The publisher has asked me to write a version 2 to my textbook "Bitcoin: A Game-Theoretic Analysis" The table of contents is here Please let me know what's important to cover! Comment below would be great, or email me at my university address or protonmail (micahw
If you've been around Bitcoin long enough, you recall that Bitcoin's breakout moment was The Silk Road. Anonymous digital cash with which one can by drugs. That was back when Bitcoin was well under $100. There was no Microstrategy, BlackRock ETF, Chainalysis or Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
In March 2022, The What Bitcoin Did Podcast invited me down to Austin TX to record an episode. They knew just a little bit about me: they knew I was a mathematician and that I was a skeptic. When I arrived at the Airbnb in Austin to record the interview
You probably heard that Tesla shareholders approved a $1 Trillion pay package. That's not entirely correct, in fact the way that this has been reported is quite misleading; what they approved is a series of stock performance and productivity stairsteps designed to meme Tesla into the stratosphere. The
Suppose we want to keep CP out of the blockchain, and believe we can do that by capping OP_RETURN payload at 1000 bytes. (Yes, there's certainly Byzantine and tortuous methods you can invent that would allow you to, in theory, transfer information into the blockchain that could
According to my math, the difficulty adjustment that happened Sept 18, 2025 put the required number of hashes to expected to find one block to be 6.113568244e+23. Divide this by 600 (seconds per ten minutes) and we get a hashrate of 1.018928e+21 per second, that is
The latest internal controversy with Bitcoin surrounds the upcoming release of Bitcoin Core, v30, which will by default, relay transactions containing large amounts of data as OP_RETURN. For the non-experts: There's an option to put small amounts of data inside a Bitcoin transaction, using something called OP_
Is it reasonable to revisit the relationship with athletics with more of a hardball, Art-of-the-Deal type approach? We all understand the basic surface level explanations as to why they "don't owe us anything" (athletics is self-funding, donors gave to expressly to athletics, we should be thankful
For the last 16 years, Bitcoin has functioned as a decentralized payment system in which transactions are verified and recorded into a canonical blockchain by miners. Miners are paid (intrinsic to the protocol) for finding a block via the block reward, and by transaction fees. Extrinsic to the protocol, mining
I find myself leaning on this thought process when reasoning about people in power. I'm writing it up here as a clean statement. The Disappointing People Trilemma: Suppose that you repeatedly observe, and are disappointed by, the actions of people holding a certain office, serially over time or
A useful statistic to keep your eye on that combines the cumulative effects of the halvings and the increase in hash rate is the miner payout per hash (this is also known a "hashprice"). "Hashprice" indicates the amount that the bitcoin network pays miners for their
Recently, we've seen a rash of US states, and a few foreign nations supposedly toying with the idea of establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Up to 11 US states, according to a recent report. Bitcoin advocates are selling an arms-race-just-about-to-be-triggered narrative: many states will be racing to get