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 a no-no, but to the lazy/non-tech-savvy, generating a new address and sharing it with counterparties isn’t always simple.

Enter BIP47 wallets.

BIP47, Reusable Payment Codes for Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets, was submitted by Justus Ranvier in 2015. As the title may indicate, it adds functionality to the existing hierarchical deterministic (or…

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 very specific niche, by virtue of its 'hands-on' approach. There’s abundant documentation, but it’s unlikely that more than a small subset of confident hodlers will implement it.

For those requiring high security assurances without taking matters entirely into their own hands, there’s Casa’s Keymaster.

Casa is already a household name…

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 hard to fathom, if you’re busy crafting a Twitter echo chamber of hardline Bitcoiners, that there exists a future where not everyone will run a full node until it can be downloaded and run as easily as a background app. …

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. Generally, the more experienced crowd will tell you that a combination of hardware wallets, assault rifles and steak diets are the only way to ensure the safety of your funds.

However, there’s another level of protection that makes the former sound almost laughable in comparison. That’s the Glacier Protocol.

The project’s website details an extensive guide aimed at Bitcoin holders that want to go above…

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 alternative (and more efficient) Schnorr signature scheme existed at the time Satoshi was working on the project, but was patented up until 2008 and therefore was not standardised across the board. As Pieter Wuille points out, DSA was specifically designed to circumvent Schnorr’s patent).

Insofar as security, both ECDSA…

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 a Lightning channel with a peer – high transactions per second (TPS) throughput back and forth, negligible fees on microtransactions, or a burning desire to buy Blockstream stickers.

If Alice wants to do so with her local transport company, she would fund a a 2-of-2 multisig address (with the company)…

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 the peer-to-peer network: propagation becomes more difficult, and nodes require higher-end hardware to keep up – in essence, decentralisation is sacrificed in the pursuit of higher throughput. …

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 amount of counterparty risk. Not only are you hoping that the service’s security is ironclad enough to defend from cyberattacks (easier said than done, by the looks of things), but you’re also working on the assumption that the company behind the exchange isn’t misleading you.

One of the trade-offs you…