Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Blog – The Coin Shack
The First Wave of Hodlers
It Started With A Post To An Obscure Mailing List Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous developer of the original Bitcoin protocol, first informed the world of his new creation on an obscure cryptography mailing list. The types of people that subscribed to this mailing list...
What is a Hodler?
A post on BitcoinTalk On December 13th, 2013 a now infamous post was first published on BitcoinTalk, the go-to forum for early Bitcoin enthusiasts. The poster intentionally misspelled the word “Hold” as “Hodl” and proceeded to go on a rant about why he has decided to...
The Challenges to Gaining Mass Adoption
Bitcoin’s Base Layer Thrived Because of Network Effects The Bitcoin base layer took off because of network effects. If only one person is mining blocks and trying to use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services, it is useless. As soon as even one more person joins the...
How the Lightning Network Works
An ingenious Solution The lightning network is an ingenious solution to some of the problems with bitcoin. It allows for fees orders of magnitude less than what they would be for on-chain transactions. Also, since lightning transactions are not recorded on the...
Some Use Cases For the Lightning Network
New Opportunities for Innovators The lightning network enables instant, peer-to-peer and private transactions between any two parties located anywhere in the world. Never before have we had this capability. With this new technological development, comes more...
Why do we Need the Lightning Network
The Blockchain Trilemma Satoshi Nakamoto, faced a trade-off when he was deciding on the underlying features of the Bitcoin Blockchain. He had to pick between emphasizing two of the following three features; decentralization, security, and scalability. This tradeoff...
An Easy Introduction to the Bitcoin Lightning Network
A Simple Introduction to the Bitcoin Lightning Network The best comparison for Bitcoin in its current state is the internet of the 1990s and early 2000s. It is slow, has a hard to use interface, and not much can be done with it. It is a necessary base layer on which...
Consumer Apathy Towards Bitcoin
Consumer Apathy is a Risk The previous posts have focused on powerful centralized entities such as governments and stakeholders in the ecosystem such as developers. There is another group that is paramount to the development and adoption of Bitcoin. At the end of the...
Funding for Bitcoin Developers
Bitcoin Developers are one of the most important stakeholders of the Protocol Another internal risk to the protocol lies with one of the most important yet often ignored stakeholders; the developers of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open source protocol that is managed by a...
A Bug in the Code
A Bug in the Bitcoin Code So far we have explored the risks to the mass adoption of Bitcoin from the perspective of what governments can do to stop it’s growth. There are also internal risks within the protocol. This blog post will discuss an always present...
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