Centralization is the Enemy of Property Rights. Bitcoin Tech Talk #247 Users are getting deplatformed. Banks are cutting off access to certain types of businesses. Accounts are getting frozen. Even entire applications are being kicked off of AWS, Apple App Store and so on. These are not good days if your views are contrary to […]

Bitcoin Thrives on Adversity. Bitcoin Tech Talk #246 Bitcoin has had its share of adversity in its life. What put Bitcoin on the map was Wikileaks. They had their PayPal donation account revoked in 2010. Searching for another means of donations, they found Bitcoin. That, in turn, led to a huge surge in the interest […]

Inflation is Here. Bitcoin Tech Talk #245 The past year has seen a lot of monetary expansion. Not only were there stimulous checks, but also all sorts of forgiveable loans, generous unemployment and bailouts of all types, ostensibly to keep the economy going. Yet despite what seemed like desperate economic circumstances, help wanted signs are […]

Why Altcoins aren’t copying Taproot. Bitcoin Tech Talk #244 Taproot locked in this past week and Bitcoiners celebrated. Altcoiners, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. I suspect that they don’t even know what it is or what it’s supposed to do. And why should they? Altcoin developers haven’t shown the slightest interest in adding […]

Proof, not Endorsements. Bitcoin Tech Talk #243 Bitcoin 2021 has shown that there are a lot of celebrities in Bitcoin. Such well-known luminaries as Ron Paul, Floyd Mayweather, Tony Hawk and Kevin O’Leary spoke at the conference. That’s not including the many other known celebrities that are into Bitcoin from Paris Hilton to Tom Brady. […]

The Great Bitcoin Reset. Bitcoin Tech Talk #242 The past year and a half has completely overturned the world. The world is still locked down in large swaths, we went through a pretty contested presidential election and there were social protests of all types all over the world. The Bitcoin community and its perception in […]

Dogecoin, the Epitome of Post-Modern Investing. Bitcoin Tech Talk #241 The market is quite irrational and has been for the past year. Not only are stock prices crazy multiples of profits, or even earnings, we’re seeing behavior from the market that can only be described as completely unhinged. At least with non-profitable companies, there’s some […]

Bitcoin is More Credible than Elon. Bitcoin Tech Talk #240 Elon this week has started to criticize Bitcoin and began to ignite speculation about making a competitor out of Dogecoin. His attacks on Bitcoin’s energy use have been debunked many times, but I found this response by Saifedean to be most helpful from an economic perspective to […]

Resisting the Siren Song of Altcoins. Bitcoin Tech Talk #239 Everyone has that friend that brags about their altcoin gains. Sure, they’re currently called DeFi tokens and NFTs instead of ICOs and IEOs, but the dynamic is the same. Such people are enthused because some coin they bought a few months ago has made them […]

The Future is Bitcoin Only. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #238 Bitcoin dominance is below 50%. There are new DeFi and NFT projects that are getting tons of publicity. People are throwing money at altcoins like DOGE and making tons of money. How is it, then, that I’m writing about how the future is Bitcoin only? […]

Learning Better Investment Habits. Bitcoin Tech Talk #237 During a bull market, new buyers look for dips to stack, but then when the dip inevitably comes, many shy away and don’t stack. We’re in the middle of one right now and it’s clear that many people just don’t know when to buy. They think that […]

Investment under a Bitcoin Standard. Bitcoin Tech Talk #236 The current system of investment is strange. Stocks with no profits for years soar to crazy heights. Bonds that return negative yields go up in value. There are lots of VCs who put in lots of money to lots of startups hoping for returns in 7-10 […]

Why We Need Bitcoin. Bitcoin Tech Talk #235 I prepared these remarks for the Texas Summit over the weekend and am publishing it again here. It’s been said that “You don’t just move to Texas. Texas moves into you.” I can attest to this as I’m not a native Texan. Texas to me means freedom, […]

Everything is a Search for Yield. Bitcoin Tech Talk #234 Bonds are returning very low, some even negative interest rates. Stocks have insanely high P/E ratios and low, if any dividends. Housing price to rent ratios are similarly high and generate comparatively little earnings for the cost. The macroeconomic conditions are such that there’s really […]

Debunking the Empty Block Attack. Bitcoin Tech Talk #233 Note: I started to write this article for the newsletter but it went too long for me to include it here. You can read it on medium, but I’ve included the first part here. It’s amazing how much effort critics expend on ways in which Bitcoin could […]

Debunking the Empty Block Attack It’s amazing how much effort critics expend on ways in which Bitcoin could not work. Few people ask about the vulnerabilities of USD for instance, which has a far greater impact globally yet in order to FUD Bitcoin, the same “concerns” are brought up again and again as if they […]

Bitcoin, NFTs and Property Rights. Bitcoin Tech Talk #232 NFTs are bribes for the Ethereum ecosystem and they are doomed economically. Even the most enthusiastic backers of NFTs are already conceding that it’s a bubble and that the prices being paid for NFTs are crazy and unsustainable. While the market dynamics of the tokens are interesting to examine, […]

