Here is a roundup of curiosities, news, information and explanations in convenient "pills", in no particular order, that all bitcoiners should know, but that too few know. If you are a novice diver, but also the most experienced will find many curiosities that they were not aware of!
At the peak of Bitcoin's price in December 2017, the computing power of the network was 15 exahashes per second. Despite the bear market phase, the computational power has continuously grown and today it reaches 50 exahashes per second. The investment behind the Bitcoin blockchain and which guarantees its security has therefore more than tripled despite the fall in prices.
MtGox accounted for 70% of global cryptocurrency trading volumes in 2014. Today the exchange with the highest volumes of exchange in dollars is Bitfinex (32% of world volumes) followed by COINBASE (21%) and Bitstamp (18%). In euros it is Kraken (50%) followed by Coinbase (15%) and Bistamp (14%)
At the collapse of the MtGox exchange, some Core developers also had an account on the platform and suffered huge losses: almost 1,000 bitcoins from Gregory Maxwell and almost 500 from Luke Dash jr.
Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin White Paper on the cryptography mailing list on October 31, 2008. The first feedback he received was from James A. Donald on November 2, who said that Bitcoin cannot work: “We really, really need this system. , but as I understand the proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required level ”. Donald was right, only years later do you begin to imagine a real scalability solution, with the Lightning Network.
In 2020, the halving will reduce the daily supply of bitcoin by halving it from 1800 to 900 bitcoins. By that date, 87% of the bitcoins that will ever come into existence will have been produced
The first translation of the Bitcoin software into a language other than English was Italian. When on May 27, 2010 Franco Cimatti (with the "Hostfat" user) attaches the Italian translations to the bitcointalk form, Satoshi Nakamoto rejoices by posting in response: "Hurray! We have our first language! "
The first blog in Italian to talk about Bitcoin was probably Il Portico Dipinto (Alessandro Polverini) in April 2011.
The most complete Bitcoin glossary in Italian can be found here, on this blog:
http://www.albertodeluigi.com/glossario-bitcoin/
All the changes to the Bitcoin protocol planned and implemented in the last 4 years were necessary to adapt the protocol to the Lightning Network technology: on December 14, 2015, checklock time verify was introduced; July 4, 2016 checksequence verify, August 24, 2017 segregated witness.
A very first idea of ??Lightning Network was conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, as evidenced by an email to Mike Hearn, where even Satoshi presents a concept very similar to checksequence verify (which Satoshi calls "IsNewerThan") which will be introduced on Bitcoin only with the fork of 4 July 2016
(go to Hearn's email)
Pieter Wuille and Wladimir van Der Laan have been extremely active in Bitcoin development since 2011 and have made over 2700 contributions (commits) to the code in 8 years. To make a comparison, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote about 2000 lines of the Bitcoin Core code, Pieter Wuille wrote ten times as many.
Of the 20 upgrades or "consensus forks" performed on Bitcoin in history, three are linked to "bugs", found respectively on August 15, 2010, March 11, 2013 and September 17, 2018. In the case of 2013, the solution to the bug it was actually a downgrade, rather than an upgrade.
In April 2014, a modification (BIP42) was implemented to prevent miners from producing more than 21 million bitcoins in about 256 years, adding another 21 million for the following 256 years, and so on indefinitely. As this modification is in effect a soft fork, we can count as many as twenty consensus forks made in the history of Bitcoin
The 2014 BIP42 upgrade proposal is written in a very different "tone" than usual. BIP42 prevents Bitcoin's money supply from actually being infinite in cycles of 256 years. The person responsible for this serious oversight in the code written in C ++ was Satoshi Nakamoto (who, however, hadn't been around for a long time in 2014). Pieter Wuille, who wrote the proposal for BIP42, in the official text makes good-natured fun of Satoshi with these words: "As is well known, Satoshi was a master programmer, whose mastery of C ++ was surpassed only by his knowledge of the culture Japanese. The code below [...] is written to accurately rely on the indefinite behavior of the C ++ specification "
There were fewer than 4 Bitcoin ATMs before 2014. During 2018 they doubled from 2000 to 4000.
