For over a year, attackers have had the ability to crash Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin Classic nodes. Yesterday, someone actually did it. According to...
The soon-to-be proposed SegregatedWitness soft fork is set to extend Bitcoin’s potential in several ways. One potentially promising innovation enabled by “SegWit” is MAST, an...
Recent years have brought significant misunderstanding of the term decentralization as it pertains to Bitcoin. Literally, it means the dispersal of nodes, data, miners...
Bitcoin Core 0.13.0, the thirteenth generation of Bitcoin's reference client as first launched by Satoshi Nakamoto almost eight years ago, has now been tagged for...
All (full) Bitcoin nodes verify all transactions on the network. This allows the system to be entirely trustless and decentralized, but also presents significant...
The Fast Relay Network, also known as Matt Corallo's Relay Network, is a relatively straightforward relay network setup by Corallo, and has existed for some years. The Fast Relay Network consists of nine nodes, distributed strategically around the globe. Designed as a hub-and-spoke model, miners can connect to the relay node closest to them to send and receive blocks over this network. This is significantly faster than Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network.
Head First Mining is a trick proposed by former Bitcoin Core lead developer Gavin Andresen. With Head First Mining, miners don’t wait for the complete block to arrive before they start mining a subsequent block. Instead, they immediately mine on top of the block header as soon as they receive it, and also forward the header to other nodes. This obviously saves time.
Traffic over the Bitcoin network has always been unencrypted. Transactions and blocks are sent from node to node in plain sight, as are Bloom filters, which are often used by Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) nodes. All this data can, therefore, be seen by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), open-WiFi providers and anyone monitoring the Bitcoin network.
To enhance privacy, it is possible to hide the amount of bitcoins transacted. An early version of this concept, then referred to as “bitcoins with homomorphic value,” was first proposed in 2013 by hashcash inventor and current Blockstream president Dr. Adam Back.
