Search by: "Bitcoin Core"

In our recent feature, we discussed the problem of full nodes in the Bitcoin network, and more likely, why running them may be expensive to a user but grants him or her no monetary reward.

Thursday, May 2, saw the official release of Bitcoin Core 0.18.0, the 18th generation of Bitcoin’s original and most popular software client. Overseen by Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Wladimir van der Laan, this latest major release was developed over a span of about six months, by over a hundred contributors, Bitcoin Magazine reports.

The next release of the Bitcoin Core code (v.0.18.0) will have an important new feature that many users have been waiting for. As reported by CoinDesk, it will allow users with hardware wallets to connect to full nodes.

Bitcoin Core 0.16.1, a new minor version including new features and performance improvements, has been officially released, according to an announcement made on Friday, June 15.

Bitcoin Core developers have announced they activated CSV soft fork, which incluides BIP68, BIP113, and BIP112.

Bitcoin Core developers have announced they release the new version of Bitcoin network client numbered 0.12.1. The release features a new mechanism of soft-fork deployment BIP9, which in turn activates proposals BIP68, BIP112, and BIP113. More About the BIPs BIP68 allows miners to prohibit a transaction until a specified moment in time or until the transaction […]

China-based F2Pool, the world’s second largest miner in terms of capacity, confirmed it rejected the original idea of supporting Bitcoin Classic as a possible solution for block size scaling, and stuck with Bitcoin Core. The same decision was made by another Chinese miner HaoBTC. Its spokespersons state Chinese miners mostly side with Bitcoin Core. The […]

Former Bitcoin Core developer and one of bitcoin’s earliest adopters Mike Hearn stated he abandoned digital currency ecosystem as it suffers from a massive crisis.

The notorious block size debate is about to gain yet another dimension following the release of a “road map” conceptualized by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell.

Crypto investors now have one more reason to be optimistic of the future after U.S.-based provider of  investment data Weiss Ratings for the first time in the firm’s history has upgraded the score of Bitcoin to a solid A- grade.

Former developer of Bitcoin Core, and current employee of R3CEV, Mike Hearn reminded the community he’s still alive having claimed that main problems that the cryptocurrency faces are in fact caused by Blockstream, and its co-founder Gregory Maxwell personally.

Yesterday, anonymous attackers hacked Twitter accounts of Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Uber, Apple, and many others. They used these accounts to post fraudulent messages promoting the distribution of 5,000 BTC on behalf of a rogue site Cryptoforhealth.

Now a world-class developer living in Silicon Valley, NEAR co-founder Alexander Skidanov went a long way from a young programming-inclined student from Izhevsk, Russia.

In May, North Korean hacker group Lazarus transferred 2,549 Bitcoins (BTC), or approximately $23.2 million, to two mixing services, ChipMixer and Wasabi, in a bid to cover their tracks. The team behind OXT Research, a company that conducts in-depth research and analysis of the Bitcoin network, de-anonymized the group through both mixers and set forth […]

The team behind the ZenGo crypto-currency wallet found a design flaw in several competing Bitcoin wallets allowing attackers to trick the software by sending and undoing transactions via the Replace-By-Fee feature.

The upcoming launch of Stacks 2.0, the major protocol release that will allow blockchain developers and miners to participate in the deployment of an innovative new consensus mechanism, dubbed Proof of Transfer (PoX), is arguably the biggest milestone so far for the New York-based Blockstack.

In an exclusive interview with ForkLog, the co-founder of Tendermint and Cosmos Ethan Buchman reveals why he sees the future of the crypto-economy in Proof-of-Stake systems. And that despite him betting long on Bitcoin.

Amidst the unstable economic situation and uncertainty in the financial markets worldwide, financial safety should get lots of attention. Although, it’s much better to think about a rainy day in advance.

A Chinese pyramid scheme called PlusToken has managed to gain notoriety as a significant factor influencing Bitcoin’s price. Just recently, a hefty bunch of 11,999 BTC from its wallet started moving, putting the watchful members of the community on high alert: an en masse sell-off of this much Bitcoin wouldn’t be a good thing for […]

Back in 2012, the FBI defined Bitcoin as a decentralized peer-to-peer network-based virtual currency. But even though Bitcoin is undoubtedly p2p, network-based, and virtual, there had been varying opinions on just how decentralized it actually is.

