I’ve been finding myself dissatisfied with how the various Bitcoin tribes of the moment self-identify: the maximalists, the plebs, the ossifiers, the multicoiners, the laser eyes, the scalers, the inscriptors, the filterers, the covenants crew, etc — they all feel like they don’t quite match how I think about Bitcoin. So, per xkcd 927, I […]
That’s B for billions (of people). Okay, lame title is lame, whatever. I wrote previously about why Bitcoin’s worth caring about, but if any of that was right, then it naturally leads to the idea that those benefits should be available to many people, not just a few. But what does that actually look like? […]
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been finding the zeitgeist in Bitcoin a bit incoherent: every second idea that’s brought up is treated as either essential or an imminent disaster, and yet a few weeks later everyone who was so excited/enraged has moved onto some different idea to be excited/enraged about. Personally, I […]
One of the things that’s hard to talk sensibly about is Bitcoin’s price. I’m going to have a go at it anyway. Personally, I think there’s two fundamental aspects driving Bitcoin’s value: adoption, and security. The idea there is that, fundamentally, if you look at each person who’s invested in Bitcoin, take their net worth […]
Blockstream posted today about Elements 0.21 and activating taproot on the Liquid sidechain. I think that’s worth talking about in a couple of ways. First is that it’s another consensus update scheduled about six weeks after the previous “dynafed” update. That update failed fairly badly causing almost a full day’s downtime for the network, during […]
At the start of the year, I wrote out some thoughts about Bitcoin priorities, probably most simply summed up as: it’s probably more important to work on things that reinforce [Bitcoin’s] existing foundations, than neat new ideas to change them In that post, I also wrote: I’m particularly optimistic about an as yet unannounced approach […]
Back at the end of 2019, I said on Stephan Livera’s podcast that activation of taproot is “something a lot of people in the community have very strong opinions of; so it’s probably going to be a Twitter flamefest or whatever about it.” It’s turned out both better and worse than I expected — better […]
Ambiguous titles are tight. I’ve always been a little puzzled by the way the segwit/uasf/uahf/segsignal drama played out back in 2017 — there was a lot of drama about the UASF for a while, and then, when push came to shove, suddenly miners switch to being 100% in favour of it, and there were no […]
I wrote a post at the start of last year thinking about my general priorities for Bitcoin and I’m still pretty happy with that approach — certainly “store of value” as a foundation feels like it’s held up! I think over the past year we’ve seen a lot of people starting to hold a Bitcoin […]
General background: Bitcoin is a consensus system — it works because there are a set of rules on how Bitcoin transactions work, and everyone agrees on what they are. Changing those rules is called “forking” — when some people want to change the rules in a non-backwards compatible way while others don’t, that results in […]
(I would have liked to have come up with a more original post title, but found myself unable to escape this one’s event horizon) I’ve been at Xapo for a bit over a couple years now, and it’s been pretty great. Earlier this year, we’d been coming up to performance review time, so, as you […]
A month and a bit ago, I wrote up my take on covid19 on facebook. At the time, Australia was at 1300 cases, numbers were doubling twice a week, and I’d been pessimistically assuming two weeks between infection and detection.That led me to pessimistically estimate that we’d be at 20,000 cases by Easter, and we’d […]
I’ve been trying to come up with a good way of thinking about what to prioritise in Bitcoin work for a little while now — there’s so much interesting stuff going around, all of it Good For Bitcoin, that you need some way to figure out which bits are more important or urgent than others. […]
Hot-take on Facebook and friends’ cryptocurrency. Disclaimer: I work at Xapo, and Xapo’s a founding member of the Libra Association; thoughts are my own, and are only based on public information. So, first, the stated goal is “Libra is a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”. That’s pretty similar to […]
About nine years ago, during the last days of the first Rudd government, the Henry Tax review came out and I did a blog post about it. Their recommendations were: tax free threshold of $25,000 marginal rate of 35% between $25,000 and $180,000 marginal rate of 45% above $180,000 drop the Medicare levy, low income […]