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A Safe Hard Fork is the same as a Soft Fork:Ending the Soft/Hard Fork Debate

Oct 16, 2016

Original By: Jiang Zhuo’er This post was translated from the Chinese version originally posted on 8btc. The scaling debate has turned into a big ugly hairball in which the technical ideas, politics, and profit motives of all the players have become tightly entangled together, making it d...

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Dispelling some myths about Bitcoin, from a Bitcoin fan

Jul 16, 2016

Many people who don’t know much about Bitcoin, or who have a poor grasp on economics, have severe misconceptions about Bitcoin. I do not attempt to dispel those myths here because many others have already done so. Rather, I’d like to dispel a few myths that are pervasive in many people who a...

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What we learned from designing an academic certificates system on the blockchain

Jun 3, 2016

Over the past year, we have been working on a set of tools to issue, display, and verify digital credentials using the Bitcoin blockchain and the open badges specification. Today we are releasing version 1 of our code under the MIT open-source license to make it easier for others to start expe...

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How The Bitcoin Protocol Works

May 25, 2016

An increasing number of businesses and consumers are now considering bitcoin, a new type of currency that offers a potential global-encompassing digital payment method. With this growing acceptance, it's important to learn the essential components of this platform designed to change how we buy and...

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The Impossible Trinity: Security, Environment Protection and Decentralization

Oct 27, 2014

The mining of Bitcoin consumes 1,000 mWh of electricity every day, the energy which could be provided to 30 thousand families in the United States. The idea that enormous energy will be used by the Bitcoin network to simply solve mathematical questions has always been severely criticized. Sa...

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Why bitcoin mining variance matters?

Jul 19, 2014

In bitcoin, miners join pools for two reasons. One is to avoid the hassle of running a full node — this could be mitigated by requiring miners to include proofs of blockchain retrievability. The other is to reduce the variance of the return in their mining. But why is variance so impor...

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Minimum Viable Block Chain

May 5, 2014

Cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin in particular, have been getting a lot of attention from just about every angle: regulation, governance, taxation, technology, product innovation, and the list goes on. The very concept of a "peer-to-peer (decentralized) electronic cash system" turns many of our prev...