Taleb, Peterson and Weinstein’s engagement with Bitcoin. Bitcoin Tech Talk #231 Allen Farrington’s masterful piece on Weinstein and Gauge Theory has been creating some waves in the Bitcoin space, a culmination of what started on clubhouse a couple of weeks ago. To recap, Eric Weinstein found his way into a room labeled “Taleb vs Peterson” populated by […]

NFTs are doomed. Bitcoin Tech Talk #230 My article last week about NFTs being bribes drew a fair amount of attention. Many were especially upset that I would condemn starving artists finally making money, proving the point I made. The people getting paid, or potentially getting paid by Ethereum become its staunch defenders. This would be funny […]

NFTs are Bribes. Bitcoin Tech Talk #229 Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been around a long time. From Rare Pepes to Crypto-Kitties, they’ve been the subject of silliness in more ways than one. The latest hype around NFTs promises that artists will somehow make lots of money by selling tokens that represent some digital artwork. The […]

The Bitcoinization of the Economy. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #228 Once you understand that Bitcoin is hard money, it’s hard to unsee it. Bitcoin’s superiority in scarcity over every other asset is obvious in retrospect and it’s difficult to return to the previous view of Bitcoin as something other than hard money. This naturally leads […]

Bitcoin Subsidizes Energy Production. Bitcoin Tech Talk #227 Any time there’s a bull market, FUD starts coming out and there’s probably no FUD quite so emotional as the “Bitcoin wastes energy” argument. It’s an argument borne of simplistic analysis by journalists that want to take pot-shots at Bitcoin, and one that noobs bring up quite […]

Bitcoin’s Eternal September is Coming. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #226 During the bull runs, the people in the Bitcoin space on average tend to be noobs. They not only have no idea what they’re doing, but are often pretty confused by the different propaganda arms of various altcoin communities. They see the number go up […]

Loans are Bailouts and other Bitcoin truths. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #225 Nothing quite brings out righteous indignation like an obvious power-play. No, I’m not talking about the election, I’m talking about Gamestop, Wall Street Bets and the SEC. The details of the saga are well known. Lots of options buying, a gamma squeeze on […]

Why Bitcoin feels hard to hold. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #224 HODL! Or so goes the mantra for everyone during price dips. The meme is a tacit acknowledgement that there is a lot of volatility in Bitcoin and holding through the dips is difficult for most people. The idea of HODL is that iron tenacity […]

The Power of Bitcoin Memes. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #223 To the moon. Number go up. Bitcoin fixes this. Run the numbers. Have fun staying poor. Few understand this. If you don’t recognize these phrases, you probably aren’t on Twitter. These are called memes and they make up a significant part of the Bitcoin culture. […]

Subverting the Technocracy. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #222 This past week has been interesting to say the least. Not only did we see a storming of the Capitol, but we saw an unprecedented reaction against it. Many people linked with the protests have been kicked off of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram including the likes of […]

Fiat Funded Bread and Circuses. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #221 Happy New Year! 2020 couldn’t be over fast enough and of course, Bitcoin is going parabolic. While the crazy price action is generating plenty of press, the real question on my mind is, how much of this is the depreciation of fiat currency versus the […]

Innovations in Institutional Bitcoin Exposure. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #220 Preston Pysh this past week published a great interview with Michael Saylor. It’s a bit long, but is definitely worth a listen. If you don’t have time to listen to 3 hours of what Michael Saylor thinks will happen to Bitcoin and why, here’s a short summary: […]

The Moral Case for Bitcoin The Bitcoin Times, Ed 3 One of the most important parts of the Bitcoin journey is learning to talk about Bitcoin in a way that connects with people. There have been a lot of approaches. There’s the investment case for bitcoin, the self-sovereignty case for bitcoin and even the societal […]

Mental Shift after Breaking $20k. Bitcoin Tech Talk #219 We broke past $20,000 this week and everyone is celebrating! Not only did we get to an all-time high, but we raced past $24,000, which even a few years ago seemed very far off. The fact that we passed through $21k, $22k and $23k without so […]

Curing Monetary Stockholm Syndrome. Bitcoin Tech Talk #218 It’s easy to see how as a society, as a civilization, we’re being bullied right now. The authorities can and do make us do things that we don’t want to do, but most of the populace go along with it without so much of a whimper. This […]

What to expect in the coming year. Bitcoin Tech Talk #217 2020 is coming to a close, leaving behind its wake economic, cultural and political devastation. Governments are more authoritarian than ever, the hopes and dreams of millions of small business owners and non-essential workers are up in smoke and the US political system is […]

The Future of Bitcoin Privacy: Cross-Input Signature Aggregation. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #216 Privacy is something everyone talks about but few people actually take time to do properly. This is as true in life as it is in Bitcoin. Coinjoins are not a great user experience right now. Not only are the anonymity sets small, […]

The Case Against Gold. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #215 We all know the case for gold that goldbugs will tell us. Their arguments are if anything utterly predictable. Gold has been in use for thousands of years. Gold is physical. Gold has uses outside its use as money in electronics, dentistry and aeronautics. Their arguments […]

