Journal of a bitcoin explorer. Where will it lead?
Keywords:
cryptocurrency [crypto currency],
blockchain [block chain],
ledger,
digital signature,
cryptographic hash,
Satoshi Nakamoto,
mining,
altcoin,
crowdsourcing,
consensus system.
I wish I had more money to give out, because there were so many awesome entries in this contest.
I've been doing this bitcoin blog for a year and a half, since
First Post, New Blog
(4 July 2015). I've taken it as far as I need and will be cutting back to two posts a month, mainly to keep up with any news.
A year ago my weekly bitcoin post fell on Boxing Day, so I had
Bitcoin Boxing the Dollar
(December 2015).
This year it falls on Christmas Eve, so I'll just have a simple post celebrating Christianity's favorite holiday.
Bitcoins wearing stocking hats and serving as ornaments it will be.
Google image search on 'bitcoin christmas'
A week ago I documented the bitcoin price in
Buying Ethereum,
making it easy to observe that the price is up nearly 20% in the seven days since then. I'm sure we'll see all sorts of reasons for the rise when I look at December news, but that's the sort of price rise you only see in a pyramid scheme. Take it as the gift it is and enjoy it while it lasts.
One of the advantages of that transaction has been to become familiar with Coinbase, the service that holds my account ('wallet' in cryptocurrency jargon). They send me occasional emails informing me about new features. For example, during the last few months I learned:-
...I felt I had sufficient knowledge to buy a small quantity. I signed on to Coinbase (always an irritating three-step process: password, SMS code, email link), discovered that I needed a fiat currency (Euros in my case) to buy anything, sold half of my bitcoin, and bought an equivalent amount of ethereum (NB: lower case, to be consistent).
Coinbase charged a 1.5% commission on both sides of the transaction.
After the second transaction, Coinbase showed that I still had all of the Euros in my account. I thought about trying a double spend to see what would happen, but decided that I didn't want to risk getting a black star next to my name.
The Coinbase account overview gives a price history of the currencies. Here's a comparison of the two currencies over the past year. Did I exchange a winner for a loser?
Left: ETH;
Right: BTC
In my previous post,
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-11 More++,
I noted, 'It sounds like every purchase with bitcoin might trigger a corresponding capital gain/loss'. If this is the case when I sold half of my bitcoin (a small amount) to prepare the ethereum purchase, the accounting is going to be awkward.
Even though my previous post,
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-11 Election,
had more than enough bitcoin news for a single month, there were a few other stories worth mentioning. The most important of these was the subject of a New York Times article by Nathaniel Popper, which automatically confirms its importance:-
2016-11-18:
Bitcoin Users Who Evade Taxes Are Sought by the I.R.S.
(nytimes.com)
•
'The tax agency sent a broad request on Thursday to Coinbase, the largest Bitcoin exchange in the United States, asking for the records of all customers who bought virtual currency from the company from 2013 to 2015. '
I took away two points from this. Bitcoin transactions (1) are subject to capital gain treatment, and (2) can be used for 'creative' financial manipulation. The NYT article noted,
The basic tax rules for Bitcoin users were set down by the I.R.S. in 2014. The agency’s guidance said that people should treat their virtual currency as property, rather than currency, for tax purposes. [...; An I.R.S. agent] identified two companies that were buying Bitcoin and misreporting them with the I.R.S. as technology expenses.
For more angles on the IRS and Coinbase, see Google's related stories:-
An unrelated story underscored another point of friction between sovereign governments and bitcoin:-
2016-11-03:
Chinese Government To Force Capital Controls On Bitcoin Exchanges
(newsbtc.com)
•
'Local exchanges will deal with limitations regarding the amount of funds moving outside of the country. Additionally, the government also wants to cap the number of Bitcoins sent abroad. Neither of these scenarios can be enforced, though, as no one can exert control over Bitcoin.'
China featured in another pair of stories from the same source and writer:-
2016-11-16:
Is Bitcoin Mining Destined for Data Centers?
(bitcoinmagazine.com)
•
'For many, Bitmain’s recent announcement of the realization of a major data center in northwestern China served as a reminder of the level of mining centralization in Bitcoin.'
Is China the defacto capital of the bitcoin world? With yearend arriving even faster than usual, I'm ready for another round of retrospective opinion pieces like this one:-
2016-11-21:
Bitcoin was supposed to change the world. What happened?
