Month: December 2019

Statechains, Sending Keys Not Coins

If you’ve heard of statechains but couldn’t understand how they worked, who better to break it down than Aaron Van Wirdum & Bitcoin Magazine? Today we get to read Aaron’s piece on the recently conceptualized “Statechains” from the mind of Ruben Somsen. An entirely different way to think of exchanging Bitcoin, by handing keys to the receiver, rather than sending coins.

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Letting a Million Channels Bloom

The Lightning Network does, in fact, have scaling problems of its own. When the network grows to millions of channels we obviously won’t be able to run it on a Raspberry Pi. Don’t tell Rusty Russell or Joe Netti that, because they’ll just build their own network and do it. Another major milestone in Lightning development, the release of the Million Channels Project!

Today we are reading & discussing, from the Blockstream blog, “Letting a Million Channels Bloom.”

Check out the official post for the network data, charts and optimization benchmarks. Follow the blog and developers involved to stay up on the incredible work they are doing to bring Lightning to the world.

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Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption is a Necessity

… And one of the greatest natural subsidies for renewable energy we could’ve asked for.

Today we hit a piece by Daniel Wingen. A thorough breakdown of the essence of mining, the necessity of its energy expenditure, the incentives for efficiency and renewable sources, and the unbelievable cost that is being rescued from wasteful alternatives. Not only is Bitcoin’s energy consumption not a problem, it could be exactly what we need for a brighter future.

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Investing in Bitcoin

Today we read yet another great piece by @hasufl and @suzhu available on uncommoncore.co on the core value offered by Bitcoin as a system and the high level trends in macroeconomics and technology that could lead to enormous future demand for just such an asset.

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Bitcoin is a Human Right

Finishing this week out with a short but wonderful introductory article by Nik Bhatia. Bitcoin is a money, a game, a land grab, works like email, and ultimately, Bitcoin is a human right. My discussion afterward may have gotten a little out of hand with a 40 minute follow-up to a 5 minute article. But when a good article sparks great ideas, sometimes its just hard to stop. ;)

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Major Developments in LND 0.7

Today we dive into the recent Lightning Labs Blog post on the incredible improvements in the 0.7-beta release. Followed with a fun discussion on the major developments and what it will mean for the UX, reliability, and further improvements of the Lightning ecosystem. If you need you Lightning Fix, this is where you’ll find it.

Don’t forget to follow the blog and Twitter handles to stay up on what the Lightning Labs team is building! Development is happening at a lightning fast pace and the team is straight fire!

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Everyone’s a Scammer

Merchants are scammers, Keynesians are scammers, altcoins are scammers, Bitcoin “investments” are scammers, scammers are scammers, and even Bitcoin hoarders are scammers.  Everyone’s a scammer.

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The Bitcoin Time Traveler

A message from the future… from 2013.  Just one of those memes that made its place in Bitcoin’s cultural history, we read the infamous Reddit post that laid out the bleak, Bitcoin-only future that lies ahead of us.  Can we stop it, before its too late?

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The Island of Stone Money

Does money need some alternative utility? Is there an example of virtual money that could be hundreds of years old?

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The God Protocols

“Imagine the ideal protocol. It would have the most trustworthy third party imaginable — a deity who is on everybody’s side. All the parties would send their input to this god. God would reliably determine the results and return the output. In addition, God, being the ultimate in confessional discretion, would ensure that no party would learn anything more about the other party’s input than they could learn from their own input and the output.”  – Nick Szabo

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