All Time High looks inevitable. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #214 Last Sunday we had the 4rd highest weekly ever. Yesterday, we had the 3rd highest weekly close ever. We also had the 13th highest daily close ever on November 12, 2020. We’re getting very close to the all time highs established in the heady 10 […]

Trust tinged by Greed will get abused. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #213 The past week in US politics has at times looked exciting, ridiculous, incredulous and inevitable. Over 120 million people in the US voted in a close and tightly contested election. What’s become clear since the vote is that there are not easily verifiable […]

Liquidity and the Future of Prediction Markets. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #212 We live in a strange time. The election is set for Tuesday and there are so many conflicting reports of who’s going to win that it’s hard to cut through the noise. What’s really interesting this election is that both sides seem confident […]

The Inevitability of Smaller States. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #211 Governments in today’s world are large. Not only are they bloated beyond reason, but they also cover insane amounts of territory. EU, Russia, USA, India and China are not only populous but span a large swath of land. This presents a natural governance problem. It’s […]

Ending the Tech Oligarchy. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #210 Online, too many of us are completely dependent on tech companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter and even the service that hosts and sends this newsletter, Substack, essentially have a veto over our content. They are essentially trusted third parties, which can be good for convenience, but when […]

Tempering Enthusiasm For Corporate FOMO. Bitcoin Fixes This #209 Microstrategies isn’t the only company to invest a ton of money into Bitcoin. Square revealed that they invested $50M into Bitcoin making this a trend. More importantly, they published exactly why. This is an obvious template that they’re hoping other companies will use to justify buying Bitcoin. […]

Bitcoin fixes over-politicization. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #208 Brian Armstrong got a lot of flak for his recent blog post where he explained that his company would be mission-focused. What upset people is his indication that Coinbase would not be a place for lots of political activism, that he wants people who work there to be committed […]

How Bitcoin Returns US Manufacturing. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #207 The Cantillon Effect, generally speaking is how the first spenders of newly printed money benefit more than the later spenders. The Cantillon Effect is an analysis of how inflation affects an economy. If you’re unfamiliar, here is an excellent primer on the Cantillon effect from back in […]

What’s common to Michael Saylor and Andreas Antonopolous? Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #206 Michael Saylor is the new darling of Bitcoiners, having put some $400M into Bitcoin over the past 6 months. This is a startling turnaround from 2013, when he dismissed Bitcoin and calling its days “numbered.” By contrast, Andreas Antonopolous has upset Bitcoiners […]

SJW infiltration into Bitcoin Core? Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #205 Bitcoin Twitter was in an uproar earlier this week when Giacomo Zucco pointed out a pull request from June. The PR didn’t introduce an inflation bug, create a DoS vulnerability or potentially cause a hard fork. The PR didn’t introduce any new functionality and didn’t affect the […]

The Market For Zero-Sum Games. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #204 DeFi-mania is nothing new. It was preceded by IEO-mania which was preceded by ICO-mania which was preceded by altcoin-mania. The sad reality of this space is that there always seems to be new money coming in for what they perceive to be easy money. The […]

Bitcoin protects our Natural Rights. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #203 The pandemic has shown just how much power governments around the world are willing to flex. It’s almost a given that governors can make rules on gatherings that don’t involve them, or rules pertaining to who can do what when. In places like the US, […]

Long Bitcoin, Short “the System.” Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #202 Back in 2014, I spoke at my first conference. It was a small libertarian conference in Austin and I was asked to talk about Bitcoin on a panel. Wanting to get an idea of where the audience was, I asked the audience, “how many of […]

The Gentrification of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #201 Back in 2011, Bitcoin was a money for people to buy drugs off the internet and not much else according to the media. In other words, Bitcoin was for those people, not for respectable, law-abiding citizens. The narrative changed in early 2013. Bitcoin became a place to practice […]

Is the Bull Market starting? Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #200 Bitcoin winter has been long and pretty stressful. Getting to the heights that we did back in December 2017 will do that. We’ve endured two drops into the $3000’s and multiple teases like the jump to $13,000 last summer. But is the bull market really […]

Bitcoin: A Declaration of Monetary Independence The system is rigged. We all can see it in the opulent residences of the rich in San Francisco which lie blocks away from the squalid tents of the homeless. We can feel it in the way that certain people and businesses do little to better civilization yet make […]

Why Satoshi (probably) didn’t move some coins from 2009 On block 631058 was mined a transaction which spent an output from February of 2009, that is a month after the Bitcoin network went live. This has caused a bit of a price swing, not to mention, a lot of speculation, about whether this is Satoshi Nakamoto moving […]

Debunking a Deceitful BCH Claim Jiang Zuouer of BTC.top posted a rather… interesting analysis of their plan to fund BCH development with 12.5% of the BCH coinbase award for 6 months starting in May. If you haven’t seen the proposal, the idea is for the miners to form a cartel where they will orphan any blocks that […]

Learning Economics Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through the Economics 11: Principles of Economics course on saifedean.com. In this article, I’m going to review the class, what I think about it and who I think it’s good for. The Austrian Method One of the things that has always attracted me to Austrian economics […]