Under Matt Corallo's 2016 Bitcoin Relay network, 90% of the blocks of the blockchain are distributed in the network in 570 milliseconds, in the FIBER network developed by Corallo in 2018, these take only 141 milliseconds.
on 11 February 2019 there was a block orphaned by the network. During 2018 there were 6 orphaned blocks. Today the frequency of orphaned blocks has greatly decreased, thanks to the faster relay speed of blocks in the Bitcoin network, thanks to technical advances. An orphaned block occurs when two miners simultaneously discover a new block at the same height and both blocks start spreading across the network. One of the two will be orphaned when the next miner discovers the new block starting from only one of the two previous blocks. Each orphaned block is like a small fork of the Bitcoin network, the chain of which is immediately abandoned.
On August 15, 2010, a miner exploited a flaw in the protocol to create bitcoins beyond the expected amount. In 5 hours the code bug was identified and fixed, then the "honest" miners downloaded the new software and fork the blockchain, channeling the computing power on the "honest" chain. Within 3 hours this prevailed and order was restored. There is no news of any economic damage to any user that occurred on this occasion.
The Bitcoin network has been running consistently without any hitch 99.9833807% of the time, from the birth of the blockchain on January 3, 2009 (02:54:25 GMT) until today.
On 11 March 2013, a bug in the code present in the new release of a version of the Bitcoin Core client, already installed by some miners, inadvertently caused a fork from the chain of miners who had not yet installed the upgrade. The problem lasted 6 hours, until all miners reverted to the previous version of Bitcoin Core (downgrade).
There is news of a user who managed, in the time window of the fork of 11 March 2013, to double spend against the Okpay service. It is the only known case of effectively successful double spending in Bitcoin's history (which occurred after the canonical 3-6 wait confirmations), given that the transaction spent twice against Okpay had 15 confirmations.
Originally, Bitcoin's source code was located on Bitcoin.org. Once a change was agreed, the developers sent an email with the code to Satoshi Nakamoto, Martti Malmi or Gavin Andresen, who directly updated the source code. The Bitcoin Core code review process has become increasingly transparent, moving first to SourceForge (where Martti Malmi created the repository) and then, with Gavin Andresen, to Github
The latest fork upgrade occurred on September 17, 2018 to correct a flaw in the protocol, discovered the same day, which would have allowed the creation of virtually infinite bitcoins. The bug had been in the code for nearly 2 years, introduced on November 10, 2016 due to a minor client change that had little code overhaul.
Matt Corallo, the developer who wrote the flawed piece of code on November 10, 2016, was the same developer who released the bug fix patch on September 17, 2018. Who discovered the flaw is a developer working on Bitcoin Cash. . Guido Dassori then tried to exploit the bug in testnet, causing the forking of outdated nodes and wrote this report about it. More info in the dedicated article on this blog
96% of the fullnodes on the Bitcoin network are Bitcoin Core software. But anyone can create alternative software, even in other programming languages, compatible with the same Bitcoin protocol. To date, there are about ten different fullnode implementations.
The Bitcoin Core code can be distributed, discussed and published on any platform, but as a matter of practice, Github, now owned by Microsoft, is used. To guarantee that no malware has been introduced into the code released on Github, 5 digital signatures are generally recognized with which new versions of Bitcoin Core are released, each held by a well-known Bitcoin developer and therefore "trusted" in the community
The 5 developers who now control the digital keys with which the Bitcoin Core code is signed are: Wladimir J. Van Der Laan, Pieter Wuille, Jonas Schnelli, Marco Falke, Samuel Dobson
The "Bitcoin Core maintainer" is Wladimir J. Van Der Laan since 2011, the first role assigned to Gavin Andresen. On a practical level, this role corresponds to a position on Github that allows you to give commit access to users who can thus directly put their hand to the source code.
