Digital Tsunami

“End the Fed”? — Maybe Learn What the Fed Does First!

I was recently lurking on one of the online crypto forums where a bunch of ‘connectors’ and social media mavens use to bring developers and venture capitalists together with people who want to get involved in crypto but are not sure what they can do to help.

The topic turned (as it often does) to how we should ‘take down’ the fiat money system.  *sigh*. This is quite often the battlecry used by…

The Bangkok Summit: The failed last attempt to prevent the BCH Split

So the BCH fork is over.  And one party sort of cheated by bringing in their mercenaries to fight the war, and to usurp their BCH chain for themselves, which was not miners who have been mining the chain for the since BCH’s birth.

But leaving all that politics behind, I would like to leave the official record of the Bangkok meeting which took place in Aug 30th 2018, in which the ABC and the…

Nov 15th BCH Fork: Nakamoto Consensus will FINALLY be tested!

Nakamoto Consensus is upon us! All hail!

With the first real hash vote ever to occur in Bitcoin Cash set to occur in less than 10 days, it’s time to take a step back and really take in the enormity and the significance of this event.

We are literally seeing the FIRST practical application of a mass decentralized consensus system (aka ‘vote’) that needs no administrator, no organization, no…

Nepotism vs Meritocracy: Which would you prefer?

If you ask anyone who works at any company, which would they prefer, they would most likely say meritocracy.  Meritocracy is the form of corporate governance that bases rewards and prestige on how much one contributes to the company and the value of those contributions, as opposed to nepotism, which rewards people for who they know, or if they have a personal connection with those in power at the…

Last time, I spoke about how the bread and butter use case of Ethereum was going to be soon challenged by Bitcoin Cash, when the missing op-codes are re-enabled in the upcoming May 16th upgrade.  Today, I will discuss more about the other use cases which BCH is going to challenge, as a payment systemand the biggest challengers in that space.  Yes, many expert bitcoiners will recognize that…

Move over Ethereum: New functionality for Bitcoin Cash makes it a Smart Contract Contender

Smart contracts.  It was dubbed Blockchain 2.0.  (Blockchain 1.0 was cash) It held all the promise of a new world, a new digital frontier.  It was to herald in an age with broker-less deals, robot escrows, AI oracles, and driverless automobiles being their own corporations as self-reliant actors in the new digital economy.  An economy which did not discriminate between true born humans and…

The WEB has taken over my computer

Remember those of you who are old enough, that once upon a time computers were not connected by default to the internet.  When things like token ring LAN and Novell Netware were tools that only companies could afford, and when emails didn’t exist and when you wanted to write somebody a memo, you fired up WordPerfect, write it up, print it out on your dot matrix printer, tear off the perforated…

Time to start a new Chapter…

… in the Book of Bitcoin.  There comes a time in every story when the characters develop, evolve, die, or are reborn.  Such is one of those times in the grand adventure which we all started off on 8 years ago.  The Bitcoin Cash fork having successfully executed is now free from the oppressive roadmap which was being driven by Blockstream and Core, which would see most of Bitcoin transactions…

Fork Wars Episode I – The Phantom Futures

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks then you know that the whole block size debate is boiling to a close.  Segwit2x arose to be a compromise solution, lead by ex-core developer Jeff Garzik, brokered and agreement in New York after the Consensus 2017 conference which had over 90% of the miners and ecosystem in agreement.  Since then BIP91 has locked in, which is an…

Yoga Splits, Banana Splits, why not Bitcoin Splits?

The world is filled with great splits.  Sometimes a split is just the best way of getting the best of both worlds. It let’s bygones be bygones and leaves freedom of choice to the market which is in the ideal position to determine the best way forward.   But in Bitcoin space, talk of a split is tantamount to talking about White Privilege, racism, or dog meat as a food delicacy. Make no mistake,…

Keep the Change! — Replay protection is a Red Herring

Much about the current Bitcoin splitting debate has revolved around the notion of a hard fork splitting of the network being dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that core developers have constantly stuck to the argument that the community should trust in their (exclusive) council in order to ensure that we don’t engage in anything that may be unsafe for ourselves. Trust them, they know what is good…

How will Bitcoin Miners be paid in the future?

The question of how miners will be paid in the long run, after mining subsidy rewards disappear is a much debated topic in Bitcoin.  For those who don’t know, mining rewards are set to half every year until they finally reach zero sometime in the year 2140.  How the Bitcoin mining ecosystem will remain profitable (and thus healthy) is up in the air.  Miners are important as they provide security…

Ouija Board Consensus - Bitcoin Decentralization Myths: Part 4

This is the fourth part of a multi-part series on the myths of decentralization. You can read the previous installments here:

Part 1 – Decentralization Redefined Part 2 – Decentralization Myth Part 3 – Decentralization comes with People

I’ve written quite a lot about the misconceptions and deliberate misdirection that some proponents in the Bitcoin community choose to spread around in order to…

Coming to Consensus: Governance is just as important as Blocksize

One of the heated debates that has raged over the years in Bitcoin space is whether the idea of a developer team lead by a benevolent dictator is the appropriate model to employ for a network worth more than 15 billion dollars in market capitalization.  Many have cited examples of how Satoshi, and then Gavin himself were benevolent dictators, and also how some well known projects have been…

Core Segwit – Thinking of upgrading? You need to read this!

So, voting on core’s implementation of Segwit is now enabled, and all 3 of the miners that support core have already cast their vote (2 pools and 1 cloud mining MLM), totalling about 23% of the network.  Adoption seems to have stalled (as of 4Dec16) as the rest of the undecided vote remain undecided.  Perfect time for an analysis breakdown of segwit, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Segwit has…

Hard Fork Risk Analysis: If the worse happens, how bad can it be?

This post is a culmination of about a year’s worth of thoughts and research that I have been informally gathering, which started with a simple question that started last year when I first read a piece which was written in the middle of the Bitcoin XT heyday describing what would be so bad about having 2 persistent forks by core developer, Meni Rosenfeld.

Forks are not scary, they are upgrades!

Th…

Why Trump Won — If you are reading this, you probably voted Hillary, THAT’s WHY.

If he can win a rigged election as an outsider, maybe we should give him a fair chance at running the country?

So now that it is all over, all the posturing, all the fake allegations and all the pretentiousness can be dropped.  I can finally say that I am relieved that Hillary did not win the election, and that all the social justice leftists have been shown some humility.  I was one of the few…