Why Exchanges Delist Coins If you haven’t heard yet, CoinFloor announced that the exchange will be Bitcoin-only come January 3, 2020. That is, they’ll delist BCH and ETH and concentrate only on BTC. Similarly BitGo is no longer supporting BSV given their p2sh rollback coming in a month. This is welcome news, not the least to the poor engineers […]

Goals — 2020 This is another post that’s too long for Twitter. Yesterday, I had an odd encounter. Someone came up to me and opened with “We’ve never met, but I’ve been wanting to meet you.” The interesting thing was, that I had met this person back in 2015 at a conference, just that no […]

Latin American Bitcoin Perspectives This is a short musing based on some conversations from yesterday that’s too long for a Tweet. Part of the joy, and frustration, of traveling is that different places have a very different perspectives. It’s easy to be limited to a very narrow view of the world and think that it’s […]

On Altcoin Valuation Bitcoin has value because it’s decentralized digital money. It has a stock/flow ratio that continues to increase and a scarcity enforced by a highly credible monetary policy that no physical asset can ever have. In addition, Bitcoin has a huge network which has made it the Schelling Point, security that’s extremely expensive […]

How to Write a Book in 4 Days About a year ago, I was talking to someone about how difficult it was to get myself to write. I had been working on a book for O’Reilly and Associates for about 9 months at that point and had talked to other authors who acknowledged the same problem. Many […]

Why ICOs Are Broken ICOs, also known as utility tokens, have dominated the cryptocurrency industry for the past three years. They’ve been credited with Ethereum’s growth, a new financing model and a gateway to a decentralized future. But what are utility tokens, really? Economically, what do they do and what value do they add? This article […]

Why Cryptocurrency Diversification Makes Little Sense Anyone coming into crypto realizes very quickly that there are a lot of different coins out there. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Tron, Cardano… How is an investor supposed to figure out which ones to invest in? There are many arguments to be made about why diversification in […]

Lessons Learned from Teaching Over 500 Developers or: Why You Should Level Up This is the text of the talk I gave on May 12, 2019 at the Magical Crypto Conference in New York City. My name is Jimmy Song and I teach Bitcoin development. Just as a show of hands, how many of you […]

Why Blockchain is Not the Answer There’s a persistent myth that blockchain tech is brand new and that if only given enough time, somebody will make something that’s useful for something other than money. This is what I call the “blockchain, not Bitcoin” syndrome and in this article, I’m going to dispel the myth that […]

Binance was hacked on May 7th, 2019 for 7000 BTC. Soon after we saw this tweet from Jeremy Rubin: This apparently led Binance to consider a reorg attempt which, according to the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao (aka cz), was scuttled after some consultation with a few people: In this article, I’m going to go […]

Originally published here. Written by Peter Selmeczy The nonstop increase of Bitcoin price over dollar has shown its reverse side. It has given birth to a brand new cybercrime industry based on numerous scams, even if they are easy to get. Crafty rascals target naive internet users in a bid to cause them to lose their Bitcoins. […]

What is Bitcoin? Part 2 In the last article, we established that Bitcoin is decentralized, digital scarcity which is uncontrolled by any party and to a degree natural, as in anyone can mine, transfer and/or store without permission. This is in stark contrast to centralized scarcity which is controlled and artificial, as in you need permission […]

What is Bitcoin? (Part 1) It’s easy to believe that you understand something just because you’ve heard the term a bunch of times. At the surface level, this is true. You know what a stethoscope is, because you’ve seen a stethoscope and have seen it being used. At a deeper level, however, there’s a knowledge […]

2018, the Year Bitcoin Separated from the Pack The past year has been a turbulent one for Bitcoin, but then again, what year isn’t? Bitcoin is disruptive and real disruption means that there’s bound to be significant volatility. In this article, I’m going to examine what’s happened in the past year and how it has […]

Tips on Getting Through a Bear Market The bear market in BTC has lasted almost a year now and it’s a hard place to be. Holding onto assets as they drop is a difficult thing to do and getting through this market takes a lot of character. In this article, I am going to lay […]

Faketoshi’s Nonsense Signature A lot of people were freaking out about a “Satoshi” signature validating. For those that know enough to check a signature, this signature does appear to validate. But how did this person do it? Does the Tweet actually have a valid signature? In this article, I go through the actual mathematical technique […]

Stablecoins: What you need to know Stablecoins have been around for a long time since the advent of BitShares back in 2014. They’ve gotten more popular with the utilization of Tether on the Omni network and backed by the same people as BitFinex. Let’s dive straight in and discuss what they’re for. What are stablecoins? […]

Roger and Me If you pay attention to r/btc (and I totally understand if you don’t), Roger Ver has “accepted” my latest terms as can be seen in this video at around the 13:47 mark: Before I give my answer, let’s recap exactly what led up to this moment. The Origin Story The story starts […]

Lord Keynes Would Be Proud Last week, I tweeted something I honestly did not expect to get much attention: Earlier in the day, I released a video made by Ioni Appelberg, which I thought would get a lot more attention, especially by the BCH crowd. They both got attention, but this tweet got more. In this article, […]

