“After four years of work, James O’Beirne’s assumeutxo option to allow instant UTXO set bootstrapping for your Bitcoin node is merged into Bitcoin Core.” — Shinobi
There has always been a gap between the

“There used to be tradeoffs between Lightning and fiat: UX vs. sovereignty; UX vs. speed; UX vs. cost; off-the-shelf fiat payment widgets vs. coding a node into an app. With the Breez SDK, Lightning beats

“It requires no consensus changes to Bitcoin at all. The trick is lifting all of that logic off-chain and being able to challenge a few steps of the computation on-chain if the other party asserts

“With Bitcoin, lives and money are at stake. Interruption of its service can cause a cascade of losses and unintended consequences for potentially millions of people and billions of fiat dollars. If it is possible

“Our existing financial system is a mirage of wealth and liquidity, sustained by an ever-expanding money supply. Bitcoin emerges as the ultimate shield against the inevitable reckoning that will shatter this illusion.”
— Theo

“Today historians focus on the symptoms of Rome’s fall, the consequences: The moral decay, the economic decline, the fall in public safety, the multiplying plagues from dysfunctional public services, the hollowed-out military that ultimately invited

“If the merchant wants the bitcoin and you pay in fiat_, that is you shifting the burden of fiat friction on to them. And paying your valued vendors in bitcoin is the opposite of mutually

“Take the idea of proof-of-stake as a base layer consensus mechanism, and throw the idea away for right now. That’s not what this is, and the problems that need to be solved to enable proof-of-stake

“This has been one of the most effective psychological operations that has ever been conducted on the public in human history. The high priests of central banking started running with this narrative and people have

“It means that, given an open-source model, this could help bring about the ability to:

Independently calculate the price of bitcoin using only your full node at any block height
Develop genuine DeFi

“Everything about the concept of a social network and the incredible potential and beauty of #nostr as a protocol is in controlling your experience, what content you see, and how you see it. This is

“When discussing consensus mechanisms for different cryptocurrencies, one issue that often causes arguments is a lack of understanding (and definition) of the security model that they provide for the historical data in the ledger.” —

“I believe it’s important to go back to what this sovereignty is made of. Bitcoin works because an economic majority is aligning incentives for every constituent of the network. The longer tail of the economic

“To not die, Bitcoin must become more used. The current thesis accepted by most “maximalists” is that Bitcoin will continue to be thought of as an investment and its price will keep increasing, the price

“Often overlooked is the importance of interoperability between not only the second-layer protocol and Bitcoin but the layer-2 protocols themselves. A second layer, where end-users can leverage several protocols together and move seamlessly between them,

“When reading a draft of this post, my wife got kind of depressed right around here. Her macabre question, basically, is: “if everyone just winds up interacting with sidechains, and not Real Bitcoin, hasn’t the

“The headroom there isn’t unlimited — expect it to show up as fee pressure and backlogs and less ability to quickly resolve transaction storms. And that will in turn make it hard and expensive for

“While bitcoin is still mainly seen as digital currency, it’s essentially a timestamped log with special properties. As such, it can be utilised for far more things than payments and store of value. I presented