There are certain polarizing topics in the cryptocurrency community: which of Bitcoin forks is the true Bitcoin, what consensus algorithms are really viable, what coins will dominate the markets of the future. 

Full nodes are the backbone of the Bitcoin ecosystem. They verify transactions, but also maintain decentralization and users’ confidentiality. Yet, there is no direct monetary incentive for running a full node, which has its costs and risks. In this feature, we take a look at the existing non-monetary incentives to set up and run a […]

Schnorr and Taproot soft forks are now official and likely to be activated soon. Both are aimed at increasing Bitcoin’s scalability and privacy of users. The numbers of their respective Bitcoin improvement proposals are BIP-340, BIP-341, and BIP-342.

Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin Core developer, Bitcoin maximalist, entrepreneur, and quite a famous person in the crypto-community. 

According to a May study by The Block, 42 large cryptocurrency exchanges have been compromised since 2012, not taking smaller platforms into account. The total amount of stolen funds exceeded $1.35 billion, with about 59% of these funds (795.5 million) being stolen in 2018.

So, 2019 is no more. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. It was the 10th anniversary of the crypto industry. There were ups and downs, unfulfilled prophecies, mutual criticism, and lots of speculations. In a word, nothing unusual.

The recently appointed CEO of Bitcoin.com Stefan Rust learned about Bitcoin in 2012, when a developer from Guatemala asked him to pay in BTC. Unlike many early adopters, Rust didn’t think it was a nonsense at the time.

The inaugural Magical Crypto Conference is set to take place on May 11-12, 2019, in New York City, promising an incredibly impressive gathering of Bitcoin entrepreneurs, software developers, and influential crypto Twitter personalities.

A recently released report on developer activity around cryptocurrency projects reveals interesting patterns about crypto networks’ environments.

Chinese crypto mining giant Bitmain confirmed the restructuring of the company in order to “build a long-term, sustainable and scalable business.”

Officially launched on October 31, 2018, the 10th anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, Wasabi Wallet is an open source, non-custodial, privacy focused Bitcoin wallet, which implements the technology known as Chaumian CoinJoin, a trustless coin shuffling with mathematically provable anonymity.

Dr. Pieter Wuille, co-founder of Blockstream and one of the most prolific Bitcoin Core developers, announced on Monday a new open-source project that will focus on making improvements to “BTC transaction relay.”

Slush Pool is one of those names in Bitcoin industry which, as it might seem, has been around forever. Based in Prague, Czech Republic, it was launched back in 2010 and not only was the very first mining pool in existence, but also paved the way for plethora of other pools, essentially laying the foundation […]

Entrepreneur, developer and educator, Jimmy Song is a well-known figure in Bitcoin community. Former principal architect at blockchain firn Paxos and VP of engineering at wallet management platform Armory Technologies, today he runs a training company called Programming Blockchain, that provides blockchain programming and development training, and also acts as a venture partner at Blockchain […]

What is the nature of privacy? Is it our basic right or a privilege? If it is our fundamental freedom, do we have to fight for it? That is the question. Most people prefer easy options to avoid such crucial fights. For years it was only cypherpunks who have tried to develop technologies which could […]

The price of Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency my market cap, fell dramatically on Saturday night breaching the $200 price level for the first time since July 2017. Over the last 24 hours ETH lost over 12 per cent and more than 35 per cent over the last seven days showing the worst performance among […]

Litecoin Core’s latest update v.0.16.2 has officially come out today, September 8. This is a new minor version release which includes new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.

Despite the deep correction the cryptocurrency market has suffered throughout 2018, its capitalization is still holding above $200 billion while leading exchanges are securing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars every day and institutional investors are looking for a better infrastructure around the industry to take part in the revolution.

While the crypto market keeps on moving down, it becomes even harder to convince unfortunate retail investors that there is a real value in Bitcoin and its underlying technology.

As the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining company Bitmain Technologies is filing for an initial public offering (IPO) hoping to raise $18 billion on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at a market capitalization of $40 to $50 billion, observers are already sending potential red flags to the investors.

A team of Bitcoin engineers has announced the launch of the Bitcoin Operations Technology Group (Bitcoin Optech) addressing the problem of Bitcoin’s scalability, according to their statement published July 20.

Formerly known as Rootstock, RSK Labs is an Argentinian startup building the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin that also rewards the miners through merge-mining.

Recalling some of the last year’s events, Erik Voorhees says the community is already deeply split and, unfortunately, there were no winners in the stand-off between the Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash proponents.

