLCs on greenlight @benthecarman and Justin Moon confused all the judges the most with their project, but I believe what they were trying to do was use greenlight lightning nodes to negotiate a DLC over lightning. While I grok DLCs in the abstract, what I've learned the most about them is that I lose money to @falsefaucet when I use them.

It was a cool project and while they weren't able to pull it off entirely, they did document all the roadblocks to achieving such a thing. The judges tucked 1 million sats in their waistbands.

Most Adversarial - Probing for privates Because channel ids are deterministically derived from the UTXOs that created them, you can look for channel opens on the timechain, guess the corresponding channel id, and attempt to make payments across that channel (ie probe). The problem is this also works for private channels. 😱

@cycryptr and @futurepaul whipped up a demo using ldk showing they could detect private channels by simply guessing the right channel id. The only thing missing was the chain analysis and an attempt to do this at scale. A ransom of one million sats went to this team else they might've exposed Kyle's 3BTC private channel to Glossier. 🤷‍♂️

I'm usually a hackathon bear - mostly because I hate not finishing things and not sleeping and also because I feel like my life is a hackathon - but the SATSxSW hackathon was awesome!