Aaron van Wirdum

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 ...

Today marks the release of Bitcoin Core version 0.13.1. This is the official introduction of Segregated Witness, the long-awaited centerpiece of Bitcoin Core’s scalability road map. Starting November 15, Bitcoin miners can signal ...

Bitcoin right now is not really anonymous. Monitoring the unencrypted peer-to-peer network, analyzing the public blockchain or Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations can reveal a lot about who is ...

As last week’s Scaling Bitcoin workshops came to an end and its attendees returned home, the main task for 12 of Bitcoin’s prominent lightning network developers was really just starting. Last Monday and Tuesday, representatives from ...

The soon-to-be proposed Segregated Witness soft fork is set to extend Bitcoin’s potential in several ways. One potentially promising innovation enabled by “SegWit” is MAST, an abbreviation for Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees. While ...

The Scaling Bitcoin conference, held at the Politecnico Milan, returned for its third iteration this weekend, with the focus throughout the speaking slots and workshops shifting away from scaling alone. Emphasizing that Bitcoin faces a ...

Blockstream engineers Paul “Rusty” Russell and Dr. Christian Decker completed their first lightning transaction on Bitcoin’s testnet this week. The test transaction was made using the latest version of the Blockstream’s lightning ...

It is generally accepted that latency in block propagation is one of the bottlenecks for Bitcoin scaling. This is why many of Bitcoin’s most active developers and researchers have presented a series of solutions to compress blocks and ...

First announced on the cryptography mailing list in 2008, Bitcoin was the embodiment of a decade-old cypherpunk vision. A digital currency not controlled by any government, bank, or company existed in the hearts and minds of hackers and ...

Ukraine is one of these countries where people require no explanation about the value of hard money. As war in the east of the post-Soviet nation helped put its economy into a recession, the Ukrainian national currency — the hryvnia — ...

Coinciding with the opening of the Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon2 conference in Shanghai this week, significant parts of the Ethereum network were crashing. In what seemed like an attack using an intentionally difficult-to-execute smart ...