Mike Hearn

Developing apps for block chains

Oops. I said I wasn’t going to blog about Bitcoin for a while, but Coinbase recently took an official position stating that Ethereum is now at the forefront of the digital currency space. I can only agree with 99% of Fred’s writing: his analysis of the problems of Bitcoin…

This is just another way of saying “Bitcoin is great because it’s totally decentralised with no central authorities ….. wait no, I didn’t mean it!!! Stability is more important than decentralisation!”

If Bitcoin can’t be hard forked against the will of the existing set of developers because political stability matters more…

The actual launch of XT is a set of posts to the mailing list and the launch of the website. Unfortunately, if you came here via Reddit, those posts were deleted by the moderators.

You can get the more positive vision by going to https://bitcoinxt.software and reading the manifesto.

Not doing anything would itself be a bug.

The term “bug” does not mean “line of code exists that crashes”. Bug means “software does not do what it was intended to do”. Obviously a Bitcoin that did not actually let you spend your bitcoins, or which allowed other people to steal them from you, would be catastrophically buggy.

I think what you’re getting at is “if a new opcode is added, what if it has a bug” …. but it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as “older Y-immune software” once the fork goes into effect. You MUST upgrade. Please re-read my article, part of it is addressing this idea that people can pick and choose which features they accept. There’s no such…

No. I’m not sure why you think that. It doesn’t matter how a change is rolled out, new versions of the software can always have (new) severe bugs.

The point you’re getting at has come up a few times on reddit too.

The idea that the fork types differ in whether they add rules or remove them is a distraction …. the problem is that the social rules Bitcoin encodes don’t map 1:1 to protocol rules.

JetBrains make Android Studio in collaboration with Google. Kotlin just became a default part of IntelliJ 15, so presumably, once that is released and Android Studio is rebased, Kotlin will be supported by default.

There are some nice Android frameworks available. But right now, apparently Kotlin+Android doesn’t do…

In Kotlin you can define a data class like this:

data class Person(val name: String, var address: String?)

That generates the getters, setters, toString, equals, hashCode, and other methods like copy() which lets you make a duplicate with new values for named fields (via named arguments), and…

Hi Chris,

First, a minor quibble: Bitcoin Core doesn’t have zero overhead for storing a transaction. They’re stored as CTransaction objects in hashmaps and things, so the actual memory used when you take C++ heap overhead and fragmentation into account is higher. Also just doing a quick eyeball divide using the blockchain…