Bitcoin News

Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind core developer Sipa (Pieter Wuille) shares the details about today’s blockhain fork with a post on the BitcoinTalk forum.

Excerpts:

“If you are not a merchant or a miner, don’t worry.”
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“If you’re a merchant: please stop processing transactions until the chains converge.”
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“v0.7 or older, the client will likely tell you that you need to upgrade. [There is no need to] follow this advise - the warning should go away as soon as the old chain catches up.”

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.0

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A significant new release of the Bitcoin-Qt and Bitcoind clients from Bitcoin.org, v0.8.0, is now available for download.

This v0.8 release includes a number of new features, performance improvements and bug fixes and is the first major feature release since the v0.7 release about five months ago.  This release was designed to improve performance and handle the increasing volume of transactions on the network.

A post on Bitcoin Money blog (@BitcoinMoney) describes some of the features, improvements and fixes which include compatibility with OSX 10.8 and Windows 8, dramatically faster blockchain sync, support for lightweight clients, and more.

• http://bitcoin.org/releases/2013/02/19/v0.8.0.html
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.0
• http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145184.0 (Announcement)
• http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/43978670573 (Further description of features and fixes)
• http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0 (Bootstrap.dat thread)
• http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/bootstrap.dat.torrent

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A blog post by David Perry (@KJ6CCZ) gives a thorough explanation of how mining works without any of the specific details that “might scare the non-techies”. Excerpts:

“Core concepts and terms:
“Hash - I tell you that I added two numbers together and the result was 14,862. Given only that number there’s no way you could tell me what two numbers I added to get that total, but it would be easy to reproduce my result if I asked you to add 3,608 and 11,254.
Block - Transactions are bundled up into big chunks of data called blocks. These blocks are linked together in such a way that each one proves that the block before it was valid.
Difficulty - Ensures that [Bitcoin’s] math problems are hard enough that it always takes the combined efforts of all the miners around 10 minutes to solve a block.”
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“The more miners there are, the higher the difficulty goes. The higher the difficulty goes, the harder it is to commit fraud on the Bitcoin network.”
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“Sudden changes in the value of a bitcoin can make or break mining operations. Granted if a drop in price knocks some miners out of the picture, difficulty will decrease to accommodate, but that takes time. Miners follow the market - the market does not follow the miners.”

 - http://bit.ly/Q3v5i9
 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488047 (Additional comments)

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A post on Bitcoin Money (@BitcoinMoney) blog points out the reason why Bitcoin’s transaction volume has gone stratospheric.  Excerpts:

“While the daily transaction volume had been steadily growing at a casual pace since October, there’s been a development in the past weeks that has had a significant impact. The ten-day-old service SatoshiDice.com has been growing at a blistering pace.”
“There to be nearly four thousand blockchain transactions resulting from Satoshi Dice for the most recent 24-hour period.”
Satoshi Dice allows the Bitcoin wallet, whether it be the standard Bitcoin.org client or a hybrid Javascript-based browser wallet like My Wallet from Blockchain.info, to function as gaming terminal. What sets Satoshi Dice apart from most other Bitcoin-based online gaming services is the ability to play in an instant and to receive winnings back within seconds.”
“What may be occurring then is that Satoshi Dice is seeing some level of participation by those intending to alter the makeup of the coins held in their wallets. Satoshi Dice in its present form makes a poor solution for mixing however.”

- http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/22374833252

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Jon Matonis (@JonMatonis)’ latest article in Forbes covers the release of the Blockhain app for Apple products. Excerpts:

“Be your own bank? There’s an app for that”.
“Run by Ben Reeves, the small company has released several reliable services and products for the thriving bitcoin community including charts, statistical data, the web-based My Wallet, an Android wallet app, and most recently an impressive bitcoin wallet app for Apple’s iOS”.
“Addresses are clickable to display a QR code and you can also scan QR codes to make payments. Keys are stored securely on your phone and encrypted on Blockchain’s servers so if you lose your phone, no sweat — you’re protected”. 
“Why approve the Blockchain app at this time when it was mysteriously rejected before? Maybe Apple no longer wanted it as an illicit app on the Cydia website”.

- http://onforb.es/If9vDO

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A post on Bitcoin Money blog (@BitcoinMoney) describes how iPhone and iPad users now have an app for Bitcoin.  Excerpts:

“The app is free and can be installed on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Wthin seconds of clicking Install the app can begin receiving bitcoins”.
“The creator of Blockchain.info, piuk, reported a week ago that the Android version was being installed at a rate 50% higher than its shunned iOS brethren”.
“Persistance did pay off. Finally, Blockchain v1.9.2 with full wallet capabilities was approved after an appeal and is now available from the App Store globally”.
“That a variety of desktop, web-based and now native mobile apps for Bitcoin are now available to well over half the world’s population is really something quite remarkable. The pace of innovation in the Bitcoin-related space is accelerating.”

- http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/21512172097

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Security expert Dan Kaminsky (@Dakami) presented in June at Toorcon Seatlle on Bitcoin.

From a Bitcoin Money blog post:

“He shares his slides of the presentation.He also gave a presention at Black Hat USA this past week in which he again discussed Bitcoin.  He shares his slides from that talk as well”.
“Dan’s two main assertions are that Bitcoin is not scalable (at transaction levels reaching even a fraction of those for the Visa payment network) and that it is not anonymous”.
“Dan wrote in a post on the Bitcoin forum that he considers Bitcoin as one of the top five most interesting security projects of the decade”.

- http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/8493775234
- http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/bitcoin-8776098 (Toorcon Seattle)
- http://slidesha.re/qGUqjf (Slides, Black Hat USA 2011)
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Brian Warner, an engineer with Mozilla Labs, gave a brownbag presentation in which he introduced Bitcoin and covered how the Bitcoin protocol functions.

The presentation starts at about 03:20 into the video.  Length 1 hour, 14 minutes.

• http://vimeo.com/27177893 (or Ogg Theora version)
• http://people.mozilla.com/~bwarner/bitcoin/slides.html

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