In the history of Bitcoin, very few people have enjoyed access to modify the source code (on bitcoin.org and SoundForge first, Github later). The only known are: Satoshi Nakamoto, Martti Malmi, Laszlo Hanyecz, Gavin Andresen, Chris Moore, Jeff Garzik, Nils Schneider, Gregory Maxwell; plus the five who still have access today, namely: Wladimir J. van der Laan, Pieter Wuille, Jonas Schnelli, Marco Falke, Samuel Dobson
Over the course of Bitcoin's history, over 600 people have contributed to writing the Bitcoin Core code we use today (607 contributors on Github)
Those who don't have committed access to Github and are denied changes to the Bitcoin Core repository can forking the code and create Bitcoin alternative software to Bitcoin Core. This software can be programmed to work on the Bitcoin chain itself (therefore an alternative implementation of a Bitcoin node that is compatible with the same protocol), or create an alternative chain, such as the fullnode Bitcoin ABC that started Bitcoin Cash
On Github in 2018, over 26,000 comments and reviews (70 per day) were written to the Bitcoin Core code, nearly 1500 requests for changes were submitted, of which 1300 accepted (merged). 194 developers contributed to the code in 2018.
The developers publish the code, but which protocol will be in place is a choice of the community as a whole. SegWit is one of the most well-known upgrades in Bitcoin history, proposed by the “Core” development team of Bitcoin Core via BIP144 (written by Pieter Wuille with Erik Lombrozo). The upgrade was designed by the Bitcoin Core team with the BIP141 report. However, SegWit was never approved with BIP141. In fact, it is not the development team that chooses which software upgrade the community will install and when it will install it, but the economic majority decide spontaneously.
The SegWit upgrade signaling took place via BIP91 (present in the BTC1 client, other than Bitcoin Core), which forced the reporting of BIP148 (the latter known as UASF). Neither BIP was integrated into Bitcoin Core, in fact the main Bitcoin Core development team was opposed to both variants. The upgrade to SegWit was therefore determined by two clients other than Bitcoin Core: BTC1 and Bitcoin Core UASF.
When Bitfinex's securities were still held, through Noble, at Bank of New York Mellon (the largest custodian bank in the world), the $ 4 billion "cash" in his account probably constituted one of the cash dollar accounts ( or immediately liquidable) richest on the planet. It is worth repeating: "one of the richest accounts on the planet"
Tether is the only stable coin actually used (98% of the volumes of all stable coins). Contrary to what critics say, it has never shown signs that it is not really guaranteed by 1 dollar for every tether in existence. Indeed, in the month of October 2018 alone, there was a massive conversion of tether, for which over 1 billion dollars were taken (by destroying the respective tethers). This withdrawal was met by Bitfinex without batting an eye.
The banks, super-regulated, supervised and sometimes nationalized, are unable to cope with slightly more consistent withdrawals than ordinary without resorting to state aid (paid by taxpayers), due to the fractional reserve mechanism. No traditional depository and investment bank in the world is likely to sustain a $ 1 billion withdrawal without going bankrupt (excluding custodian banks, existing institutions in the US). In fact, the Bitfinex exchange has surprisingly turned out to be one of the strongest financial institutions in the world.
According to a CipherTrace research, through all cryptocurrencies there would have been a recycling, from 2009 to today (in 10 years), of 2.5 billion dollars. It is estimated that European banks launder money for an amount equal to 1% of European GDP per year, therefore about 140 billion dollars every year.
The amount of value moved to the base layer of Bitcoin, i.e. the blockchain (without considering Bitcoins transacted on secondary layers or trust services), has far exceeded Paypal and is approaching the order of magnitude of the volumes of Mastercard and Visa ( about a tenth of Visa).
Despite the bear market, in 2018 the value of Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain increased by 30% compared to 2017, from one trillion dollars (1T $) to one thousand and three hundred billion dollars (1.3 T). Visa moves about 10 trillion dollars a year (10 T $).
A Bitcoin transaction can be "burned" making its output no longer usable. A tiny fraction of Bitcoin is thus consumed, but in this way it is possible to write any data at will within the blockchain (OP_RETURN).
Tether works on the bitcoin blockchain through the omni-protocol that uses the OP_RETURN. In 2018, the number of OP_RETURN outputs on blockchain increased from 4 million to 10 million, 53% of these are done with the omni layer protocol (Tether).
