Full nodes are an indispensable part of Bitcoin’s system of checks and balances. They further decentralize the network, they keep miners honest, they verify and register every transaction that takes place on the blockchain, and they provide more autonomy and privacy to users. In order to run a full Bitcoin node, it’s enough to download…
As a fervent bitcoin enthusiast, I frequently come across the following objection: In contrast to physical, analog things, bitcoin and similar crypto assets are completely virtual and digital. As such, they are neither tangible nor graspable and would thus lack any real basis of value. Because of their digital nature, many people still object to…
In this episode of the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, Dave Hollerith talks with Kiara Bickers, author of Bitcoin Clarity: A Guide to Understanding Bitcoin. Bitcoin Clarity is different from other Bitcoin guides because it leverages a “systems thinking” approach to explain how and why each part of Bitcoin’s system has evolved into what it is today.…
Since 2013, one of the ongoing conversations between U.S. regulators and digital asset market participants has been the attempt to get a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) approved. By my count, there have been 24 ETF application listings filed, with all but one either rejected by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or withdrawn (the United…
Bitcoin enjoyed a near 100 percent price gain over the course of 2019, but it otherwise had a tame year to round out the decade. 2019 was also the year that bitcoin’s price movements broke away from the rest of the cryptocurrency pack — and it continued to present itself as an uncorrelated hedge to…
Bitcoin’s consensus layer has remained unchanged for over two years now. Since Segregated Witness (SegWit), which activated in August 2017, no hard fork or soft fork protocol upgrades have been deployed at all*, marking Bitcoin’s longest stretch without consensus forks so far. But this stretch may soon come to an end: several backward-compatible soft forks…
On January 3, 2009, the pseudonymous developer(s) Satoshi Nakamoto bootstrapped the Bitcoin network by mining its first ever block, block 0. The Genesis Block, as it has become known, came etched with a message that would invariably position Bitcoin as an alternative monetary system to rival the realm of central banking: “Chancellor on brink of…
India has been one of the most notable emerging economies in the world in the last few decades. It currently stands at seventh place with a nominal GDP of $2.72 trillion and it is expected to overtake the United Kingdom in years to come. India’s PM Narendra Modi envisioned a dream of making India a…
Ever since he read the Denationalization of Money by Friedrich Hayek in college, Alex Leishman, the co-founder and CEO of River Financial, had been on the search for an alternative currency. The aerospace engineer major turned amateur Austrian economist wanted to build a financial institution around this yet-to-be-found, nongovernment-issued money. Leishman thought the banking-free option…
As protests have turned to civil insurrection in the South American Republic of Chile, the relatively new Bitcoin space in the nation has been rising to meet the occasion. Making headlines in October 2019 with a fare-dodging campaign in the country’s capital, Santiago, dissatisfaction with the country’s government quickly escalated to involve the widespread barricading…