Jimmy Song
medium.com/@jimmysong · Personal blog · on HN since 2017
Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, writes on how Bitcoin and blockchains work, covering forks, difficulty adjustments, ICOs and smart contracts.
What HN saysHN commenters cite his posts to argue that blockchains only make sense for decentralized currency, and to explain Bitcoin Cash difficulty adjustments and smart contract limits.
25HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
28stories submitted
121story points
6 years agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why Blockchain is hard5 people · 11 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2Bitcoin cash difficulty adjustments 2ec589099a8e3 people · first shared 2017
- 3No Sean Spicer Didn’t Make Some Secret Bitcoin Transaction2 people · 60 points · first shared 2017 · 17 comments on HN
- 4Why Bitcoin is Different2 people · 8 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 5Why ICOs Are Broken2 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 6Pathological BIP91/UASF Scenarios2 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 7The Truth about Smart Contracts2 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 8Examining Bitmain’s Press Release2 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9A Gentle Introduction to Bitcoin Core Development1 people · 11 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Why Bitcoin Will Get Scaling Without Segwit or Large Blocks1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11Bitcoin Core Bug CVE-2018–17144: An Analysis1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 12Why Satoshi (probably) didn’t move some coins from 20091 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Bitcoin Realism Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 1MB Blocks1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Alternatives to Blockchain1 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 15Bitcoin and Virtue Part 1: Prudence1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
thisisit · 2018-05-21
> If it’s not a decentralized currency...Maybe don’t use a blockchain?
It seems people slowly arriving at this conclusion. Another good read with a similar conclusion:
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-blockchain-is-hard-60416ea4c5c
altoz · 2017-03-02
There are a lot of reasons Bitcoin is worth more than other cryptocoins. I lay out an analysis here: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-transaction-capacity-doesnt-…
hardlianotion · 2018-06-25
Quite. This is a live topic for me. Wiser heads pointed me toward
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/the-truth-about-smart-contracts-ae825271…
when I had my own blockchain moment. I think that immutability and lack of human judgement limit the usefulness of these things. And of course, not everything needs decentralised.
Frogolocalypse · 2017-12-16
> and original vision
Where in the original white-paper is the emergency difficulty adjustment?
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec5…
> peer-to-peer
If you don't run a node, or you can't run a node because of resource requirements, you're not a peer.
pmorici · 2017-08-21
The difficulty re-targets once every 2016 blocks. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has a added feature that re-targets the difficulty downward if blocks are being found too slowly. Bitcoin's Legacy chain doesn't do this so if enough hash power leaves the legacy chain in a short period of time it causes slow block times and people hope that if it gets bad enough there will be an inflection point where people abandon the legacy chain for Cash. The likely hood of that happening is anyone's guess.
[0] https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec5…
TD-Linux · 2017-08-02
It's super unprofitable to mine BCH right now, at current exchange rates (assuming you could even sell BCH, which you can't). Miners stopped to wait for it to become profitable again, due to BCH's special difficulty adjustment. Details: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec5…
Rmilb · 2017-06-15
Speculation is that this is primarily due to Bitmain's announcement yesterday to hard fork if the UASF soft fork gets any momentum. Jimmy Song has a good analysis on this.
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/examining-bitmains-press-release-6b47b06…
This forking of Bitcoin is a required trial that the chain must go through to prove how resilient it is to this type of attack. It is unknown which chain will win in the event of a fork, maybe Ethereum will win, probably not PotCoin.
themgt · 2017-05-01
I just read this and thought ... didn't that transaction take place after the infamous tweet? Couldn't anyone have done it? Quick google and sure enough:
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/no-sean-spicer-didnt-make-some-secret-bi…
Why are so many so desperate to believe this immense hydra of a conspiracy theory?
ktorvald · 2017-05-01
ASICBOOST doesn't seem to be as big of a deal as it's been made out to be. $2M in potential annual savings for a company, not the $100M greg claimed.
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/mining-profitability-and-asicboost-ffdb7…
kanzure · 2017-07-17
Not really a "civil war"-- basically, bitcoin will keep working, even without the segwit upgrade if it gets delayed another year or two, and there might be some new altcoins that could be spun off from the current bitcoin, and there might be some brand confusion for a while as people wonder whether something incompatible with the bitcoin network is still bitcoin.
Here is some background:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-segwit2x-scaling-proposal-core-develo…
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/segwit2x-what-you-need-to-know-b747e6326…
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/major-exchanges-will-consider-bit…
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/countdown-segwit-these-are-dates-…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587
https://www.reddit.com/r/sound8bits/comments/5xre70/the_origins_of_the…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6mz19j/potential_network_dis…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6mgecw/frankensegwit8x_testn…
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-unlimited-miners-may-be-p… or https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/verified-chatlogs-why-jihan-and-jiang-w…
how about some peer review yo, https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-July/0147… and https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-July/0147…