Bitcoin Core Blog

> Is it in the Debian repos? Maybe. Try `apt-get bitcoin-cli` At least one place is to download from https://bitcoincore.org As with all binaries outside of package managers that handle signed verification, be sure to verify the signature. Also, I'm not sure if Bitcoin and Electrum are exactly the same. You're using `electrum`, for example. And I cite `bitcoin-cli`. So they may be "different peer-to-peer (P2P) networks."

bitcoin.org is not owned by bitcoin project. There is some tug-of-war going on about that domain that's too stupid to even talk about. (As are all the stupid "what is true bitcoin???" debates of 2017-ish.) The actual Bitcoin domain is https://bitcoincore.org and they link Libera there.

> First you make many copies of that file, to different disks and usb-memories. This is exactly what I've done with it so far, haha. > Then you can load one of them into bitcoin-core wallet and you are done. Sorry, I'm completely out of touch with Bitcoin by now. In the beginning there was not much info and everything was low risk anyways. Nowadays there is so much noise and I'm never sure what to trust. When you say bitcoin-core, you mean the client I can get from https://bitcoincore.org? If I understand the instructions correctly I should enable pruning and need to download and store about 6 GiB, but that's it. > That file should be all you need, it is unencrypted and contains your bitcorns. Sounds good...

True. Core's website has two good reads on SegWit for anyone interested: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/ https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/28/segwit-costs/

https://bitcoincore.org/en/faq/optin_rbf/ It may be worthwhile to read the detailed RBF FAQ.

Hi. Bitcoin.org contributor[0] here. You can start and run a fully validating Bitcoin node with 7GB of storage space and 128MB-256MB RAM. Download the official GUI Bitcoin software here[1]. Enable pruning to store just 7GB. This validates all blocks. The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself: > Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored. Only the recent several days need to be stored for security, which allows Bitcoin to run very securely with just 7GB of space. [0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624 [1]: https://bitcoincore.org/

Disclaimer: I am a researcher in this space and also CTO of a company (Arwen.io) which builds cross-chain atomic swaps. To me, one of the more powerful properties of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies is that they overcome a long standing impossibility result in cryptography: fair exchange, i.e. atomic swaps, are impossible without a trusted third party [0]. Cryptocurrency-backed blockchains do this by modifying the underlying assumptions behind that impossibility result in two ways [1]: 1. it adds the assumption that at least one side of the exchange is trading a blockchain asset, 2. it the treats the blockchain holding that asset as a trusted party. To someone outside the world of cryptocurrency this may seem like an odd set of assumptions. However if what you want to exchange is a blockchain asset, assumption 1 and 2 is very reasonable. Valuing a blockchain asset already assumes that the blockchain is trustworthy because the value and ownership of the asset requires a trustworthy blockchain. A very cool result is that a party can perform a fair-exchange between a cryptocurrency and the solution to a problem in NP. For instance the ZKCP (Zero Knowledge Contingent Payment) protocol has been used to perform a fair-exchange of bitcoins for the solution to a Sudoku puzzle [2]. SIA coin uses a slightly different model to enable users to prove and collect cryptocurrency for storing another users data [3]. Taken to its logical conclusion, this seems like it would allow…

Hi HN. I built this because resources to learn more about building with Bitcoin are scattered throughout the web and hard to find. Rich content for technical people to consume is buried within websites, fragmented and hard to pry out of places like Stack Exchange (unless you know what you're searching for). For example, on https://bitcoin.org, one needs to dig in through the dropdown menu, and then navigate to a series of pages to get to material. On https://bitcoincore.org, it's a similar process. So, with that in mind - I've been working with another contributor, Cornelius Schumaker and have put together a vanilla, purely technical version of Bitcoin documentation - it's completely distilled so that a person with a technical or engineering-related background can dive right in and get started with Bitcoin. Thinking there is a lot of opportunity here to do all kinds of extensions to it, how-tos, readmes, more guides, faqs, etc. The goal is to make this a one-stop shop for all things technical to help people who already have engineering backgrounds, get started developing with Bitcoin. If anyone has any questions or feedback, please let me know. Thanks. :)