The Bitcoin Foundation is a group of industry insiders with the stated goals of funding Bitcoin infrastructure and promoting it to the public. This helped the Foundation to make over $350,000 from membership dues last year alone as multiple Bitcoin-related startups and paying members believe they’re helping to improve Bitcoin through the Foundation.

The bitcoin community is growing fast, and so does the scaling problem. As Bitfinex and Coinbase added support for Segregated Witness, bitcoin network capabilities remain limited – thousands of unconfirmed transactions are often stuck when there is a new flow of interested users.

Sweden-based bitcoin startup Bitrefill focused on topping up mobile phone accounts and selling gift cards has garnered some attention from the community in the recent months after implementing some innovative solutions.

The group of Mybtgwallet scam victims has been negotiating refund of $5 million stolen in users funds with the Bitcoin Gold team for the past month. As the talks are stalled, there is no way for victims but to sue the core team members.

SegWit2x, a Bitcoin hardfork expected to become effective this November, is among the most talked-about and somewhat disputable matters in the community. ForkLog talked with Dr. Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream and one of the world’s leading Bitcoin developers, to find out what’s that dangerous about it, and how to prepare yourself for that.

Summer 2017 was hot in every sense of the word. Aside from the drama that resolved with bitcoin hardforking into two, there were several major conferences and other events like Hyperledger Hackfest in Odessa DataArt center. There, renowned speakers shared their experience of work in blockchain projects, and held several coding practice sessions.

SegWit might be one of the burning issues concerning Bitcoin’s scaling up, however, it has gone beyond the first cryptocurrency.

This March proved exuberant of drama for the entire cryptocurrency community. First, the Winklevoss failed to obtain SEC approval for their ETF, then some altcoins rushed upwards, and all that against the background of fierce discussions concerning well-planned media attacks by both sides of the Unlimited/Core conflict. This feature discusses some important issues of the […]

A team of coders from Imperial College London and Cornell University has come up with a brand new solution for bitcoin network scalability, which uses trusted execution environment in the components of secure hardware.

Rumors of Ukraine’s largest commercial bank PrivatBank inevitable nationalization have been circulating for a long time. One may only guess whether the new record set at Ukraine’s LocalBitcoins last week has anything to do with that; however, the USD exchange rate in Ukraine definitely has, as millions of the bank’s clients rushed to convert their […]

Several weeks ago, ForkLog announced a readers poll, with 1,038 users participating. Our editorial board has summarized the readers’ answers, so that everyone could decide for themselves as to the degree of cryptocurrency integration in our lives.

Andrew Poelstra of Blockstream has presented a new Bitcoin network scalability solution dubbed Mimblewimble on the first day of Scaling Bitcoin conference in Milan.

Recently founded start-up bitcoin-based browser Brave already drew the attention of the media with raising a huge funding from leading venture capital firms and angel investors. The Brave team claims the browser to be more user-friendly in terms of safety, privacy and, the issue they mostly focus on, advertising.

Abrupt plunging of bitcoin price in the wake of a ruthless attack by an equally ruthless hacker who had stolen nearly 120,000 BTC from Bitfinex has surprisingly benefited the cryptocurrency in a way.

Bitcoin price has been moving downwards for two weeks already. On Tuesday, August 2, it plunged down to $595 for a short while. However, at press time bitcoin price has already rebounded to 602.51 USD.

Bitcoin donations platform BitHope.org has posted a petition urging people to donate to Edward Snowden.

The week after bitcoin mining reward halving, ForkLog decided to compile a short overview on the history of mining methods.

Gender differentiation today looks outdated and uncourteous in today’s society, not because there are no differences of that kind, but because depriving people on that basis is a mere nineteenth century. Some people just tend to discriminate others, but they’re inconsistent, and choose the most illogical concepts from the bunch of coal-and-steam ideas, even though they […]

Reward halving is about to happen in less than hour, and the community gets oversaturated with the opinions as to what will happen to bitcoin price and the cryptocurrency itself once it occurs. Still, halving isn’t the only thing capable of seriously impacting bitcoin price. ForkLog brought together all anticipated events that will definitely have […]

Bitcoin scalability debate gained steam as 8btc.com published details of the Bitcoin Classic implementation proposal discussed by miners of China.

June 8, Ruben De Vries, one of developers of decentralized finance tools platform Counterparty has announced that testing the company’s new protocol for smart contracts, EVMParty, has successfully kicked off.

