Bitcoin privacy isn’t something guaranteed at the protocol level. How an individual stores, transacts or otherwise uses Bitcoin is the difference between remaining virtually anonymous and providing motivated onlookers with permanent access to their transaction history. Unfortunately, achieving greater privacy oftentimes comes at the cost of convenience. Address reuse is…

In our last piece in this series, we took a look at The Glacier Protocol, a rigorous airgapping procedure ensuring next-level fund protection for Bitcoin users. While certainly one of the most robust cold storage solutions available to individuals safeguarding large amounts of coins, the Glacier Protocol caters to a…

You may have stumbled across the term Neutrino over the past few weeks following Coinbase’s acquisition of the controversial s̶u̶r̶v̶e̶i̶l̶l̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ‘blockchain intelligence’ company by that name. The Neutrino we’ll discuss in this article has no relation to the business — it’s a proposed solution for better Bitcoin light wallets. The Problem: Lack of Privacy in Light Wallets It’s…

When it comes to Bitcoin, there’s ownership, and then there’s ownership. Some are happy with delegating custody of their coins to exchanges, while others feel relatively confident with their private keys stored on their phones. …

Get into a conversation about Bitcoin improvements, and before long, someone will inevitably bring up Schnorr signatures, the Holy Grail of Bitcoin upgrades poised to solve two major threats to Bitcoin’s longevity: privacy and scalability. From the very beginning, Bitcoin has used ECDSA signatures for creating keys and verifying transactions…

The bitter opponents of off-chain scaling denigrating the evolution of the Lightning Network (LN) have done little to hamper the growth of Bitcoin’s second layer. Since January 2018, LN node count has grown by roughly 60x, and LN capacity by 600x. Nodes, Channels and Capacity There’s many reasons why you may choose to establish…

For years, it was generally accepted that increasing the block size was the best way to scale the Bitcoin blockchain – more space available means more transactions can be crammed in and lower fees can be paid due to less competition. Larger blocks, however, come at a cost externalised to…

It’s a bitter pill for the self-sovereignty maximalists to swallow, but third party custodians will always exist: it’s more convenient for traders, the technophobic and the lazy to simply have their magic internet money held on their behalf. Entrusting an exchange with your cryptocurrency, however, carries with it a significant…

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jameson Lopp, cypherpunk and CTO of Casa. When I think ‘cypherpunk’, you’re the archetype I picture. What got you interested in the movement? I spent the first several years of my career working in online advertising, so I became very aware…