If you follow Bitcoin politics you'd know that there is a large population of Bitcoin users who like this decision[0][3][4]. There is an upcoming contentious hard fork in Bitcoin called Segwit2x. It activates in November and is supported by some miners and a number of Bitcoin companies. Those who oppose that hard fork believe cutting China out of the network will cause the proposal to fail. Segwit2x was a compromise between Bitcoin providers and the very miners that China look like shutting down now - primarily Bitmain, who many believe are also behind, or in control of, the previous bcash bitcoin fork. The compromise was activating Segwit in exchange for miners getting their wish of a 2MB block size increase. Segwit has since been force-activated with a user-activated soft fork - so many feel the compromise is now not necessary and presents many risks. [0] https://twitter.com/stefanobernardi/status/910233392251326464 [1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/ [2] https://github.com/OPUASF/UASF

1) I've heard rumors that "the banks" are behind ETH, so that can be a huge artificial push to get it popular and mainstream, which in turn can make it more valuable. 2) JavaScript creator Brendan Eich-backed Basic Attention Token https://basicattentiontoken.org/ will launch on May 31 with ETH being the purchasing currency. Its goal is to make online advertising less super completely shitty like it is now. 3) Although not directly related to ETH, follow news about Lightning Network https://lightning.network/ , Segregated Witness https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/ , and the vast world of alt coins https://coinmarketcap.com/ which can all affect each other when people like or don't like something (for example, if ETH starts using Segwit, maybe people will flock to it or away from it). 4) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 5) BTC, ETH, LiteCoin and alt coins in general are all way way up, so it's not just an ETH thing.

There is near complete consensus, see: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266… Nearly every developer, along with the vast majority of miners, have agreed to this. The group that did not agree (Coinbase, 2 developers, and some small miners) is extremely good at social media and has done a great job of spreading a false story of "serious scaling problems" and "developers can't reach consensus". It's simply not true. They want to take over the bitcoin network with a fork, which will follow different rules, called "Bitcoin Classic". This is their second attempt at a takeover, the last was the failed "Bitcoin XT" fork. There is no sane reason to fork the network short of trying to take control of the protocol. Here is the roadmap that the main Bitcoin ("core") team has put together and is working on: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/

"The tokens" can't be a medium of requesting compute except in the sense that any money can be used to pay for goods and services. When we talk about something having intrinsic value it doesn't really make sense to argue it on the basis of "you can use it as money to pay people to do stuff", that's an extrinsic value. (It also seems to be a non-sequitur. If you want to pay people to perform computation for you only the most minimal functionality from Bitcoin's script is required to do so in a trustless manner, e.g. https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-paymen… ) You've also appear to have ignored my correction on your "stopped" remark, if you're engaging in this discussion in good faith and were simply mistaken it would be polite to retract your error.

Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the spirit of this philosophy. https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-paymen…

The original DAO “hack” was reversed by censorship: https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao I put “hack” in quotes because at the time the community loudly was proclaiming “code is law” and if you accept that the person accused of hacking didn’t break any “laws” of the DAO…he simply used it according to the code published in the smart contract. The community decided to hard fork, change the rules and censor his transaction. You could make the same argument that was censorship in bitcoin had a transaction been made that exploited the inflation bug before the fix was pushed out: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/

Part of the answer to that question involves (Ctrl-F) "Reproducible builds" and "Verified reproduction": https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

The most recent bug (that we know of) that allowed double-spend was in production for over a year [0] (~Sept 2017 to ~Sept 2018). I don't think it is possible to accurately determine the probability of this bug being exploited (because you are right, it is "all probabilistic"), but this inability to determine the probabilities is precisely why PoW is security theatre. PoW has always been painted as a mathematical model of the security of the system (see featured article), but in reality this model is not accounting for the much more realistic attack vectors. Hence it fails to be an accurate model. If you're just saying that PoW isn't painting the whole picture, I agree with you. [0] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/

Hey thanks for the update! But I'd encourage you to do a bit more investigation. According to Bitcoin core, there is an inflation vulnerability. https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/ So maybe you weren't too far off from independently discovering the vulnerability yourself. Edit: apparently you were credited in discovering the vulnerability yourself in the very discloser that I linked. Congrats!

