I'm pleased to announce that Mastering Bitcoin (3rd edition), co-authored by
@aantonop
and myself, has been sent to the printer. Ebooks should be available around Nov 15th. Print books should be available by early December. (1/8)
@socrates1024
You gotta get them when they're young. At 78 years old, my Grandma's first computer ran Debian. Three computers later and only a few months away from turning 100, she's still running Debian.
Even knowing how LN works, watching frenzied activity on made me wonder about the mempool. Were all those people opening channels driving up transaction fees? The answer it seems is no. LN enables silly fun like cryptokitties but without killing capacity.
Hey
@CoinbaseSupport
, I tried to close my account but your website is broken (like usual). Please fix (or implement segwit, stop promoting scams, don't make insider trades, provide cryptographic proof of reserves, don't complain about scaling when you crash every rally, etc...).
I disagree.
@LukeDashjr
has cost valuable Bitcoin contributors more than than most people can imagine. He manufactures controversies over inanities, abuses his authority, and tells half truths that take time and expertise to refute. I think he's been a net negative for Bitcoin
Wrote an article for the Bitcoin Wiki with a list of techniques for reducing transaction fees. It's aimed at wallet devs and organizations (rather than individual users) since many of these techniques require software support:
Pleased to announce that
@OReillyMedia
has published an early release of the first two chapters of Mastering Bitcoin, 3rd Ed., which I've had the privilege of updating based on
@aantonop
's previous editions with the support of dev editor
@angelarufino1
.
If you generated a wallet using Libbitcoin's Bitcoin Explorer, including as described in the appendix to Mastering Bitcoin, your funds are at risk (or already stolen).
Full details:
Mastering Bitcoin, third edition, is now available on GitHub under a CC BY-NC-ND license.
The credit for getting this on GitHub goes entirely to
@aantonop
. It would not have happened without him.
Launch announcement for , a community-maintained fork of Bitcoin(dot)org with advertisements removed and third-party trackers disabled. I've already had the pleasure making some small contributions.
Today is my tenth anniversary as a Bitcoin technical writer. In a decade of contributing, I've made amazing friendships that will last the rest of my life and learned of things more fantastical than most fiction. 1/2
Russell Yanofsky belongs in the Bitcoin Hall of Legends. I'm looking at this week's merge of
- 31 months from open to merge
- updated or rebased 152 times
- created almost a dozen spin-off PRs
- almost 200 comments by all reviewers
That's commitment.
I recommend reading this: it's the most detailed and vivid description I've seen yet of how decentralized consensus systems become increasingly centralized as validation resource requirements increase and marginal peers stop fully validating and start trusting miners instead.
For those who don't know,
@CobraBitcoin
may co-own but he's had little to do with the production, translation, and maintenance of its content. His major contribs are allowing Google to track pageviews, reducing server security, and gratuitous pontification
How many of the people complaining about high fees on Bitcoin would be saying nice things about Bitcoin if it had low fees? Every year it's a new complaint and a new set of knockoffs claiming to fix the complaint. It's ok to worry, but don't take all your cues from serial haters.
If you like Bitcoin and you're capable of reviewing programming logic, please consider participating in the structured review of schnorr, taproot, and tapscript described in this week's newsletter.
I wish I had previously said more publicly about the problems Luke causes for other contributors. Maybe then the millions he has recently received would've gone instead to the quiet, undramatic builders that really help move Bitcoin forward. I'm sorry.
My reply to a press inquiry about Segwit2x being called off. (I like sharing these replies publicly so that it's clear I'm not trying to speak on anyone's behalf.)
I just arrived in Hawaii for a vacation. What's the first thing that happened? The Uber driver who picked me up from the airport mentioned Bitcoin, so I inquired further and found he owns BTC and is well informed about it. 1/2
@jimmysong
1. Write 100 new or substantially improved articles for the Bitcoin Wiki, plus continue helping out elsewhere
2. Improve my cold wallet setup for (a) better security (b) easier fork selloffs (c) smoother inheritance to my family
3. Start accepting income exclusively through LN
Read an article claiming the IRS says hardly anyone is claiming Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency capital gains. I did, but I wonder if they're not counting me because I filled in something different than what they're testing for in their free-form text field.
All of my royalties from Mastering Bitcoin (3rd ed.) will be donated to
@bitcoinbrink
to support Bitcoin developers. It's impossible to write about Bitcoin technology without wanting to support the people who give it away to the world for free. (5/8)
I had the pleasure of reading drafts of this book over the past several months, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to acquire hands-on knowledge of the Bitcoin Protocol. Congratulations, Jimmy, and thanks for creating such a valuable educational resource!
