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
I expect this is going to be a very fun and interesting thing to watch over the next few years. Because crypto/Bitcoin prices have long decoupled from any connection to adoption or underlying usefulness, prices are now determined by rumors about what big players (like the USG) are doing.
I made the decision to do a thing this upcoming quarter; No tech for 12 hours a day, broken up into three hour intervals. I made the decision to do this towards the end of Fall quarter, after spending entire days at the computer, and spending weeks without getting any
The United States throwing its weight behind Bitcoin would effect a massive shift in the game theory underpinning Bitcoin, but probably not in the way you think. Bitcoin's decentralized consensus mechanism works based on some cleverly crafted incentive structures. The first and fundamental rule is that the chain
By the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 5302 of title 31, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose As global finance increasingly integrates digital assets and
Rob Warren (no relation, AFAIK) recently posted a video on Twitter responding to some of my security budget FUD. It's a good video. (Elon has been trying to play hardball with suppressing links, so I'm obviously going to do my part and not link his website.
Bitcoin price enthusiasts are often happy to tell you that the number of Bitcoins minted every year is declining exponentially, which they hope leads to a supply crunch. What they don't tell you is that this schedule also will choke the miners who provide security out of existence.
In July Senator Cynthia Lummis proposed the so-called BITCOIN Act which would establish a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve." Shortly after, Trump promised Bitcoin enthusiasts that he would create a "strategic national stockpile." Naturally, Bitcoin holders are rapturously elated: The USG buying Bitcoin represents massive exit liquidity at
I came across this piece today written by Sam Lyman https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/12/06/the-case-for-a-strategic-bitcoin-reserve/ It's pay-walled, but I'll quote the important parts. In summary, it's basically a concise version of Jason Lowery thesis: Once the entire world gets fully enraptured
While it bears some similarities, there are many reasons why it's not the same type of asset. First of all, if you want to say serious things about Bitcoin, you have to understand how it works. You can't just observe that other people are buying it.
No, the United States should not invest in a "strategic Bitcoin reserve" Bitcoin was created 16 years as an innovative solution to a decades old problem of how to create a decentralized cryptocurrency, a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" as the white paper described. The solution is
Bitcoin is cryptocurrency. This means that the underlying units, which are abstract, made-up units, are sent from one user to another via signed messages. These message cannot be forged unless you are the owner of the private key, which is essentially a very long password. The cryptography has been understood