The Bitcoin Core project's official blog covers software releases, protocol upgrades like SegWit, security disclosures, and FAQs.
HN commenters point to it as the real Bitcoin project domain and link its SegWit posts and RBF FAQ as useful reading.
Disclaimer: I am a researcher in this space and also CTO of a company (Arwen.io) which builds cross-chain atomic swaps.
To me, one of the more powerful properties of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies is that they overcome a long standing impossibility result in cryptography:
fair exchange, i.e. atomic swaps, are impossible without a trusted third party [0].
Cryptocurrency-backed blockchains do this by modifying the underlying assumptions behind that impossibility result in two ways [1]:
1. it adds the assumption that at least one side of the exchange is trading a blockchain asset,
2. it the treats the blockchain holding that asset as a trusted party.
To someone outside the world of cryptocurrency this may seem like an odd set of assumptions. However if what you want to exchange is a blockchain asset, assumption 1 and 2 is very reasonable. Valuing a blockchain asset already assumes that the blockchain is trustworthy because the value and ownership of the asset requires a trustworthy blockchain.
A very cool result is that a party can perform a fair-exchange between a cryptocurrency and the solution to a problem in NP. For instance the ZKCP (Zero Knowledge Contingent Payment) protocol has been used to perform a fair-exchange of bitcoins for the solution to a Sudoku puzzle [2]. SIA coin uses a slightly different model to enable users to prove and collect cryptocurrency for storing another users data [3].
Taken to its logical conclusion, this seems like it would allow…
This web site looks like a good dashboard! Although, I'm not up on the technical details of everything going on here, so some of it is confusing to me, because there's not as much background as I'd like.
I've spent some time reading around, and here is my guess as to what the site is describing:
Behind the scenes, achow101 (https://github.com/achow101) is running four Bitcoin clients:
* `Bitcoin Core` is running the client from https://bitcoin.org/en/ (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin) (https://bitcoincore.org). This client does not support Segregated Witness, and it does not support larger block sizes (so blocks larger than 1 MB are ignored).
* `UASF (BIP 148)` is running the client from https://bitcoinuasf.org (https://github.com/UASF/bitcoin). This client supports Segregated Witness. This client does not support larger block sizes (so blocks larger than 1 MB are ignored).
* `btc1 (segwit2x)` is running the client from https://segwit2x.github.io (https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin). This client supports Segregated Witness, as well as changing the block size to 2 MB (blocks larger than 2 MB are ignored).
* `Bitcoin ABC (UAHF)` is running the client from https://www.bitcoinabc.org (https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc). It supports blocks of <8 MB in size (initially defaulting to 2 MB). This client does not support Segregated Witness.
As I understand things, right now there are two events which have hard-coded dates:
* At midnight UTC on August 1, the…
Hi HN. I built this because resources to learn more about building with Bitcoin are scattered throughout the web and hard to find. Rich content for technical people to consume is buried within websites, fragmented and hard to pry out of places like Stack Exchange (unless you know what you're searching for). For example, on https://bitcoin.org, one needs to dig in through the dropdown menu, and then navigate to a series of pages to get to material. On https://bitcoincore.org, it's a similar process. So, with that in mind - I've been working with another contributor, Cornelius Schumaker and have put together a vanilla, purely technical version of Bitcoin documentation - it's completely distilled so that a person with a technical or engineering-related background can dive right in and get started with Bitcoin. Thinking there is a lot of opportunity here to do all kinds of extensions to it, how-tos, readmes, more guides, faqs, etc.
The goal is to make this a one-stop shop for all things technical to help people who already have engineering backgrounds, get started developing with Bitcoin.
If anyone has any questions or feedback, please let me know. Thanks. :)
If you follow Bitcoin politics you'd know that there is a large population of Bitcoin users who like this decision[0][3][4].
There is an upcoming contentious hard fork in Bitcoin called Segwit2x. It activates in November and is supported by some miners and a number of Bitcoin companies. Those who oppose that hard fork believe cutting China out of the network will cause the proposal to fail.
Segwit2x was a compromise between Bitcoin providers and the very miners that China look like shutting down now - primarily Bitmain, who many believe are also behind, or in control of, the previous bcash bitcoin fork. The compromise was activating Segwit in exchange for miners getting their wish of a 2MB block size increase. Segwit has since been force-activated with a user-activated soft fork - so many feel the compromise is now not necessary and presents many risks.
[0] https://twitter.com/stefanobernardi/status/910233392251326464
[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/
[2] https://github.com/OPUASF/UASF
Hi. Bitcoin.org contributor[0] here. You can start and run a fully validating Bitcoin node with 7GB of storage space and 128MB-256MB RAM. Download the official GUI Bitcoin software here[1]. Enable pruning to store just 7GB. This validates all blocks.
The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself:
> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.
Only the recent several days need to be stored for security, which allows Bitcoin to run very securely with just 7GB of space.
[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624
[1]: https://bitcoincore.org/
1) I've heard rumors that "the banks" are behind ETH, so that can be a huge artificial push to get it popular and mainstream, which in turn can make it more valuable.
2) JavaScript creator Brendan Eich-backed Basic Attention Token https://basicattentiontoken.org/ will launch on May 31 with ETH being the purchasing currency. Its goal is to make online advertising less super completely shitty like it is now.
3) Although not directly related to ETH, follow news about Lightning Network https://lightning.network/ , Segregated Witness https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/ , and the vast world of alt coins https://coinmarketcap.com/ which can all affect each other when people like or don't like something (for example, if ETH starts using Segwit, maybe people will flock to it or away from it).
4) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
5) BTC, ETH, LiteCoin and alt coins in general are all way way up, so it's not just an ETH thing.