Through Tether, over 200 million dollars are transferred every day to the Bitcoin blockchain (projected, 70 billion dollars a year) (blockspur data)
If, by hypothesis, all the transactions in the history of Bitcoin had been modern confidential transactions (guaranteeing a greater guarantee of anonymity), today the Bitcoin blockchain would weigh 650gb. The increased weight is one of the main reasons why an upgrade of the Bitcoin protocol that allows such transactions has not been proposed. Even with bulletproof (later implemented on Monero) the weight is high and the blockchain is therefore less efficient than the current standard
Mimble Wimble is a revolutionary protocol that allows you to make confidential transactions (therefore a completely anonymous transaction) without increasing the weight of the blockchain, indeed decreasing it
Grin, a new cryptocurrency that implements Mimble Wimble, allows transactions to be made three times less expensive (in terms of space) than those of Bitcoin, while adding more privacy to transactions. If there were a volume of transactions on Grin equal to that present on Bitcoin (and over the same 10-year time frame), Grin's blockchain would weigh about 70gb against Bitcoin's 200gb.
Grin is designed by developers of the Bitcoin world to better study and test Mimble Wimble, but possibly also to build a Bitcoin sidechain and, perhaps in the future, use it directly with Bitcoin through an "extension block" fork. Grin alone cannot constitute a definitive scalability solution, since a cryptocurrency, to be truly scalable, must be able to allow "thousands or millions of transactions more" than the current Bitcoin onchain, for the same space occupied, and not only "the triple more ”as Grin. An offchain solution such as Lightning Network is therefore necessary (today not implementable on the Grin blockchain)
The daily trading volumes in Bitcoin have been around 5-10 billion dollars in recent months and have not dropped below 3 billion for over a year, a value first touched in November 2017, when the price of Bitcoin had a soaring to $ 7,000 and then, in the following month, to $ 19,000. In comparison, the previous average trading volume values ??are practically non-existent. At the beginning of 2017, volumes stood at 100 million per day, therefore 100 times lower than today, yet the price of Bitcoin was already only a quarter of the current one.
When a Bitcoin fullnode connects to the internet, it must find other nodes in the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to participate in the network, send and receive transactions, download and relay blocks of the blockchain. To begin, it is therefore necessary to know at least the IP address of any node. Unless we manually connect to an address we know of, Bitcoin Core will connect to one of the following servers which will provide a list of addresses. They are servers maintained by some of the most famous Bitcoin Core developers:
bitcoin.sipa.be (Pieter Wuille)
bluematt.me (Matt Corallo)
bitcoin.dashjr.org (Luke Dash Junior)
bitcoin.jonasschnelli.ch (Jonas Schnelli)
btc.petertodd.org (Peter Todd)
bitcoinstats.com
In Italy, there are numerous stores and physical points where dedicated staff can teach you the first steps in buying cryptocurrencies, and to help novice users find their way around this world. For example, there is the Coin Society store in Milan in via del Torchio 10, or Cripton in viale Piacenza 39 in Parma, or Bitcoinyou in via Conchiglia 103 in Civitanova Marche. In addition, of course, the Bitcoin valley of Rovereto, born thanks to the assiduous activity of Inbitcoin since June 2016
The current monetary system in fiat money is not able to guarantee non-reversible electronic / digital transactions for non-reversible services. To give an example: if I eat pizza, I cannot return it (if not already partially digested by my enzymes), therefore the service provided by the pizza chef is not reversible, but the payment made by credit card is reversible. This "asymmetry" can become the cause of scams and high management costs. In the US, credit card fraud accounted for a cost of nearly 17 billion in 2018 alone. Bitcoin is also a technological solution to this problem.
A normal Bitcoin transaction is not reversible, but if the two parties need reversibility, they can use an escrow service. For a similar service it is not necessary to know the personal information of the counterpart (such as name and surname, address, bank details, etc.), which is always necessary for electronic transactions in fiat money.
This transaction is the largest in history in terms of the number of bitcoins transferred, as many as 550,000: see the transaction on blockchair
Lightning Network allows, for the first time in the history of human civilization, to conveniently carry out microtransactions, thanks to the reduction of costs for handling tiny amounts of value. New business models, but also of information security, can be built on this new system. For example, you can replace anti-spam that require computational power to pass a filter (proof-of-work), with systems in which a down payment micro-transaction is carried out, withheld only if the user proves to be malicious (spammer , ddos ??attack etc.)
