A new study by the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies reveals that “43% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 1h from the first time they were seen in the network and 20% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 30 days, revealing therefore great inefficiency in the Bitcoin system.” The bitcoin network was studied over a period of three...
Jihan Wu, co-founder of bitcoin mining equipment maker Bitmain, has rebutted a statement made yesterday by Gregory Maxwell where he says that a “design oversight” in Bitcoin’s proof of work “has a potential attack which can allow an attacking miner to save up-to 30% of their energy costs.” Maxwell further stated: “Reverse engineering of a mining ASIC from a major manufacture has revealed that it...
I woke up today to what appeared to be good news. Joseph Poon, a Lightning Network developer, Stephen Pair from BitPay, Christopher Jeffrey from Purse and Fedor Indutny, had published a seemingly interesting proposal. In what appeared to be a compromise that may reluctantly get the support of both sides, they proposed both on-chain scaling and segwit activation through a mechanism called...
John McAfee, a former programmer for NASA during the 70s and creator of the first anti-virus, entered the packed Blockchain Money Conference room to rousing applause. “Information only has value based on who wants to buy the info and its content”, McAfee said, but “Bitcoin is the information. The value of information is information itself,” he emphasized. There are 100 million phones that have...
Almost one million bitcoins, worth more than half a billion dollars, are currently stuck in no man’s land as the network struggles to meet rising demand from China. At one point, 70,000 transactions were stuck, unleashing a mountain of complaints from worried bitcoin users who took to bitcoin’s main communication channels of r/btc and r/bitcoin to ask why their transaction does not confirm. Among...
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are solely that of the author and do not represent those of, nor should they be attributed to CCN. A mood of resignation prevails across the bitcoin space as a viciously years-long debate that has taken the reputation of so many and the time and focus of all, seemingly, comes to an end. Eric Mu of HaoBTC, one of the most influential, if not the...
With April coming to a close and the halving in three months, bitcoin’s scalability is reaching decision time. Following a year of heated debate, wide consensus has been achieved on a maxblocksize increase, segwit deployment and support for the Lightning Network. The only outstanding issue is one of timing. Can segwit be ready before the halving? If not, should maxblocksize be increased so as to...
A new study by the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute authored by Christian Decker, Ittay Eyal, Andrew Miller and Emin Gün Sirer, among others, found that bitcoin’s blocksize could currently scale up to 4MB without affecting decentralization. According to the recently released position paper, On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains, 4,000...