Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System The Bitcoin whitepaper is 9 pages long and consists of an Abstract and 12 sections. While i have read many articles about Bitcoin (see references below), for the purposes of this post i refer to the whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” only: Bitcoin Whitepaper: ABSTRACT – Satoshi Nakamoto outlines: The Problem: There is no way...
Many people who have held bitcoin for a long time have been through several boom and bust cycles. Recently, many folks have noticed a pattern to these cycles linked to the bitcoin halving event that happens every 210,000 blocks or approximately every four years. The next one is anticipated to occur in April/May 2020. Historically, these halving events have not been properly priced into the...
Many cryptographic standards widely used in commercial applications were developed by the U.S. Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Normally government involvement in developing ciphers for public use would throw up red flags, however all of the algorithms are part of the public domain and have been analyzed and vetted by professional cryptographers who know what...
“Since we’re all rich with bitcoins, or we will be once they’re worth a million dollars like everyone expects, we ought to put some of this unearned wealth to good use.”
Hal Finney, the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction
Satoshi didn’t envision Bitcoin as a new class of bank controlled by the same corrupt power structures as our current financial system. Custodial solutions like Lightning are not changing our broken system. Users must control the keys to their digital money, not third parties.
@KimDotcom
Many cryptographic standards widely used in commercial applications were developed by the U.S. Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Normally government involvement in developing ciphers for public use would throw up red flags, however all of the algorithms are part of the public domain and have been analyzed and vetted by professional cryptographers who know what...
As far as open-source protocols go, one area in which Bitcoin is unique is the sheer difficulty of making any changes to the protocol. Unlike most other protocols, where features can be added, modified or deprecated at a moment’s notice, in the world of Bitcoin even the slightest change requires the simultaneous cooperation of the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network. The reason for this...
I’ve been reading up recently on the revelations that the NSA is subverting implementations/service providers to undermine various internet crypto standards (see this: ). Now this has all of the basic hallmarks of a ‘scare campaign’ where people are led to believe that crypto techniques/mathmatics themselves are insecure rather than the truth that the NSA is attacking the...
Such a sensitive topic, so let me note a few things before I start: I will omit the guessing game of what Satoshi’s appearance would or would not matter/mean, what he wants or does not want and just present the hard facts. Not disproved ≠ proved, so do not misunderstand me… oh some of you will, I know you will… The hilarious Satoshi hunts, like the Dorian Nakamoto and Craig Wright sagas are out...
bitcoinj is a library for working with the Bitcoin protocol. It can maintain a wallet, send/receive transactions without needing a local copy of Bitcoin Core and has many other advanced features. It’s implemented in Java but can be used from any JVM compatible language: examples in Python and JavaScript are included. It comes with full documentation and many large, well known Bitcoin apps...