Coinbase is probably the exchange that holds the most bitcoins in the world, controlling various wallets that count, in total, 856 thousand Bitcoins (this is the amount of a sum moved between 1 and 6 December 2018 most likely attributable to Coinbase - source ).
Two wallets of the BINANCE exchange are known whose sum amounts to 190 thousand bitcoins. Bitfinex and Bittrex have cold wallets respectively for 120 and 130 thousand bitcoins each. It is extremely rare for wallets of individuals to contain more than a thousand bitcoins (there are currently only 1,886 addresses that hold more than 1000 bitcoins).
Bitwala is the first service that allows you to maintain a fiat money account guaranteed by the Bundesbank up to 100 thousand euros and, at the same time, to provide a web wallet to and from which you can freely transfer bitcoins, or spend them via the debit card associated with the bill
Many blockchains are insecure and at risk of a 50 + 1 attack. Some of the most famous that suffered a successful attack were Verge and Ethereum Classic. Attacking a blockchain is not a question of computer hacking, but only of computational power, that is how much an attacker is able to invest economically in the attack, obviously taking into account the expected profit from such attack and the probability of success
A well-organized attacker who intends to do a 50 + 1 on a blockchain will probably also ensure the connivance of an exchange. In fact, exchanges have alert systems and do not easily authorize withdrawals of large sums, so an attacker could spend a lot on computational power without being able to obtain profitable double spending. It cannot be ruled out that Gate.io was somehow involved in the attack on Ethereum Classic, since the famous "sum returned" on January 10, 2019 for which there is talk of "white hacking" is rather suspicious. Who knows if it wasn't a "bribe" instead.
Trusting exchanges too much is never a good thing, especially if they are small and little known. QuadrigaCX failed because it had non-existent security levels, given that the cold wallet keys were in the hands of a single (deceased) person, without any multi-signature mechanism or unlocking through locktime (or other smart contracts) that more structured exchanges implement for at the same time ensure security and access to their wallets.
In addition to being used as an exchange of value (eg bitcoin), blockchain technology is "almost" useless and it is a mistake to think that it can be useful to many existing business structures. However, one use of blockchain that is revolutionary compared to pre-existing systems is decentralized timestamping, which can completely replace major notary services. Opentimestamp is the flagship of these systems.
An Italian team has developed video games that take advantage of the Lightning Network: for example Super Mario Bro https://satoshis.games/, where every coin you collect in game is a satoshi that is sent to you via the Lightning Network. It can also be played for free, but if you lose your life, you will also lose the satoshis collected. By purchasing more lives, however, the satoshis will still be available until the remaining lives are exhausted.
Batching is the aggregation of transactions requested by users in a single transaction. It is a very powerful tool as it allows you to save a lot of space on the blockchain.
At this moment (March 2019) there are less than 2000 addresses / wallets with over 1,000 bitcoins each. Mostly they are all addresses of large exchanges. There are over one hundred addresses that contain exactly 8000 and 5000 bitcoins and it appears that many of these are under the control of Coinbase.
The oldest Bitcoin exchange still operational is the Italian exchange The Rock Trading, on the market since June 2011
The development of Lightning Network has closely seen the commitment of various companies that have independently initiated the development of LN nodes and wallets. Among these: Lightning Labs, Blockstream, Acinq, Bitfury, Amikopay, Blockchain Luxembourg S.A
The need to make interoperability between the various implementations developed by the community possible has led to the drafting of a shared protocol, the BOLT (Basis of Lightning Technology). The first meeting between these companies for sharing the protocol was organized by Giacomo Zucco's BHB Network in Milan, so much so that initially BOLT was informally called "Milan protocol". Go to protocol
Thomas Bertani's Italian company “Oraclize”, founded in 2015, is the first Italian company (the second in Europe) with share capital contributed in Bitcoin.
The world of cryptocurrencies is full of scammers and at least one person is scammed every minute. I don't know if the bill is really one per minute, but what is certain is that we have a victim here and now. In fact, this list does not contain 101 curiosities as the title reported, but just over half. Scam! Damn De Luigi and his click-bait!
