Aaron van Wirdum

In the quest for privacy and fungibility in Bitcoin, two researchers (from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany and Indiana’s Purdue University) presented a promising privacy enhancement proposal last week. ValueShuffle, as the ...

Bitcoin does not sleep, nor do its markets. Most exchanges run 24/7, day and night, even on weekends and holidays. This is one reason some day traders — the people who trade on the price swings per hour or even per minute — use trading ...

Bitcoin, digital currency and blockchain technology experienced another explosive year in 2016. While bitcoin breached the all-time high in USD market cap, several new digital currencies claimed a place in the spotlights as well, while ...

Bitcoin, digital currency and blockchain technology experienced another explosive year in 2016. While bitcoin breached the all-time high in USD market cap, several new digital currencies claimed a place in the spotlights as well, while ...

Scalability has been a central issue within the Bitcoin community for well over a year now. Amongst the most promising innovations being developed are bidirectional payment channels. These can be extended to the Lightning Network, ...

Centralization of mining pools is often considered one of the biggest problems Bitcoin faces. Only a handful of pools typically control well over half of all hash power on the network, and there is little indication this trend will ...

Bitcoin is surging. The exchange rate of the leading digital currency broke the $800 mark earlier this week, to reach a two-year high of about $875 today. The all-time high of over $1,100 or even over $1,200 depending on the exchange, ...

Publicism, a Dutch social enterprise established earlier this year, wants to leverage the potential of blockchain technology to guarantee press freedom. The initiative is backed by a €50,000 (~$52,000 U.S.) subsidy from the Dutch ...

Bitcoin right now is not really anonymous. Monitoring of the unencrypted peer-to-peer network and analysis of the public blockchain, combined with Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulation, can reveal ...

Born as a rebellion against Ethereum’s hard fork to retrieve funds from The DAO after it was "hacked" last summer, Ethereum Classic has increasingly formed a unique identity since. The continuation of the “original,” pre-fork Ethereum ...

Segregated Witness (SegWit) — the proposed upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol developed by the Bitcoin Core developers — is still far from activation. Requiring 95 percent of hash power to signal support for the solution, miner-adoption ...

The number of transactions on the Bitcoin network has steadily increased over the years. This means more blocks are filling up. And as not all transactions can be included in the blockchain straight away, backlogs form in miners’ ...

WikiLeaks’ public donation address recently received its 4000th bitcoin. The nonprofit whistle blower site, which to a large extent relies on donations, reached this milestone on November 12, with well over 25,000 incoming transactions ...

For the first time, bitcoin miners have been able to signal support for Segregated Witness this past week. Developed as a soft fork, the proposed centerpiece of Bitcoin Core’s scalability roadmap requires 95 percent of all blocks within ...

Last February, in the midst of Bitcoin’s long-lasting block size dispute, a group of Bitcoin Core developers, Bitcoin miners, and representatives from the Bitcoin industry met in Hong Kong. Sealing their position with a signed letter, ...

Bitcoin’s oldest mining pool, Slush Pool, will let its miners vote on the Segregated Witness soft fork proposed by Bitcoin Core. By passing this choice down to individual miners that connect to the pool (sometimes also referred to as ...

Set to offer an effective block size limit increase, a transaction malleability fix and more, Segregated Witness (SegWit) could soon go live on the Bitcoin network. Starting tonight, miners can signal support for the proposed ...

For many, Bitmain’s recent announcement of the realization of a major data center in northwestern China served as a reminder of the level of mining centralization in Bitcoin. Although the Beijing-based company will not own the entire ...

Beijing-based Bitcoin ASIC hardware producer and mining giant, Bitmain, announced on November 5 that it’s in the process of building a major data center complex in the northwest of China. The company says the facility will be capable of ...

Bitcoin Core launched its latest software release last week, which includes a proposed Segregated Witness soft fork. If a majority of miners signal support for the proposal, Segregated Witness will activate on the Bitcoin network — ...

Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 was released last week, which means miner signaling on the proposed Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork will start soon. If activated, SegWit offers a number of benefits, one of which is an effective block size ...