BTCPay Server has come a long way since Nicolas Dorier first decided to build out a software project with the goal of obsoleting the payment processor BitPay in response to their actions during the 2017 Blocksize Wars. It has blossomed since then into one of, if not the, most widely …

Casey Rodamor, the creator of the Ordinals protocol and reference implementation, recently dropped a proposal for a replacement to the BRC-20 fungible token protocol: Runes. It took roughly seven hours before basic implementations were live and people were minting tokens. They didn’t draw from a specification, or a concrete design, …

Shinobi’s Strawman is a weekly series where our Technical Editor Shinobi challenges the Bitcoin community, aiming to stir up conversation around heated technical debates. ______________________________________________________________ It’s been two years since the last upgrade to Bitcoin, Taproot, activated and went live on the network. Since then there has been a proliferation …

Many people these days are finally starting to realize the shortcomings and limitations of off-chain channels limited to two participants, i.e. the Lightning Network, and the necessity to start exploring designs for channels with more than two participants for this direction in scaling to work successfully in the long term. …

UTXOracle is a simple Python script [Attention: direct download link] that takes advantage of a surprising fact about the Bitcoin blockchain – by parsing on-chain data it’s possible to derive an approximate U.S. dollar price. A graph of UTXO creation over time. Source: utxo.live All of this is based on …

Shinobi’s Strawman is a weekly series where our Technical Editor Shinobi challenges the Bitcoin community, aiming to stir up conversation around heated technical debates. _________________________________________________________________ Here is part two of the experiment. Last week I published a short prompt challenging readers to respond with their own defense or criticism of …

 This is an extension to my previous article series discussing the different sidechain proposals that exist. Those articles can be found here: Spacechains, Spacechain Use Cases, Softchains, Drivechains, Federated Chains, and Trade Offs Of Sidechains. Botanix Labs has proposed a completely new sidechain design recently, called spiderchains, for the purposes …

Shinobi’s Strawman is a weekly series where our Technical Editor Shinobi challenges the Bitcoin community, aiming to stir up conversation around heated technical debates. ______________________________________________________________ We are going to try something of an experiment today. Drivechains are being proclaimed by some as the savior of Bitcoin, the answer to all …

Despite a nice few months this summer after Burak, infamous slayer of the Lightning Network, dropped his proposal for the new second layer protocol Ark where people had a lot of discussion around different covenant proposals, drivechains are once again becoming a dominant topic of discussion. There are a large …

Using zero-knowledge proofs, ZeroSync seeks to radically reduce the computational costs of bootstrapping a fully-validating Bitcoin client. This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are something that have been discussed in this space for over …

Nostr, a rising hub for the Bitcoin neighborhood, faces some incentives challenges if it’s going to achieve vital scale. That is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator within the Bitcoin house and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host. I’ve written an article on the basics of what Nostr is and …

This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host. I suggest, before reading this, that you read the prior article I wrote explaining what Nostr is and how it works at a high level. You should then have a good …