Bitcoin is a brilliant mix of technologies and offers numerous marvellously elegant solutions to tough problems. Here is a collection of articles dedicated to my favorite bits and pieces of the blockchain protocol.
While I was having a late lunch today I overheard a couple — a girl and a guy — talking about Bitcoin at the table next to me. The man was working as a bartender and had no idea what the blockchain was. I don’t know what the girl did for a living, but when… Read More “You’re Telling It Wrong…”
Those of us who spend some time at the SSH console at the expense of GUI and web browsers have finally been saved: there is now a way to check the exchange rate of the BTC from the command line. The rate.sx website allows you to request an up to date performance chart for Bitcoin… Read More Looking up BTC exchange rate from Linux console
Today the guys at trezor.io had a brilliant idea: they decided to drop the price of a single Trezor Hardware Wallet from €89 to €79 (ex-VAT) and to offer free delivery via postal service in Europe. At such price, the overall cost of a Trezor becomes lower than that of a Ledger Nano S (€58… Read More Trezor Hardware Wallet Now Cheaper
As I discovered recently, deploying a Bitcoin Full Node is easy. However mine is a plain vanilla node, with a bitcoin.conf file that is only 8 lines long. Did you know that Bitcoin Core 0.15 has no less than 139 config parameters that control the way it works? Because I frankly had no idea they… Read More Bitcoin Core Config Generator
One of the first things a Bitcoin newbie hears is how the system is ‘designed to prevent double spending’. This feature is indeed a proper advantage of crypto payments compared to some traditional payment methods and it deserves to be touted as such. However almost all explanations of the actual prevention process that I’ve seen… Read More Double Spending is Your Friend (Hear Me Out)
I wrote on a couple of occasions previously about the cost of Bitcoin transaction fees after SegWit went live on 23. August. I kept updating my article Bitcoin Transaction Fees after SegWit2x Lock-In with data from bitcoinfees.21.co to follow the trend. After about a week — on 30. August — I wrote: Transaction fees have not yet subsided… Read More SegWit Works and Fees Drop — For Real