Confused about how Lightning payments really work? This article explains the hash- and time-lock contracts that make LN "trustless" with simple diagrams.
At the end, we reveal Lightning's dirty little secret: small payments aren't "trustless" at all.
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Peter R. Rizun
@PeterRizun
Chief Scientist, Bitcoin Unlimited. My opinions are my own.
Peter R. Rizun’s Tweets
Possibly. Bitcoin was conceived at a time of relatively low bandwidth & high latency. If both continue to improve substantially, we will reach a point when no second layer is needed.
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New Article Alert! "On the Intraday Behavior of Bitcoin," by Giacomo De Nicola, is now available to read at the following link:
ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/art
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Remember to UPGRADE BU (bitcoinunlimited.info/download) to V1.9.2 in the next few days! We've got about 150 nodes that need to be upgraded: cashnodes.io
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One month to go! We're still looking for submissions on distributed identity and blockchains/shared ledgers for a special edition—check out the official Call For Papers at the link below! Deadline: April 30!
Please RT!
ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/ann
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REMINDER: Wall Street hedge funds running to the exchanges to halt trading to prevent losses is another example of why the game has always been rigged in favor of the elites.
When you lose it is okay, but when they lose the game is turned off.
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It's the official launch day of our editor and his coauthor 's book, Bitcoin and the Future of Fundraising! If your nonprofit doesn't accept cryptocurrencies (or even if it does) you should pick up a copy of their book today!
Quote Tweet
Today, @JasonShim and I are proud to launch Bitcoin and the Future of Fundraising! It’s a handy guide for charities and nonprofits on how to set up your own crypto donation program. Get your copy today! #Bitcoin #charity #nonprofit #fundraising bitcoinfundraising.com
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A sincere and heartfelt thank you to the community renewing their funding for Ledger! This will help keep the lights on while we continue our mission to bring high quality peer review to the Cryptocurrency world.
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We've just launched our new quarterly newsletter!
Ledger: News & Updates is designed to deliver our latest published articles, calls for papers, and developments at the journal right to your eyeballs, in one quick and easy-to-read package! Check it out!
mailchi.mp/108ab6645ee7/l
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New Article Alert! Benchmarking Bitcoin Adoption in Canada: Awareness, Ownership and Usage in 2018, by Kim P. Huynh, Christopher S. Henry, Gradon Nicholls, and Mitchell W. Nicholson is live at the following link:
ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/art
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Reminder to BU members to cast their votes for the current round of BUIPs. Friday is the last full day to do so.
bitco.in/forum/threads/
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Wow, thank you to the anonymous donator who sent 500 BCH to Bitcoin Unlimited yesterday! I am repeatedly blown away by the community's generosity and its commitment to make decentralized electronic cash ubiquitous.
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Massive appreciation to the donor who sent us 500 BCH. 👏We at Bitcoin Unlimited remain committed to #BitcoinCash and executing a vision for its success.
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4. Demonstration of sustained 500 TPS throughput and 1 GB blocks on a global testnet (youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2e)
5. Orders of magnitude faster processing of long chains of unconfirmed transactions
6. Other improvements, e.g., to block template construction, mempool admission, etc
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Some of BU's R&D highlights include:
1. Kicked of the fast-block-propagation race with Xthin (medium.com/@peter_r/towar)
2. First to merge parallel block validation
3. Implementation and deployment of Graphene block propagation using invertible Bloom lookup tables (IBLTs)
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Wow 🤩. Someone just donated 500 BCH to Bitcoin Unlimited. On behalf of BU, thank you for your amazing generosity!!
These funds will be used to continue our work demonstrating that bitcoin can scale "on chain" to a global p2p e-cash system.
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I just published Roger Ver is not the enemy of Bitcoin. Indifference, Censorship and Ignorance is. link.medium.com/lAOHoFRoO5
$BTC $BCH
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#BitcoinUnlimited is quietly doing the heavy lifting for the BCH p2p network.