Bitcoin Core Bug CVE-2018–17144: An Analysis The Bitcoin world was surprised when last week, 0.16.3 was released to the public and everyone was urged to upgrade as soon as possible. The ostensible reason was that there was a Denial of Service (DoS) vector found in 0.14-0.16.2 that needed patching. Later on, we found out that there was the […]

BCH is a fiat money This is the text of what I prepared in my debate with Roger Ver. I wanted to post this here as a reference. My goal today is to have a civilized debate about BTC and BCH. We’re going to have a Lincoln-Douglas style debate where each person will get to […]

The debate around what Bitcoin is or what Bitcoin should be never seems to end. From 2010 when Satoshi Nakamoto begged Wikileaks to not use Bitcoin for donations to the debate over whether bitcoin use in darknet markets was good or not to the scaling debate that lasted from 2014–2017, debates about the utility of Bitcoin never seem to […]

Why You Can’t Shortcut Trust Trust is one of those words that is both loaded and ill-defined. We all recognize that trust is very important for nearly all human interactions, especially trade. The actual mechanics of trust, however, are not really well articulated or understood. How do people trust in something? Why is trust important […]

Crypto-Keynesian Lunacy My article on smart contracts has had quite a reaction, much like the blockchain article before it. I’ve had a lot of praise and criticism on the article, much coming from the Ethereum/altcoin crowd which didn’t like what I said. Chief among the critics vying for my attention is one Kyle Samani, who more or less […]

The Truth about Smart Contracts Much like the words “blockchain”, “AI” and “cloud”, “smart contract” is one of those phrases that get a lot of hype. After all, what can be better than being able to trust what will happen instead of using the judicial system? The promises of smart contracts include: Enforcing contracts automatically, […]

Alternatives to Blockchain In my last article, I argued for why blockchain is not really a good fit for anything other than money. Blockchain as used in Bitcoin is really a collection of different technologies (proof-of-work, public key cryptography, gossip network, etc) that result in a decentralized system. Systems that try to utilize a blockchain but retain […]

Why Blockchain is Hard The hype around blockchain is massive. To hear the blockchain hype train tell it, blockchain will now: Solve income inequality Make all data secure forever Make everything much more efficient and trustless Save dying babies What the heck is a blockchain, anyway? And can it really do all these things? Can […]

Why Hard Forks are Altcoins If you’ve gotten into crypto in the last 6 months, you are probably confused about the different hard forks that are occurring. There are a lot of different ones in different coins, some resulting in new coins, others seemingly coasting along without any splits. This can be very confusing to […]

Why Bitcoin Works The fact that Bitcoin has succeeded is beyond dispute. Bitcoin has lasted 9 years. Bitcoin has a $100B+ market cap. Bitcoin has had better uptime than almost anything else and has spawned a pretty large ecosystem of businesses, open source projects and investors. Perhaps most tellingly, Bitcoin has also spawned a large […]

Mining Centralization Scenarios In my article last week, I talked about how Bitcoin is decentralized, that is, lacks a single point of failure or choke point. One of the things many critics of the article pointed out was that mining is somehow centralized and therefore, my argument didn’t hold. In this article, I’m going to examine […]

Why Bitcoin is Different If you’re new to the Bitcoin space, the last few months have been pretty crazy. There have been some steep climbs and heart-stopping drops making for a roller coaster of emotion that’s not easily controlled. The price action is both thrilling and at times, painful, so it’s easy to lose sight […]

Bitcoin Diamond/Super Bitcoin/BitCore: What You Need To Know 2018 is the year of the Hard Fork and wouldn’t you know it, 3 different hard forks started trading recently on some exchanges. In this article, I’m going to lay out what these forks are, where the software is published and how to claim them if you […]

New Programming Blockchain Prices A few months ago, I started programmingblockchain.com as a way to train new Bitcoin developers. The events have been a success and I have trained over 40 people thus far. While I intended to keep denominating in BTC as a way to make my accounting easier, the recent surge in BTC price has […]

In the previous three parts of this series, we examined how Bitcoin creates positive incentives. Specifically, people are motivated to plan for the future, find the sweet spot between lazy and greedy, and finally trade fairly. In this article, I’ll examine how Bitcoin and sound money encourage bravery, grit, courage, or what ancients called fortitude. Rent Seeking vs Producing […]

The Segwit2x hard fork was called off a little over a week ago in an email post to the 2x mailing list. Several parties threatened to split the network anyway, and we eagerly waited for block 494784 to see whether someone would mine the 2x hard fork or not. As it turns out, there was a bug […]

The scaling battle that’s been raging in the Bitcoin ecosystem the past 3 years is finally over. The entire Bitcoin network has spoken and it has spoken for … what exactly? There are lots of articles that will chronicle for you what’s happened in the past few months and years. If you aren’t familiar with […]

Segwit2x Game Theory Scenarios Part 1 The Segwit2x hard fork is coming in less than two weeks and many are wondering about what may happen. In this article, I’m going to go through a few of the scenarios. Big caveat is that I don’t expect any of these scenarios to come to pass. We are […]

