The Long Road to SegWit: How Bitcoin’s Biggest Protocol Upgrade Became Reality
Segregated Witness (SegWit) has activated on Bitcoin. As of today, all SegWit-ready nodes on the Bitcoin network are enforcing the new rules, marking Bitcoin’s biggest protocol upgrade to date. But activation did not come easy, and it did not come fast. This is a look back at the long road to SegWit here.
Here’s What’s Really Driving Bitcoin’s Price Network economics is a new field, and so much of the economics around cryptocurrency is foreign to most. The network economy is the emerging economic order within the information society. The name stems from a key attribute−products and services are created and value is added through social networks operating on large or global scales. This is in sharp contrast to industrial-era economies, in which ownership of physical or intellectual property stems from its development by a single enterprise. See the full story here.
A Guide to Survive the coming Bitcoin split on 1st of August 2017
There is a chance Bitcoin will experience a chain-split on August 1st. A segment of all Bitcoin users is committed to activate a user activated soft fork (UASF) as described in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 148 (BIP 148). Specifically, they will reject any Bitcoin blocks that do not signal support for Segregated Witness (SegWit), the centerpiece of Bitcoin Core’s scaling roadmap. Read the full story here.
Bitcoin is not Quantum Safe and how to fix it if needed.
Is Bitcoin at Risk as Google and IBM Aim for 50-Qubit Quantum Computers?
A looming concern in the crypto community is whether quantum computing will destroy Bitcoin’s underlying protocol. People are worried government agencies or other nefarious entities will crack bitcoin’s code with quantum algorithms and undermine blockchain technology. Read more here.
Fractional Reserve Banking with Bitcoin
Will banks try to use off chain transactions to run fractional reserves? Read the story here.
Bitcoin Is Bigger Than The Internet
Video with Andreas Antonopoulos, Published on Feb 28, 2017
The Second Era of Bitcoin Begins, December 17th 2016. Read the full story here.
How bitcoin is used is about to change radically, and for the better. The final perceived limitations to it have been destroyed with SegWit. Now all that is left is building the software and businesses that will take advantage of this new, high-capacity bitcoin.
Lightning Network
Scalable, Instant Bitcoin/Blockchain Transactions
Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.
Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians.
Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments.
Cross Blockchains. Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules. So long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without trust in 3rd party custodians.