This week a flood of transactions which has alternately been called a spam attack or a stress test has forced Bitcoin users to adapt to a competitive transaction fee market for the first time since early 2013 when blocksize was consistently near default soft limit of 250 kilobytes. Numerous Bitcoin users and businesses are adapting to the flood of transactions by increasing their own transaction fees. At the present there are more than seventy megabytes of unconfirmed transactions leading to more naive users on Reddit and other social media to revert to speculating about blocksize hardforks which would merely amplify the problems this sort of flooding attack poses. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: July 2015
Most Serene Republic Begins Advertising Public Blockchain Seed Nodes
In preparation for potential improvements to the Bitcoin reference client, citizens of Bitcoin's Most Serene Republic have begun establishing high availability Bitcoin nodes located in datacenters and hosted on dedicated hardware to serve as publicly advertised seed nodes from which Bitcoin users may sync their blockchains and more peers. The improvements to the foundation's reference implementation which spurred this move are the removal of all Domain Name System code from the client to allow an entirely statically built bitcoind as well as the removal of the legacy IRC initial peer discovery mechanism to reduce the attack surface bitcoind presents. Continue reading
Another Post BIP 66 Fork Dies after 3 Blocks
A second fork has followed the initial post BIP 66 fork further highlighting the continued danger of so called "soft" forking changes to the consensus code of Bitcoin network clients. The second fork persisted from 21:50 through to 23:40 on July 5th, 2015. Implementing the rather non-controversial change proposed by BIP 66 to enforce strict DER encoding on ECDSA signatures has without a doubt increased the fragility of the Bitcoin network such that users of all Bitcoin clients ought to consider waiting beyond the traditional 6 mined blocks before considering a transaction confirmed. Unless all major miners begin mining with fully validating node software, this instability is likely to continue indefinitely into the future with users of the latest versions of "Bitcoin Core" at risk of finding themselves stranded, maybe even permanently on the short side of an enduring fork.
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
French TV Venture CANAL+ Hacked, Suppresses News with DMCA
TorrentFreak reports major French television Canal+ hits Github with DMCA complaint after experiencing a severe AWS breach. The hacker, who ran the “hooperp” Github repository, was able to steal “all the data and codes” regarding its new CRM project “Kiss deploy”, before using the server’s key to mine Bitcoin. Legal counsel for Canal+ revealed: Continue reading
Chain Fork Reveals BIP Process Broken
This weekend the Bitcoin Blockchain experienced a forking incident due a discrepancy between what the expectations of a group developing a Bitcoin network client named "Bitcoin Core" and the actual behavior of Bitcoin miners. The developers of the Bitcoin Core client through a process they refer to as "Bitcoin Improvement Proposals" or BIPs introduced a "soft" forking change into their client which would be triggered through a voting mechanism. In this case miners had appeared to vote in favor of BIP 66, which would have enforced stricter encoding of signatures in an attempt to address the transaction malleability issue which is most notable for having been used as a scapegoat by Mt Gox while actually having little to do with their collapse. Continue reading
Peter Vessenes Attempts To Revive CoinLab (Again)
Despite the bankruptcy of failed Bitcoin mining company Alydian and the inevitable collapse of the Bitcoin Foundation under his belt, Peter Vessenes and his company CoinLab would appear to be back. Hoping to strike it third time lucky, the CoinLab website (archive) came back online this past week now offering a blockchain analytic service for governments, agencies, industry and other investigations. Despite previously being quoted (archive) as saying that he stays away from companies which have questionable KYC policies, Vessenes now publicly appears eager to work alongside the biggest and most questionable company of all – government.
Further Reddit Outrage as Unpaid Moderators Rebel
Beginning yesterday Reddit's volunteer moderators have been rebelling over the firing of the one administrator that they liked. This latest crisis for Reddit follows a previous blunder which last month saw a substantial influx of users moving from Reddit's platform and settling on Reddit competitor Voat. Voat has been down intermittently as they massage and further expand their infrastructure to accommodate the influx of new users.
Survey: More Than a Third of American Adults Would Expatriate
CNBC reports that a British venture has conducted a survey which found 35% or more than a third of American residents born in the United States and immigrants who settled in United States would like to expatriate to live in another country. More than half of young adults, 55%, are willing to abandon the United States as well. The United States Treasury department recorded 3,415 Americans formally renouncing their citizenship last year up from 348 in 1998. The number of American Citizens actually renouncing their citizenships began its trend of climbing steeply in 2010 when 1534 United States Citizens renounced citizenship compared to 742 in 2009.
UK Gambling Commission Strongarms Some Bitcoin Based Gambling Websites
The UK Gambling Commission has written (archive) to what it perceives to be Bitcoin gambling venues operating illegally due to the lack of a licence. The UK Gambling Commission states that regardless of where such a business is located, it must hold a licence if it is to provide British consumers with its services.
Gambling Commission CEO Jenny Williams said: Continue reading