How to Protect Against Replay Attacks Jeff Garzik recently reverted opt-in replay protection on the btc1 GitHub. This is causing some anxiety as many believe this lack of replay protection will cause all sorts of horrible things on the network. In this article, I’m going to explain a few ways to protect against replay attacks regardless of […]

Bitcoin and Virtue Part 3: Justice In the previous two parts of this series, I argued that sound money in general, and Bitcoin in particular, create incentives for prudence and temperance. Specifically, people are incentivized to plan for the future and take the right amount of risk as to not be lazy or greedy. In this installment, I’ll […]

One nightmare scenario for many of us when we’re sending bitcoins is putting in a wrong transaction fee and having that transaction mined. The fees would be lost and you would never see them again. This happened to a person I know in this transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/d38bd67153d774a7dab80a055cb52571aa85f6cac8f35f936c4349ca308e6380 Yes, he paid 50 BTC in fees and 1Hash.com mined the block […]

Bitcoin Gold: What you need to know There’s a Bitcoin hard fork around the corner and it’s not 2x. Announced right before Bitcoin Cash forked, Bitcoin Gold is scheduled to go live sometime in November. In this article, I’m going to explain what Bitcoin Gold is, how and when it will hard fork and what you’ll need […]

How Segwit2x Replay Protection Works Note: This replay protection scheme has since been reverted! Please make sure you DO NOT use the protection scheme from this article for anything as you WILL NOT be protected before or after the 2x hard fork. Jeff Garzik merged in an opt-in replay protection scheme for Segwit2x yesterday. In this post, […]

In the previous installment of this series, I argued that sound money in general, and Bitcoin in particular leads to a more prudent society that cares about its future instead of one that lives for now. In this article, I’m going to explore the second cardinal virtue of temperance and how it’s affected by the monetary […]

Atomic Swaps Decred and Litecoin completed something called a cross-chain atomic swap a few days ago. They published a blog about it, created a GitHub repo with utilities and talked about it on my show. In this article, I’m going to explain what atomic swaps are, how this affects Bitcoin and what we can expect going forward. Problem of Trust […]

Bitcoin and Virtue Part 1: Prudence I’ve been involved in Bitcoin one way or another for about 6 years now and it’s never been lacking in drama. Exchange hacking, Darknet markets, Scaling debates, altcoins, ICOs and, of course, price volatility have all been a part of Bitcoin in that time and it’s very easy to […]

The Fee Market Explained Roger Ver and Richard Heart had quite an interesting debate last week. One of the points of debate was whether fees should be high or not. In this article I’m going to explain why fees are high, why that’s the result of a market process and how that gets affected by block size. […]

Making Bitcoin Better Bitcoin is amazing in its ability to align incentives. In my quest to find something to contribute to the community, I found something that’s both a big pain point for businesses and something I can help with. In this article, I’m going to describe my solution and why I think it will be effective. […]

Mining BTC/BCH: Past, Present and Future Many miners are clearly moving back and forth between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in an attempt to maximize profits. What’s going on and why is this happening? In this article, I examine what miners have been doing on each chain and what their motivations might be. Mining Bitcoin Miners […]

Why I Was Wrong About Segwit And Big Blocks Segwit has activated on the network, and a lot of people have pointed out that my pinned tweet is 2/3 wrong. Indeed, I was very wrong on two of these predictions. In this article, I’m going to do a little bit of self-reflection and explain my […]

Replay Attacks Explained Segwit2x has garnered some controversy over the fact that it will not have replay protection. In this article, I’m going to explain what a replay attack is and how it will affect the upcoming 2x hard fork. Bitcoin Transactions In order to understand what a replay attack is, we first have to […]

Transaction Malleability Explained One of the benefits of SegWit, scheduled to activate on the network very soon, is that it fixes something called transaction malleability. In this article, I’m going to explain what malleability is and why fixing it is important. What is Transaction Malleability? To understand transaction malleability, it helps to think of Bitcoin […]

Bitcoin Tech Talk Mission Authored with John Newbery Keeping up with Bitcoin is exhausting. Most sources out there are either untechnical, inaccessible or partisan. It’s hard to know which details are accurate or inaccurate, partial or whole, FUD or actually something to worry about. Enter Bitcoin Tech Talk This is why we’ve created Bitcoin Tech Talk. […]

Network Partitioning Bitcoin Core recently merged in a pull request from Matt Corallo which disconnects certain nodes. This has caused some interesting takes by several prominent people. In this post, I’m going to describe what this pull request does. The Bitcoin Network Before I start explaining this pull request, we first need a little background on how […]

Understanding Segregated Witness Segregated Witness (SegWit, for short) is scheduled to “lock in” within 24 hours and activate in about two weeks. Not everyone understands what this Bitcoin protocol upgrade actually does, so in this article, I seek to explain to a general audience what Segwit is. But first, let’s take a look at bitcoin. […]

