Ten Years of Bitcoin
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
1y ago
This post was originally written for an opinion series marking ten years since the announcement of Bitcoin. It was not published at the time but appears here, without change, in the form it was written in late-2018. It was originally published in Dec, 2022 and has been backdated. Reflecting back on my almost-8-years of working on Bitcoin, I’m very proud of his far we’ve come in answering some of the biggest questions around viability of trustless financial technologies. We’ve gone from a niche technology valued by only a small handful of geeks to something discussed and debated in internationa ..read more
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Bitcoin's Diversity of Use-Cases and Security Models
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
3y ago
A few months ago I ran a hacker residency program with Chaincode Labs where we taught about Bitcoin philosophy, security, implementation, and technology. This is the first in a series of posts in which I’m going to write up some of what we discussed, hopefully making Bitcoin protocol development more accessible and helping frame discussions around proposed changes to the system. Before I can begin talking about Bitcoin’s security model or protocol development generally, we have to agree on one thing: what IS Bitcoin? Or, at least, what are the key features of Bitcoin that we must protect as we ..read more
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Scaling Bitcoin Roundup
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
3y ago
With Scaling Bitcoin over, and lots of interest in the conference, I figured I should post a summary of my views of how the conference went. While this year’s Scaling had a similar focus to the previous two, it seemed to have a different target audience. Instead of being focused making short- and medium-term scaling proposals accessible to a general audience for analysis, this this year’s submissions and attendees seemed much more interested in sharing their work with the Bitcoin protocol development community and academics. This made for an incredibly exciting series of talks, with many new t ..read more
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Hacker Residency with Chaincode
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
3y ago
I’m excited today to announce that, for a few months this coming fall, I will be taking up residency with Chaincode Labs in New York on sabbatical from Blockstream. Even more exciting - we’re looking for people to come join the fun! Chaincode Labs has been doing excellent protocol-level Bitcoin development for several years, and now has some of the top contributors to Bitcoin Core. In that time, Chaincode Labs has become an intensely supportive environment1 without distraction where developers can work on protocol-level Bitcoin development. Starting the second week in September (the 12th) and ..read more
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The Future of The Bitcoin Relay Network(s)
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
3y ago
When the Bitcoin Relay Network was announced, there were some (understandable) complaints about the centralization pressure that it might introduce. While most of the complaints were quickly withdrawn, it is certainly true that more could have been done to encourage others to set up their own relay networks, instead of relying on mine alone. Additionally, over the past year, as Bitcoin blocks have moved from containing every transaction available in mempools to containing only a subset thereof, the design of the Relay Network has begun to show its age. Though the network itself is very efficie ..read more
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How Bitcoin Moves Forward
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
3y ago
The scaling debate that has been gripping the Bitcoin community for the past half year has taken an interesting turn in 2016. Until recently, there have been two distinct camps - one proposing a significant change to the consensus-enforced block size limit to allow for more on-blockchain transactions and the other opposing such a change, suggesting instead that scaling be obtained by adding more flexible systems on top of the blockchain. At this point, however, the entire Bitcoin community seems to have unified around a single vision - roughly 2MB of transactions per block, whether via Segrega ..read more
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Why Bitcoin's Decentralization Matters
BlueMatt's Blog
by Matt Corallo
3y ago
Bitcoiners, from Bitcoin Core developers to long-time Bitcoin enthusiasts to recent /r/Bitcoin discoverers, love to talk about how Bitcoin’s decentralization is its ultimate feature. Rarely, however, do you see anyone explain why decentralization matters - surely it’s an interesting property from a computer science perspective, but why should consumers, businesses or investors care? This post is an attempt to write out why decentralization is foundational to Bitcoin’s utility and, somewhat more importantly, set up future posts talking about when it isn’t. When Bitcoiners talk about decentraliz ..read more
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