#BCH Unlimited nodes are the ones that perform the immediate transaction transmission seen in BCH.
Now they will greatly ease the "too long unconfirmed chain" problem mentioned by .
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A Brief History of the Mempool Chaining Limit by .
Learn where the limit came from and where we are today.
#BitcoinCash $BCH $BTC
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I started working on Cashdrive because I was worried that the UTXO database wouldn't scale. But it scales fine up to millions of transactions per second and trillions of outputs. The dominant cost is NAND flash which is already cheap and getting cheaper each year.
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For outputs stored on the DRAM chips, the bottleneck is the PCIe bus. With PCIe3.0 + m.2 connector, it's difficult to squeeze more than 10M TPS. A larger card + all 16 PCIe lanes of the PCIe 6.0 standard could easily exceed 100M TPS, syncing today's blockchain in seconds.
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NAND flash is plenty fast to keep up with the blockchain at scale. The cost of the database is driven by the price of NAND flash chips--less than $0.50 per GB and falling. Managing a multi-terabyte UTXO set is feasible for a hobbyist in the western world for a few thousand $.
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For outputs that are stored in flash, throughput is limited by the ~100 us random page access time of the NAND flash dies. Each die has a dedicated controller on the FPGA for parallel access. 64 dies (4 x 2 Tbit flash chips) fit on a m.2 card, for a peak throughput >100k TPS.
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Cashdrive has no software--0 lines of code. The UTXO database is controlled with combinational logic gates and flip flops. It scales horizontally with hardware cells that operate in parallel, limited by the bandwidth of the PCIe bus and economically by the price of memory.
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I soldered some chips together and synthesized some electronic circuits on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). It's a proof-of-concept for a bitcoin UTXO database that would help a laptop computer keep up at global scale transaction throughput.
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New version of ElectrsCash, v1.1 released. Written in Rust for Bitcoin Cash.
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Second, we have "Real-Time Block Rate Targeting," by Thomas M Harding! Check it out!
ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/art
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First, we have "Legitimizing Bitcoin as a Currency and Store of Value: Using Discrete Monetary Units to Consolidate Value and Drive Market Growth," by Chad Albrecht, Steven Hawkins, and Kristopher McKay Duffin!
ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/art
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I just witnessed my 9 month old buy Frozen 2 on Apple TV before I could stop him. Upon deeper investigation, it turns out he also bought Avatar, Birds of Prey, and Hobbs & Shaw.
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New article: "Exploring Long Chains of Unconfirmed Transactions and Their Resistance to Double-spend Fraud."
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We must remind "ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality…What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise…corrupted by both math and violence."
In 2020 we learn what money and debt really are.
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Big news for $BCH.
Tether will be using the Protocol built on the #BitcoinCash network for issuing its tokens.
Millions of Bitcoin.com Wallet users will now be able to send and receive $USDT via SLP tokens right within the app!
buff.ly/3bakdMr
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As current events unfold, I was reminded of a closing remark by in his book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years":
"It seems to me that we are long overdue for some
kind of Biblical-style Jubilee...it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable..."
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Can't wait for Bitcoin Cash City Conference this August in Townsville, Australia! Tickets are now on sale. twitter.com/BitcoinCashCit
This Tweet is unavailable.
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No cryptocurrency is truly decentralized today because each has a dominant "reference implementation" that effectively defines the protocol, controlled by a few developers.
If BCH succeeds in migrating away from ABC, it will be an important step towards true decentralization.
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If miners could earn slightly more revenue by validating blocks faster than their peers, miners would pay for the best block validation technology. A competitive market that funds the development of such tech would be born. Would this market be a good or bad thing for BCH?
- Good47.9%
- Bad17.1%
- Show results35%
257 votesFinal results
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In this article I describe how the incentive of new coins led to a million times efficiency improvement in mining tech, how validationless mining short-circuits this incentive for developing efficient block validation tech, and how we can fix this.
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