Because right now you can't distribute the UXTO set in a trustless way. Core developers blocked it two years ago for nonsensical reasons [1], one of the many reasons the community doesn't trust them. Work has picked up on this in BCH [2]. [1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/meetings/2016/03/10/#initial-block-download… [2] https://github.com/bitcoincashorg/workgroups/blob/master/wg-utxocommit…

> But only a small minority of transactions have taken advantage of this option so far, so the network's average throughput has stayed below 2,500 transactions per block Let's celebrate the exchanges and wallets that have opted in to segwit. Notable entries from [1]: bitfinex, bitsquare, bitstamp, blockchain.info, counterparty, Gemini, localbitcoins, OpenBazaar, ShapeShift Let's put pressure on those who are still WIP: Coinbase, GDAX -- and migrate away from those who don't have any plans to embrace segwit. [1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/

Perhaps it should give you pause with that belief structure when you realize the word 'mining' doesn't even exist in the bitcoin whitepaper. It is only the nodes that exist, because it is only the nodes that validate, and everything that didn't have anything to do with validation is rightly considered a secondary concern of the protocol. So there are nodes, which are peers. And there are people who need nodes for performing bitcoin transactions, and some of those people are miners, and some of them are just making good-ol-fashioned transactions. The correct term is "I am a peer, and I use this node for my transactions, which create blocks". Or "I am a peer, and I use this node for my transactions, which are payments." Download it for yourself and see. https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

OP probably meant Core members: https://bitcoincore.org/en/team/

I regularly send payments with 5c-10c in fees and it works just fine. Sometimes takes a bit longer, if we're in a high-demand period or going through a spam attack[0]. The "small block policy" view[1] is held by nearly every technical participant of the bitcoin space[2][3], myself included. Claiming that blockstream are somehow "forcing" anything is pure conspiracy nonsense. [0] https://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-spam-attack-stressed-network-for… [1] that is, the "let's start by doubling the blocksize with segwit first, analyze the results and then talk about further increasing it" view. not sure how valid the "small block" label is, considering that the people you're labeling with it want to double the block size. [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support#Developers [3] https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/

> [Prediction markets] only work for the part of truth that can be eventually verified and objectively confirmed/disproved but it's a start. Requires an arbiter/judge, otherwise you'll just end up with one of the two sides refusing to sign the multisig payout transaction. For truly objective determination you could do zkSNARKs and zero-knowledge contingent payments, I guess: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-paymen…

Not Ethereum, but smart contracts have been demonstrated in Bitcoin to guarantee delivery of certain immaterial goods for which you can build specialized zero-knowledge proofs. You could for example buy cryptographic keys this way. The idea has been around some time and was used to buy a Sudoku solution for a demonstration last year: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-paymen…

It's a feature originally developed for Bitcoin: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/ Litecoin is based on Bitcoin Core's codebase and therefore inherited it as well. Due to various reasons it's activating on Litecoin before Bitcoin.

Here's your "propaganda". The segwit softfork may fix some things that make side chains more feasible, but that undersells it severely. It mainly solves a bug in bitcoin that prevents a good implementation of Lightning Network (which is not a side chain), and it also upgrades on-chain transaction capacity by doubling it, while solving another bug in Bitcoin (quadratic scaling of sigops) which make such a capacity increase safer. More information here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

Segregated witness and other changes seem like positive news for bitcoin scaling. https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/

This web site looks like a good dashboard! Although, I'm not up on the technical details of everything going on here, so some of it is confusing to me, because there's not as much background as I'd like. I've spent some time reading around, and here is my guess as to what the site is describing: Behind the scenes, achow101 (https://github.com/achow101) is running four Bitcoin clients: * `Bitcoin Core` is running the client from https://bitcoin.org/en/ (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin) (https://bitcoincore.org). This client does not support Segregated Witness, and it does not support larger block sizes (so blocks larger than 1 MB are ignored). * `UASF (BIP 148)` is running the client from https://bitcoinuasf.org (https://github.com/UASF/bitcoin). This client supports Segregated Witness. This client does not support larger block sizes (so blocks larger than 1 MB are ignored). * `btc1 (segwit2x)` is running the client from https://segwit2x.github.io (https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin). This client supports Segregated Witness, as well as changing the block size to 2 MB (blocks larger than 2 MB are ignored). * `Bitcoin ABC (UAHF)` is running the client from https://www.bitcoinabc.org (https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc). It supports blocks of <8 MB in size (initially defaulting to 2 MB). This client does not support Segregated Witness. As I understand things, right now there are two events which have hard-coded dates: * At midnight UTC on August 1, the…