Get ready, brace yourself. Reading this might enrage and confound you, it might confuse you, you might even get mad enough to punch your screen (don’t do that.) Consider this a trigger warning. Bitcoin is a database. Period. That is what it is. The blockchain is a database for storing …

From an economic standpoint, Jevon’s Paradox is arguably the foundation of the scaling road we have started walking down for Bitcoin. Pushing things off-chain is attempting to make the use of the scarce resource that blockspace is much more efficient to accommodate a materially larger user base than the blockchain …

CommerceBlock is releasing Mercury Layer today, an improved version of their variation of a statechain. You can read a longer form explanation of how their Mercury statechains work here. The upgrade to Mercury Layer represents a massive improvement against the initial statechain implementation, however unlike the initial Mercury Wallet release, …

I have a feeling that I am going to be writing a lot on this topic in general for the foreseeable future, but the philosophical and existential crisis currently confronting the Bitcoin space over what constitutes “spam” is starting to have massive second order effects and consequences in all of …

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Primary Issue”. Click here to get your Annual Bitcoin Magazine Subscription. Click here to download a PDF of this article. On November 6, 2012, Washington and Colorado became the first two states in the United States of America to legalize the recreational …

Yesterday the Human Rights Foundation announced a wave of new grants for a diverse range of projects. I want to focus on one specific project and grant: Braidpool, and the grant Kulpreet Singh received to continue his work on actually implementing it. The last few weeks have been dominated by …

Well, let’s just say the launch of Ocean from the social perspective was anything but smooth. The decision to filter out transactions conducting inscriptions should have been communicated clearly on launch day, instead speculation lead to a chaotic shitshow on Twitter. People were screaming about inscription censorship, while at the …

The recent decision by Wallet of Satoshi to stop serving customers in the United States brings us to a crossroads in the evolution of Lightning’s use as a consumer tool. While it is trusted and custodial, Wallet of Satoshi has been invaluable in giving casual users a functional and reliable …

Lightning is doomed. High fees from Ordinals have killed all hope of scaling Bitcoin non-custodially, there is no chance at all that people will be able to cost effectively open channels or enforce hung payments on-chain when necessary. It’s all over, pack it all up guys. Time to start shopping …

Atomically purchasing digital files with digital currency is an idea that has a long history in this space. Digital goods, digital money, the two seem like a perfect pairing together. Digital goods, i.e. information, are also massive markets. Think about all the video, audio, text, games, and other forms of …

BitTorrent has been around for 22 years as of this year. In many ways it is a technology protocol almost as big as Bitcoin in the scope of how it changed the game of moving data around the internet. If Bitcoin is the money for sending money around when people …

I have written quite a bit about my concerns regarding drivechains and miner incentives over the years, because I think it is a very important set of risks to be aware of. Bitcoin is almost 15 years old as a live network at this point, and it has stood up …