September 13, 2019
Contents
This essay by Dhruv Bansal was published in Unchained blog.
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The desire to travel far away and start a new currency will become a powerful driver of human expansion into space.
Earth will run on bitcoin, but colonies on Mars, the outer planets, and distant stars will not. Though faraway colonies will value and trade bitcoin, they will choose to launch, defend and use their own local blockchains. This pattern of replication is an inevitable consequence of hyperbitcoinization and the physical limitations inherent to any blockchain that respects the finite speed of light.
...December 9, 2020
Contents
This essay by Dhruv Bansal was published in Unchained blog.
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This is Part II in a series of speculations about the hyperbitcoinized future. In Part I, we defined the First Law of Bitcoin Astronomy and described how it incentivizes searching for energy to power our growing civilization.
In this part, we continue to follow the energy and speculate about how money and society coevolve as humanity expands through space. We begin with a brief review of Part I.
...March 8, 2021
Contents
This essay by Dhruv Bansal was published in Unchained blog.
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This is Part III in a series of speculations about the hyperbitcoinized future. In Part I, we defined the First Law of Bitcoin Astronomy and described how it leads to new blockchains as humanity expands through the solar system. In Part II, we described a Second Law which leads to nested blockchains the size of solar systems and beyond, hashing vast energies on cosmic timescales.
...September 6, 2019
Contents
This article by Parker Lewis was first published in Unchained blog.
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December 28, 2017
Abstract
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In this piece, we list 19 Bitcoin consensus rule changes (or 18 as an accidental one “failed”), which represents what we believe to be almost every significant such event in Bitcoin’s history. At least three of these incidents resulted in an identifiable chainsplit, lasting approximately 51, 24, and six blocks, in 2010, 2013 and 2015, respectively.
This report was originaly published in BitMEX Research blog. Later it has been updated. The updated list now includes the 2018 security incident and the 2021 Taproot activation.
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July 28, 2015
This article by Arvind Narayanan was first published on Freedom to Tinker computer science blog.
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On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two. Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary competence of the developers in charge. The event gives us a never-before-never-again look into Bitcoin’s inner workings. In this post, I’ll do a play-by-play analysis of the dramatic minutes, and draw many surprising lessons. For a summary of the event, see here.
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