This is an outrageous post title: of course Bitcoin is better money than the Solana meme coin ‘Bonk’, right? Well, maybe, but also maybe not. What is money? What should money be? Money in the modern era should be digital, almost free to transact (preferably free to send and receive), able to scale to millions […]
Category: Bitcoin
All articles in the category of “Bitcoin”:
If Bitcoin were to replace the US dollar as a global currency, it would likely have significant economic and geopolitical implications. However, it’s important to note that such a scenario is highly speculative and uncertain. If it were to happen, the US government and financial institutions might respond in several ways, including: It’s crucial to […]
The development and updates of the Lightning Network are typically decided upon through a collaborative and open-source process involving multiple contributors and developers from the broader Bitcoin and Lightning community. There is no single central authority that makes these decisions. Key decisions regarding the Lightning Network often involve: Ultimately, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin and […]
Approximately 6.25 new bitcoins are mined every 10 minutes (see note on the ‘bitcoin halving cycle’ below), which equates to approximately 900 new bitcoins per day. This roughly translates to around 328,500 bitcoins per year. As of October 2023, one bitcoin is worth approximately $28,000, so doing the math: = 328,500 × $28,000 = $9,184,000,000 […]
The size of the entire Bitcoin blockchain grows at a pace of approximately one additional megabyte of data (known as a block) every ten minutes (and has done since it began way back in 2009) — making it (so far) approximately 500GB in size (so half a terabyte, i.e. 0.5TB). The 1MB block size allows […]
Trying to find out how big the entire Bitcoin blockchain (also known as the Bitcoin ‘ledger’) is? The size of the entire Bitcoin blockchain grows at a pace of approximately one additional megabyte (MB) every ten minutes (and has done since it began way back in 2009). As of August 2023 it is a pretty […]
There are about 900 brand new bitcoins mined/created per day. There are about 7 billion people on Earth. So splitting all 900 new bitcoins equally, allocating an equal share of all of these to everyone on Earth each day, would result in 900/7,000,000,000 bitcoins = about 0.00000012857 bitcoins per person. A bitcoin is divisible by […]
There’s this question I keep coming back to: “If Bitcoin had been able to match Visa’s transactions per second from the start, what would its value be now, today?” Bitcoin can handle about 7 transactions per second. For comparison, Visa can handle somewhere in the region of up to about 25,000 transactions per second. Clearly […]
Whilst going through hundreds of emails and forum posts written by Satoshi Nakamoto (all of which are documented for posterity at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute), one particular correspondance I came across stopped me in my tracks. Why? Because it — an email written by Satoshi himself no less — talks about scaling Bitcoin (a topic […]
Have you ever wondered how proof of work (the mechanism by which new blocks are added to Bitcoin – a.k.a ‘mining’) solves the Byzantine Generals Problem? Well, who better to try to explain this than the creator of Bitcoin himself: Satoshi Nakamoto. Interestingly, everything Satoshi Nakamoto wrote is recorded for posterity on a website called […]
There’s a lot to appreciate looking back at all the various things Satoshi Nakamoto (the creator of Bitcoin) wrote in emails, mailing lists, and forums (and boy did he write quite a bit). If you happen to already understand Bitcoin you’ll quickly see some of the early-thinking-brilliance of Satoshi in many of the below quotes, […]
Bitcoin went live on January 3, 2009. This was the day that Satoshi Nakamoto generated the first Bitcoin block, in which he encoded the message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” -taken from the title of an article on the front page of one of London’s best-known daily newspapers: The […]
Let’s explore Bitcoin priced in gold (all prices as of August 2023). The entire market cap of Bitcoin is currently roughly 570 billion US dollars (i.e. over half a trillion US dollars). At current market prices, one kg of gold is approximately $60,000, giving us one metric tonne of gold having a price of approximately […]
An ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) is a fund, held by a custodial/manager (such as BlackRock), that can be traded like a stock. A Bitcoin ETF would be a fund that holds Bitcoin and then sells shares in this fund that represent the price of Bitcoin, which can then be traded on traditional stock markets. Someone […]
Every ten minutes Bitcoin adds a new block to its blockchain. Every new block is approximately 1MB in size (meaning every ten minutes the entire blockchain grows by approximately 1MB in overall size). Each of these blocks contains on average roughly 2,000 bitcoin transaction, and every new block that is mined carries a reward of […]
“Can you define ‘blockchain’? I think a few people in this room could define blockchain, but the real challenge would be can you define ‘blockchain’ in such a way that I can’t do search and replace with the word ‘database’ and still make that sentence work.” -Andreas Antonopolous, in the YouTube video ‘Blockchain vs. Bullshit: […]
‘Bitcoin’ (with a capital B) refers to the concept of Bitcoin, i.e. to the technology itself, the protocol, community, or the network. And ‘bitcoin’ (with a lowercase b) refers to bitcoin as a unit of currency. Let’s take a look at some examples of each: Examples of Bitcoin with an uppercase B: “I first heard […]