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 […]
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. […]
I figured “Someday we’ll find it: the Bitcoin connection; the coders, exchanges, and me” was too long for a title. Anyhoo, since very late February I’ve been gainfully employed in the cryptocurrency space, as a developer on Bitcoin Core at Xapo (it always sounds pretentious to shorten that to “bitcoin core developer” to me). I […]