2/2 If you're enthusiastic about Bitcoin, consider contributing. You don't have to be a dev to make a difference. Find people who do work that you think is important, tell them about your skills, and ask them to suggest how you can help. Then follow through. Repeat as necessary.
@CobraBitcoin
This isn't about PoW change for me. This is about the sum of your many and frequent complaints. You hate miners, both Bitmain and Halong; you hate hodlers; you hate the whitepaper; you hate the Bitcoin Core name; you hate tx fees---and that's just from your tweets in Feb!
2/2 We had a great chat, but it's crazy and amazing that my IRL chats with random people are now basically the same as my IRC chats in
#bitcoin
with random people.
Isn't that backwards? Before Bitcoin had users---and attackers---early participants fantasized about how it might work. Those who held "it in their hearts" successfully built a currency network that fulfills more and more of those early fantasies every year.
What I love about Bitcoin: the people who love it most have already abandoned it in their hearts, and spend their days fantasizing about a totally new currency network that’s nothing like it.
@socrates1024
One year we bought her a larger monitor so we could make things easier to read. We snuck it in and installed it during a family party, hoping to surprise her. Then we asked her to check something on the computer. She never noticed the monitor swap. Still hasn't to this day.
This is my 2019 recommendation for anyone seeking a gentle introduction to the technical concepts behind Bitcoin. If you can use a Bitcoin wallet, I think you have enough technical background to read this book and learn about the technology that helps you keep your money safe.
TIL about
@real_or_random
's nifty scheme for allowing today's BTC users to upgrade to Quantum Computing (QC) resistant signatures even in the presence of fast QC attackers. Here's a quick description of it with some context for readers (& link to orig):
Summaries of
@bitcoincoreorg
weekly meetings are now being published again. Get the notes from the last two meetings here:
For updates, subscribe to the RSS feed here:
Yesterday's launch announcement for was the last thing on my Twitter todo list, so I'm retiring this account and moving my microblogging to Mastodon. Hope to see you there!
New chapters and sections of the book cover schnorr signatures, scriptless multisignatures, MAST, P2C, taproot, tapscript, bech32(m), fee management, scriptless threshold signatures, compact block filters, compact blocks, and more. (2/8)
@nopara73
Perhaps because people pay for Coinbase and (the later through attention-sucking ads), but nobody pays for Bitcoin Core. Also, CB and BC.i are proprietary---so all we can do is criticize---but with Core anyone with the skills can contribute.
Faketoshi allegedly says Bitcoin was never meant to allow key/address reuse, which agrees with the original paper---but, FYI, real Nakamoto's early code naughtily reused pubkeys when he paid Hal Finney and others. Here's the reuse code:
Oops.
A while ago, for the one-year anniversary of the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club (
@BitcoinCorePRs
), Antoine Riard collected some comments---many which mentioned
@jfnewbery
. The comments are public, but today I'd like to tweet some of the things people said about this amazing mentor.
@CobraBitcoin
This is playing on reputation. Claiming to own a respected resource is to imply you played a major role in establishing that reputation. You didn't. You are, of course, entitled to publish your opinion, but I think people need to know that you're just some random blogger.
Why are we bailing out airlines that have no demand while air-cargo shippers like UPS, Fedex, and Amazon are seeing huge spikes in demand? Please consider letting the airlines go bankrupt so that their planes, pilots, maintenance staff, etc can convert to shipping air-cargo.
I'm currently updating chapter 6 and 7, which are being expanded and reorganized into four chapters with details about schnorr sigs, taproot, tapscript, modern fee bumping, and lots of other exciting new details, so there's plenty more early release content to come in the future.
I like
@LukeDashjr
's idea[1] to update the new bech32 (native segwit) address format with P2SH^2 logic, although I agree with him it's possibly too late. For those who don't know about P2SH^2, I wrote a quick article.[2]
[1]
[2]
Compared to my initial draft, the book has been much improved thanks to comprehensive technical reviews from
@roasbeef
@renepickhardt
@murchandamus
. Even if I had a 10,000 character tweet, I couldn't fully express how much gratitude I have for them. (4/8)
A hastily-written response to a journalist asking about arbitrary data inclusion in the block chain.
(I like to publish replies to journalists so that anyone who wants to criticize me can criticize what I actually said versus what might get published.)
Excited for this! Being able to fully partition funds from the GUI for different use cases is something I really want. E.g. separate wallets for my business transactions, my personal transactions, my watch-only wallet for cold savings, and individual wallets for low-taint txes.
