Last week Paypal released a whitepaper in partnership with Energy Web and DMG Blockchain Solutions, describing a “Green Mining Initiative” intended to redirect fees from participating users specifically to certified miners powering their operations with renewable energy. I can’t say I’m surprised by this honestly, mining has at this point …

An announcement was put out today by the Justice Department that Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill had been arrested and charged with operating Samourai Wallet, “an unlicensed money transmitting business” that executed “unlawful transactions.” Fuck the Justice department, full stop. At no point did Samourai custody user funds, have control …

The world is becoming an increasingly unstable place politically and economically speaking. Many people all over the world are currently living somewhere presenting serious risks to their livelihood and well being, everything from totalitarian and persecutory governments to the general state of the economy deteriorating so badly that their ability …

Taproot Wizards released a cartoon yesterday called CatVM. I will not refer to it as a whitepaper, those are real academic documents for adults. In the cartoon, interspersed amongst the absurd childish narratives, were a few valuable technical insights regarding different scaling proposals in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Of course, in …

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Inscription Issue”. Click here to get your Annual Bitcoin Magazine Subscription. Click here to download a PDF of this article. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the cringiest of them all? Is it the JPEG People? Or is it the Laser-Eyed Maxis? …

BitVM has recently come under some scrutiny after the Taproot Wizards, Tyler and Rijndael, posted their criticism of the liquidity requirements imposed on the operator of a BitVM based two-way peg. In all the recent discussions around BitVM based layer two solutions, I had taken for granted that people discussing …

Last October Robin Linus from Zerosync dropped a bit of a bomb in the form of BitVM. One of the longest running criticisms of Bitcoin is that it is not possible to make arbitrary programs to control how money is spent or locked. Bitcoin only has a very limited amount …

The blockchain truly is a marvelous piece of technology. A mechanism to timestamp the order of digital information without needing to depend on a centralized operator. A decentralized mechanism with no one in charge, that provides undeniably cryptographic guarantees around what data was added to the temporal record in what …

Commerceblock has released a new atomic swap protocol for use with statechains on their Mercury Layer protocol. The HSM server has introduced functionality to support atomically swapping two statechains, as well as enforcing an atomic exchange of a statechain for a Lightning payment. This is the first example of concretely …

The bedrock of Bitcoin self-sovereignty is having control over your private keys. Without this, in one way or another, you are relinquishing control of your money to someone else. “Not your keys, not your coins” as the saying goes. A counter-intuitive aspect of Bitcoin for people who aren’t familiar with …

Marathon yesterday announced their Anduro layer two proposal. While there aren’t really any fundamentally new pieces or developments in the Anduro design, they do compose in slightly different ways compared to other existing sidechain systems such as RSK or Liquid/Elements. Anduro is a federated model that makes use of a …

The current EIA Emergency Cryptocurrency Mining Facilities survey held by injunction would require monthly reporting of information from mining facility operators through July 31, 2024. This survey would require the collection of information such as the power price with the power provider, the amount of electricity available under their purchase …