Analysis
Bitcoin – Opacity by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The influential author has finally revealed his thoughts on Bitcoin with this forward to Saifedean's upcoming book, and absolutely nails why most of us are so excited about this technology, and makes me even more anxious to get my hands on The Bitcoin Standard book coming out in a couple of months.
Five myths about Bitcoin’s energy use
Peter Van Valkenburgh wrote up a great overview of the Energy Use argument against Bitcoin and provided a well thought-out, multi-pronged rebuttal. Next time you see someone Wrong On The Internet™️ about Bitcoin's energy usage, just send them this article.
Here’s What Paul Krugman Got Wrong in His Bitcoin Tweetstorm
Paul Krugman, the famous economist and infamously the person most Wrong On The Internet™️ (literally), had a tweet-storm this week making a sloppy argument against Bitcoin. Luckily, Kyle Torpey published this takedown and points out the common mistakes Mr. Krugman and most mainstream economists make when it comes to our nascent distributed value-system.
BitMEX's analysis of the Lightning Network
BitMEX research has published this deeeeep dive on The Lightning Network and covers the trade-offs and constraints of this new network, as well as some of the potential pitfalls.
How the Lightning Network Layers Privacy on Top of Bitcoin
Aaron van Wirdum continues his work on explaining the Lightning Network with this good introduction to its privacy properties thanks to the use of the Sphinx Protocol, which is a slight improvement on the Tor protocol for privately routing messages through a network.
News
Introducing Strike, a stripe-like API for Lightning
The same week that Stripe announces they are ending Bitcoin support for merchants, Acinq, one of the main proponents of Lightning, has announced the introduction of Strike, a new Stripe-like (see what they did there?) tool for Merchants to make it easy to accept Lightning payments.
Robinhood adds zero-fee cryptocurrency trading and tracking
The millennial-investor hoard is coming for crypto, now that Robinhood is getting into the game. For people who aren't familiar, Robinhood is the stock and security trading platform that is extremely popular in the US with younger investors (including yours truly). After announcing that they are going to bring Bitcoin and Ether trading to their customers starting next month, over 350,000 people have joined the queue less than 24 hours later. It's looking like US bitcoiners now have a plethora of new exchange options, with Square Cash also rolling out new features and to a wider audience.
Development
Key Aggregation for Schnorr Signatures
Pieter Wuille has published a post this week expanding on his recent work on Schnorr signatures and how they can apply this to get new Key Aggregation features on the Bitcoin network with a new scheme known as MuSig. Fellow collaborator Greg Maxwell, not to be outdone, also posted his new idea for undetectable MAST scripts called Taproot.
Videos
Future Technological Directions in Bitcoin
Want to know what the future of Bitcoin holds? Well then let Rusty Russell take you on this whirlwind tour of a myriad of upcoming developments on the horizon like MAST, Key Aggregation, Scriptless Scripts, Confidential Transactions, and more esoteric changes like UTXO Proofs, Dandelion, Neutrino, etc. He even provides a helpful prediction for when these changes could possibly become reality.
Bitcoin Edge Workshops
This free collection of deeply technical lectures from the leaders in Bitcoin Core development is a must watch. It looks like they've got great content for beginners and expert alike, from the foundational math underpinning the Bitcoin protocol (Jimmy Song's lecture) to more advanced topics like Crosschain Atomic Swaps and Discreet Log Contracts.
Education
Bitcoin Sidechains & SPV Proofs
If you've ever wondered what-the-heck people are talking about when they talk about "sidechains", this video is for you. Expertly described and visualized by James C., a fellow alumn of the Programming Blockchain class. This seems to be his first video, so go give it a watch and thumbs up to make sure he keeps creating more!
Tutorials
Run your own mainnet Lightning Node
WARNING YOU PROBABLY SHOULD NOT DO THIS. But if you are, check out this guide and godspeed to you.
Tools
transactionfee.info
This great new website from @b10c will show you how much you (or your wallet provider / exchange) overpaid in bitcoin transaction fees. I plugged in my last Coinbase transaction and the result was 😳😱😭. This perfectly demonstrates how much of the problem of large network fees comes down not to the Bitcoin protocol, but its (mis)use.
Comment
This week I attended the Programming Blockchain 2-day intensive with instructor Jimmy Song, here in London. Me and 24 other students went deep on the technical underpinnings of Bitcoin, and Jimmy led us all the way up to implementing our own Bitcoin client in Python. And on top of the knowledge provided, it was great to be able to spend time with people just as passionate about Bitcoin as I am and hear from them about what they were working on and what they were excited about. It was clear that most people were very interested in Lightning and about helping it become a reality. If you have a chance to learn from Jimmy, I highly recommend it.