@kallerosenbaum
That Bitcoin's security depends not just on cryptography and direct financial incentives but also on users who care deeply enough about Bitcoin's consensus rules that they'll automatically refuse to accept any payments that violate those rules. Details:
I saw a blog post by
@PeterRizun
claiming that current LN payments below about $0.02 aren't trustless, so $50 could end up requiring trust too if fees rise. However, there are solutions; they just aren't worth bothering about (IMO) at $0.02. Details:
I think maybe someone wrote my name on , and then someone else turned it into "sharting", a derogatory reference to Ethereum's plans to implement security-reducing sharding. To whoever did this, I approve!
@barrysilbert
True believers in Bitcoin would've either enforced segwit on its own if they thought it was good, or rejected it if they thought it was bad.
@gavinandresen
@morcosa
I wrote many of the posts on (and prepared, edited, or reviewed almost all the rest), and I've always felt valued as someone who makes non-code contributions. Nice try though with the concern trolling about non-code contributions being unvalued.
I knew fees dropped on the weekend, but I was wondering how big the effect was. Seems like it's not huge, but rather that the weekday higher fees lag into the weekend, and the weekend lower fees lag into the weekdays. Notice that Monday & Tuesday cheaper on average than Saturday
Updates in the third edition include the evolution of Bitcoin scripting, terminology updates (h/t
@murchandamus
), RGB and taproot assets, much more backup and recovery info, and complete witness transaction serialization. (3/8)
Finally, I have to confess that updating the book took more out of me than I expected. I don't think I could've finished if it hadn't been for the unreserved support and encouragement of my incredible partner,
@33countyplates
. Thank you, Amanda. I love you. (8/8)
@jimmysong
@satoshi
Note, you don't need to understand the math to protect yourself from fake celebrities. Simply demand that anybody---no matter how potentially famous---pass the same test you'd use to verify that a normal person controlled the private key corresponding to an address.
Congrats
@BRDHQ
on your recent fund raise. Question, how do you know your users are storing $6 billion using your software? Last I heard you used BIP37 bloom filters, which shouldn't be sending info about user balances back to you. (h/t
#bitcoin
IRC)
I also owe a big thanks to the inimitable
@adamcjonas
, who did the scariest thing possible to an educational author: introduced me to teachers such as
@femilonge
and
@dulce_vird
who will be depending on the book for their classes. Femi, Dulce: I hope it meets expectations! (7/8)
@BitcoinErrorLog
@francispouliot_
@ErikVoorhees
Bitcoin is P2P electronic cash because each of its users (full node operators AKA *peers*) has equal rights with respect to the network (the ability to enforce arbitrary protocol rules), it's tracked using *electronic* databases, and is a bearer asset (*cash*).
@starkness
@LukeDashjr
@r32a_
@arunsasi
I'd prefer to see the spec as a series of BIPs, and I'd be more than happy to handle all of the conversion work and other necessary administrivia.
@bitstein
I'd fund people, not particular tech. I'd make a list of 150 people I thought had made excellent contributions in the past, with no funny business since then, and give them each a no-strings-attached $1 million now plus $1 million in BTC timelocked 5 years in the future.
@OneMorePeter
@dremannBTC
@blockchain
I'm surprised one of your leading customer needs isn't significantly lower fees. Even for the simplest of transactions, segwit saves 40% on fees. Here's a calculator when you can play around with tx sizes to see the potential savings:
@CobraBitcoin
In addition, we've debated many topics, both privately and publicly. At this point, I feel it's necessary to point out that the primary focus of your recent activities seems to be pontification, rather than making any useful contributions to the site or Bitcoin in general.
I don't think I've ever seen this
@ChaincodeLabs
logo before, but now that I have, my 5+ years of receiving feedback on block chain illustrations leads me to strongly suspect that there was an embarrassingly dorky discussion at some point about which way the arrows should point.
@ziggamon
@0xB10C
Very cool! Some other things that could be checked:
- Native segwit (versus P2SH-wrapped segwit, ~15% extra savings)
- Compressed pubkeys (33 bytes versus 65 for uncompressed)
- Exact change (~32 bytes savings)
- Lower fee priority (compared to other tx's in same block)
@CobraBitcoin
I didn't say you hadn't contributed, only that you've contributed little compared to the many others who helped build 's reputation as a quality source of information about Bitcoin, a reputation you play upon by styling yourself as the domain owner.
@alansilbert
@SamouraiWallet
The reverse of "first they came for...and then they came for me" is "first I defended the rights of...and so I also defended my rights".
Less than two hours after launch and the site already has its first community-contributed PR fixing up some broken links in the contributor docs (which, alas, are displayed by GitHub, so not covered by our CI testing). Thanks
@BlockchainBilly
!
I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the speed and scope of Bitcoin & LN development. That makes the scale of development of the Apollo program absolutely mind boggling to me. Kudos to all the amazing people who made it happen.
#Apollo50th