Bitcoin Foundation has been an easy target for criticism and comparisons to defunct red tape entities and failed states. Last year, it has gone through a series of ordeals, including exodus of several board members and realization that it will have run out of money by this March.

Bruce Fenton, CEO at Bitcoin Foundation, attempted to shed some sunlight on myths around Bitcoin in an interview with RT. He stated that most problems associated with the system are a consequence of poor knowledge of cryptocurrency in general. Speaking about notorious exodus of Mike Hearn, and addressing his statements of bitcoin’s demise, Fenton said: “I […]

Australian Craig Wright, who has recently claimed he is Satoshi Nakamoto, promised to provide additional evidence thereof. In particular, he stated he intends to effect a transaction from one of the first bitcoin addresses.

Bitcoin’s new price achievement, important news from the industry’s stakeholders, novelties at exchanges and platforms, blockchain’s continuing development, regulation news and many other things – covered in ForkLog’s weekly overview. Bitcoin Price Bitcoin continued ascending this week, and reached this year’s highest mark at $470.16 on Tuesday, April 26. However, significant fluctuations followed the peak, […]

ForkLog continues exploring cryptocurrency worlds of different countries. Earlier we took a close look at bitcoin’s stance in Bulgaria and Finland. Today we decided to explore one of the Baltic states, Estonia. There are not too many news concerning blockchain and cryptocurrencies coming from Estonia; however, the country has its own bitcoin community as well […]

Bitcoin price growing, new investments in the industry, ambitious statements on practical application of blockchain technology – all highlights of crypto-industry’s week presented in ForkLog’s weekly overview.

Mastermind and lead developer of Dash, Evan Duffield, was among the participants of Satoshi Rountable discussing current problems bitcoin industry faces. Following the event, Evan stated that Dash, as opposed to Bitcoin, has no scalability problem.

Last month has been quite fruitful with events being held with a single aim to reach an industry-wide consensus on Bitcoin network scaling. Bitfury Group, the world’s leading Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company, initiated the first Bitcoin Consensus Roundtable back in January, with two other meetings to follow later. The second Roundtable, […]

A few days ago, Bankir.ru published an interesting feature by Corezoid founder and PrivatBank’s e-business center head, Alexander Vityaz. His predictions stating that VISA, not Bitcoin or blockchain technology, will eventually destroy the banking system, have gone viral across media and social networks. ForkLog talked with Alexander to make things clearer. FL: In your feature, […]

Following an 18 hour-long meeting in Hong Kong, a group of miners representing nearly 80% of the network’s hash power, alongside with representatives of several prominent exchanges, issued a timeline for introducing a hard-fork solution.

After the last week’s bitcoin roundtable, where some of the most prominent figures of the industry have gathered to discuss possible solutions to the drawn out block size dispute, some thought the resulting letter was making an offer the developers wouldn’t refuse. As a reminder, last week, representatives for several mining pools collectively holding at […]

Mining pools collectively holding at least 70% of the whole bitcoin network’s hash power sided with two large bitcoin exchanges in a so-called “call for consensus”. The call in question was compiled following the roundtable where the attendees agreed not to support Bitcoin Classic or any other hard-fork they call “contentious”. This move may propel […]

The first version of Bitcoin Classic fork, which implies twofold increase of block size, from current 1 MB to 2 MB, is released. The initial code of Bitcoin Classic 0.11.2 was posted on Github by Bitcoin developer, Gavin Andresen, on February 9. The version is numbered 0.11.2, however, this only means it’s compatible with Bitcoin […]

It’s not a secret that China is bitcoin world’s leader in many regards. Since the major cryptocurrency glut in 2013, Chinese companies started getting increasingly involved in virtual money, including mining and various financial services. Currently there are about 20 major companies involved in cryptocurrency operations, with about 800,000 customer base, not to mention smaller […]

The continuing block size debate has entered a new phase following the announcement by Antpool concerning its forthcoming test run of Bitcoin Classic, which is considered one of possible solutions to the problem. Jihan Wu, CEO at Antminer, tweeted: Antpool will start to test Classic soon. There is 7day long holidays ahead, so it's likely […]

The recent surge in Bitcoin price amidst stock exchange turmoil and capital outflows from China has been brusquely interrupted by the new round of Bitcoin scalability dispute. Providing that neither the current Bitcoin Core team nor Bitcoin NXT can find a middle ground, the bullying of each opinion group finally resulted in a somewhat hysterical […]