Bitcoin Cash Difficulty Adjustments Bitcoin Cash has had a very interesting launch with miners coming in and out very quickly. In this post, I’m going to explain how the difficulty on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain will change over the next 10+ blocks. How Bitcoin Cash Retargets Bitcoin Cash has a very particular rule about […]

A Gentle Introduction to Bitcoin Core Development If you’re a developer and you own any Bitcoin at all, contributing to Bitcoin Core can be one of the best things you can do to help out your investment. In this article, I’m going to give a gentle, step-by-step overview of how to contribute to Core development. […]

Mt. Gox Hack Technical Explanation WizSec recently released a technical analysis of what ultimately led to the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox. In this article, I’m going to explain what the hackers stole and what likely happened. Rough Timeline September 2011 — Mt. Gox’s hot wallet private keys were stolen from a wallet.dat file. 2011 to 2012 — […]

Bitcoin Cash: What You Need to Know Bitcoin Cash’s sudden announcement on Saturday that they’ll go ahead with a fork on August 1 caught a lot of people, including myself, by surprise. In this article, I’m going to explain what Bitcoin Cash (aka BCC) is, how it affects you and how you should prepare for […]

Pathological BIP91/UASF Scenarios The Bitcoin community is feeling great about BIP91 locking in. Amid the celebration, however, are voices of doubt asking about some extreme scenarios. In this article, I’m going to lay out the various crazy scenarios that may happen now that BIP91 is locked in. Scenario 1: Cautious Miners We really have no […]

UASF/Segwit2x Scenarios and Timelines A bunch of miners started signaling for BIP91 yesterday and a lot of people are feeling more hopeful about the state of Bitcoin as Segwit looks to lock in and activate. In this post, I’m going to update you on the latest developments and what could happen when. BIP91 Signaling In […]

The Economics of Transaction Fees Transaction fees have been dropping recently and have caused all manner of speculation about what is going on. In this article, I seek to examine what has been going on and what may have changed. Why Fees are High Why Fees are High Transactions get into blocks, generally by offering […]

High Fees and UTXO Sets High fees have been a complaint for a while now in Bitcoin. A question that’s been asked but hasn’t really been answered is one of useless coins. That is, how many Bitcoins can’t be moved without paying fees that are more than the actual output’s worth? In this article, I’m […]

Understanding Segwit Block Size After I wrote my last article, I was surprised by the protest about the 2MB part of the title (the title has since been changed). The protest stems from the fact that Segwit2x would allow block sizes that are larger than 2MB (it’s possible to get very close to 8MB). This is often a point […]

Segwit2x: What you need to know about the 2x Hard Fork (aka 2MB non-Segwit Transaction Capacity per block/8MB Total Block Size Hard Fork) When I wrote my last article on Segwit2x, I concluded with questions about the lack of clarity around the 2x part of Segwit2x. Since then, there’s been more clarification, especially in the btc1/bitcoin (aka Segwit2x) […]

Segwit2x: What you need to know Bitmain rocked the Bitcoin world last week when they published a press release detailing their plans for a hard fork should BIP148 gain traction. The very next day, Segwit2x merged a pull request to make their client software compatible with BIP91. The day after, a group of miners published their own press release proclaiming […]

Examining Bitmain’s Press Release If you haven’t heard yet, Bitmain just released their plans for an upcoming Hard Fork should BIP148 start on August 1. If this makes you scared and want to sell all your Bitcoins, don’t fret, I’m here to help you understand what this proposes, how it’ll affect you and what you can do. […]

How to Give Everyone More Control Politics has gripped Bitcoin and it’s about the only thing people have been wanting to talk about for the past few years. I’ve written before about how the Bitcoin ecosystem is like the three branches of government, with Developers being the legislative branch, Miners being the executive branch and Users […]

BIP 148 UASF Q&A I solicited questions about UASF in my last article, and I am here to deliver. From Ansel Linder: How are industry players supposed to know? Hopefully by paying attention and gaming out scenarios carefully. This depends quite a bit on what hash rate UASF BIP148 shows it has and right now, the only […]

I’ve written a good deal about BIP148 already, and recently, there’s been a lot of speculation about what will happen once the UASF starts on August 1. In this article, I’m going to lay out some potential scenarios of BIP148. Some caveats before we get started: All possibilities, up to and including the destruction of Bitcoin as […]

Bitcoin, UASF and Skin in the Game If you’ve been following various Bitcoin personalities on Twitter, you’ll notice that a lot of people have UASF in their Twitter name. If you don’t know what it is, the supporters of a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) have an informative website and if you’re technical, you can read the Bitcoin Improvement […]

Why ICOs are Very Different than Seed Capital Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are all the rage these days and though I’ve written already about how altcoins differ from Bitcoins, ICOs are a separate topic that need their own treatment. In this article, I seek to show how raising money through ICOs are very different than raising […]

Why Bitcoin is Different than other Cryptocurrencies In my last article, I discussed how the market cap of many altcoins is deceiving as recently, there’s been a large run-up in the prices of a lot of altcoins. In this article, I seek to show how and why Bitcoin is different than all the other altcoins that […]