A few years ago, I went to see a shrink. She taught me a pretty simple technique to get down to the bedrock of my problems. The technique is indeed a piece of cake, and anyone may use it. You just have to keep asking yourself “why so?” One time is not enough. Those experienced […]

Blockchain’s disruptive potential is omitted solely in yellow publications, and the last company to proclaim its intention to integrate the technology in its services will probably become the stone-age Russian Post. International banks unite under major consortiums, startuppers prowl for opportunities to implement blockchain in yet another app, while venture capitalists headhunt for prospective developers. […]

Surprisingly for many bitcoin community members, Jonathan Toomim’s Bitcoin Classic proposal has garnered support from as much as 72% of the network’s mining capacity. With the consensus threshold set at 75%, the proposal is very likely to become active in no time.

When Mike Hearn buried bitcoin, its exchange rate immediately went down, as if you’re dead, you indeed should keep close to the ground. Lots of prominent cryptocurrency industry figures snapped into writing lots of texts, both long or laconic, stating that rumors about bitcoin’s death are somewhat exaggerated. Website titled “Bitcoin Obituaries” so far contains […]

Sanne Kiljan, 23, a Dutch psychology student and an active bitcoiner holds a research project on broad acceptance of bitcoin in order to graduate as a bachelor of psychology at his university in Eindhoven, Netherlands. According to the press-release to the project, it seeks to investigate – using a quantitative methodology – various factors influencing […]

Two prominent Bitcoin Core contributors, Jeff Garzik and Gavin Andressen, co-wrote a response to the recently published bitcoin scalability roadmap by Gregory Maxwell, which is based on the SegWit concept.

Dmitri Donets, deputy chairman of e-business center at PrivatBank presented an extended speech on the bank’s cryptocurrency-related intents at Blockchain Conference Kyiv.

1 How do I choose a bitcoin wallet? You will need a wallet to work with bitcoin: it’s impossible to send or receive cryptocurrency without it. First of all, you have to know for which purpose you are going to use bitcoin. Your aims will dictate the type of wallet you choose. 2 What types […]

Special Read in Russian Unknown developers published a report on two new malware items capable of introducing dramatic amendments into Bitcoin mining on infected computers. As opposed to their counterparts, those malware programs are made in quite an exquisite way and remain almost invisible to a victim.

Emin Gün Sirer, associate professor of computer science at Cornell University and an early proponent of Bitcoin, is known as the creator of several important scaling solutions, including Bitcoin-NG.

Ubiquitous and private corporate money. Isn’t it a scary concept, no matter where you lean on the political spectrum? The very phenomenon of Libra is somewhat underrated in the media, but it is possible that the ramifications of Libra going live will exceed our expectations.

“I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin [Andresen] and everyone” — this message was sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to a developer Mike Hearn on April 23rd, 2011. It is considered to be the last or one of the last confirmed contacts with the creator of Bitcoin before his, her, or […]

“I’ve been doing software engineering for a very long time all the way back to the middle school or maybe even earlier, so it’s hard to remember”, says renowned speed typist and Bitcoin Core contributor Bryan Bishop.

Privacy-oriented Bitcoin mobile wallet Samourai has announced release of a general update, bringing a fresh look and new user interface.

Emercoin blockchain developers have released 16 updates including support of Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocol. Also a new Emercoin wallet version has been released to match the new rules of the blockchain and dSDKs.

1 What is Segregated Witness? Segregated Witness or SegWit is a protocol update developed by Bitcoin Core team. SegWit’s mission is to optimize the Bitcoin block structure which can be a solution to the long-standing issues of network scalability, block overflow, transaction speed, and commission size. In other words, SegWit improves Bitcoin blockchain’s efficiency without […]

Some anthropologists believe consensus is a universal decision-making system inherent in primitive societies where people struggled for survival and inclined towards equal partnership.

It’s been almost six months since the fateful Ethereum hardfork that followed notorious The DAO attack. The turmoil around the fork has subsided since then, so now it’s high time to calmly assess the situation and take a closer look at Ethereum Classic.

Hong Kong-based exchange Bitfinex has stated that the losses incurred due to the recent hack may affect all of its users, including those whose wallets were not hacked in the first place.

Litecoin Association has published a roadmap for Litecoin’s further evolution, which includes, among other things, new client software, enhanced protocol, and consolidation of various management and communication structures.