A Note on ZCash In my last article, I noted that not many people use Zcash’s privacy features based on this article. It turns out this may or may not be true, but I what I stated was at best, a guess. We don’t know how many people are using Zcash’s privacy features and it’s not easy […]

Why The Bitcoin Dominance Index Is Deceiving While the scaling debate has been going on for years, more recently, there’s been a lot of complaining and speculation about how Bitcoin will soon lose supremacy as the largest coin and how other coins will eventually take over. In this article, I seek to show how the Bitcoin […]

No, Sean Spicer Didn’t Make Some Secret Bitcoin Transaction There’s a story going around that Sean Spicer didn’t tweet out his password, that it was some Bitcoin transaction and he wanted people to know it was him. I’m here to examine the claims of the post and try to understand exactly what happened. The Tweet Sean Spicer […]

Why the Litecoin Roundtable Agreement Matters If you haven’t heard, Litecoin’s developer and mining communities met in a roundtable discussion recently. In this article, I seek to show exactly what happened, how it affects the Litecoin ecosystem and how it can affect the Bitcoin ecosystem going forward. A Little History Charlie Lee is the creator of […]

Why the UASF Segwit Scenario is Hopelessly Naive Recently, there’s been a 20-slide presentation being posted all over the place and though I’ve written about how UASF would play out, I will, in the spirit of open debate, respond to this deck directly. Let’s begin with slide 1. Flag Day This is assuming a flag-day activation of UASF. There are a […]

Just How Profitable is Bitmain? Editor’s Note: I originally intended this to be an edit to my last article, but it became interesting enough to just make a whole article out of it. Thank you to my friends in the semi-conductor industry that helped me with this. In running some numbers for my last article, I ran […]

Mining Profitability and ASICBoost Guy Corem, former CEO of Spondoolies Tech, posted recently on the savings of ASICBoost. In this article, I hope to show exactly what his numbers say, what can possibly be in dispute and why his estimate of $2M savings is so divergent from Gregory Maxwell’s $100M payoff. A Little History Spondoolies Tech was a […]

Examining Bitmain’s Claims about ASICBoost Bitmain recently published a blog post that made several claims about their use of ASICBoost. In this article, I seek to examine their claims. The Difference Between Overt and Covert ASICBoost I’ve written about ASICBoost before, but I’ve seen a lot of confusion about the difference between overt (or version-based) ASICBoost and covert (Merkle […]

A Small Modification to Segwit Motivation One of the interesting aspects of Gregory Maxwell’s proposal is that it only precludes the covert version of ASICBoost. He specifically left the overt version alone. Overt ASICBoost requires grinding on the version bits of the Block header instead of the Merkle Root. This is likely more efficient than […]

ELI5: Gregory Maxwell’s Inhibition Proposal Truth be told, I don’t know if I can explain this to a 5 year old. This is a fairly technical proposal and assumes a lot of technical knowledge which isn’t obvious even to technical people. I’m sure you have questions, I’ll try to answer what I think you’d ask. […]

Why a Bitcoin Divorce will be REALLY Painful It’s cliche at this point to say that I, as the author, don’t want to write this piece but that I have to. I didn’t think I had to write this piece. I thought that the drawbacks of a Bitcoin Permanent Fork are really obvious. We’re at a crossroads […]

100 Blocks of Terror or Why a 51% Miner Split Won’t Work Bitcoin is in a rage about a possible 51% split of the network from Peter Rizun’s article. In this article, I will show you how a 51% network split would play out and how that would be a terrible idea. From the article: Miners […]

Why Any Contentious Change Will Become a Permanent Fork Forks are all the rage these days and there’s been a lot of news recently about what companies, individuals and developers will do in the event of one. Though I believe forks in Bitcoin are neither likely nor good, I will map out in this article what is […]

Why Bitcoin Node Statistics Aren’t Trustworthy I see a lot of statistics about how X% of Bitcoin nodes are running the Y client and how that means Users support Y. Note this is not about what miners are signaling in blocks, but rather what software nodes on the Bitcoin network are reported to be running. I want […]

Throwback Post: What If We Build It and Nobody Came? Editor’s Note: I originally wrote this post on September 14, 2014 after about a year of working on Colored Coins. I realized that Colored Coins and many platforms like it weren’t getting much traction, despite the technology being very interesting. I wrote this post as […]

Bitcoin Realism or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 1MB Blocks If you’ve been paying attention to the Bitcoin community lately, you’d think we’re on the brink of war. There’s a lot of hostility between the Small and Big Block camps and proposals by each to undermine the other side seem to come […]

Why Bitcoin Transaction Capacity Doesn’t Really Matter In my last article, I wrote about how the Bitcoin network will scale one way or the other. In this article, I will write about how network transaction capacity doesn’t matter nearly as much as people seem to believe. To get there, I’m going to start with a little […]

Why Bitcoin Will Get Scaling Without Segwit or Large Blocks If you’re like me, you’re pretty sick of the bitcoin scaling debate. On the one side, you have the big blockers who want 2MB blocks, entertaining the notion of a network fork to do so. On the other, you have the small blockers, who want […]