(vox.com)
•
'To a large extent, Bitcoin today is still used for the same applications -- illicit transactions and financial speculation -- that it was in 2014 and 2012.'
As for buying non-illicit stuff, here are two stories on the current state of affairs:-
2016-11-22:
iPayYou Brings Bitcoin To Amazon
(pymnts.com)
•
'Bitcoin wallet iPayYou continues to work toward a future with bitcoin as the default currency. It was just announced that iPayYou has made a way for consumers to pay for items on Amazon with bitcoin, called Amazon Direct.'
2016-11-25:
Bitcoin Black Friday Deals for the Digital Currency Enthusiast
(nasdaq.com)
•
'Here are a few options for anyone looking to get a good deal on some crypto-friendly merchandise this weekend.
•
Hardware Wallets
•
OpenBazaar Stores and Other Specialty Sites'
Getting back to that first story, the IRS and Coinbase, it sounds like every purchase with bitcoin might trigger a corresponding capital gain/loss. What am I missing?
Bitcoin news last month was dominated by the U.S. presidential election results (as was most news in general). The victory of Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton reminded many observers of the unforeseen, populist result of the Brexit vote near the end of June. At that time I wrote two posts --
Stores of Value
(25 June 2016) and
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-06 Price
(02 July 2016) -- both of which could serve as templates for the current post-election analysis.
News stories for November followed a predictable pattern. First there was the pre-election prognostication.
Then there was the immediate reaction to the unexpected result. There were so many stories that Google News offered 'Full Coverage'. Here is their main story followed by the related stories.
In June I wrote about 'store of value'; here we have 'safe haven'. Are they the same thing or is there a subtle distinction? Whatever the answer, the following days brought more reflective stories.
As for the post-election price bumps, I was surprised to find a number of reasons offered by the pundits. Here are contradictory views from the period
2016-11-09 Full coverage:-
2016-11-09:
Cryptocurrencies rise on Trump victory
(techcrunch.com)
•
'What’s clear is that when politics defies conventional expectation, and when very many best laid plans are laid to wrack and ruin, cryptocurrencies are acting as a haven and a hedge against uncertain times -- alongside the traditional one: gold.'
2016-11-09:
The Trump Train Goes to Washington; Three Ways Trump Helps Bitcoin
•
'[Trump has] already done more in one night than President Obama has done in eight years. Thank you America, for joining me and the rest of the liberty movement on the right side of history.'
That first sentence of 'Trump Train' shows that the rest of the opinion piece is not exactly thoughtful analysis. What are the 'Three Ways Trump Helps Bitcoin'?
'Bitcoin price should go up even faster for the rest of the year'
'Not having World War III should be good for Bitcoin'
'Choosing the right President protects the Internet and Bitcoin'
'Not having World War III' should be good for just about everything and not everyone agrees that Trump is the 'right President', but Americans do have freedom of expression ... at least for now.
Although my previous post,
Quantum Computers,
was only a low level introduction to the subject, it piqued my interest. I ended that post with a vague objective for a follow-up:-
In my next post I'll try to learn more about quantum algorithms.
I continued watching videos and quickly discovered that the algorithm with a direct impact on bitcoin is
Shor's algorithm
(Wikipedia):-
Shor's algorithm, named after mathematician Peter Shor, is a quantum algorithm (an algorithm that runs on a quantum computer) for integer factorization formulated in 1994. Informally it solves the following problem: given an integer N, find its prime factors. On a quantum computer, to factor an integer N, Shor's algorithm runs in polynomial time (the time taken is polynomial in log N, which is the size of the input).
Next I found a short video on Youtube starring Peter Shor,
What is Shor's factoring algorithm?,
but it's much too short to explain the subject properly. Another video,
Shor's Algorithm,
looked more promising, but required knowledge of math concepts that I wasn't familiar with.
Fortunately, it was the last clip in a course playlist,
Intro to Quantum Computing
(no.23/23), that covered the math from the start.
From the first videos in the course, I learned that quantum mechanics are based on linear algebra, a subject I studied many years ago when I was still capable of learning complicated new things.
Although I wasn't able to complete the intro course before writing this post, I found another video that explained the algorithm using more basic math. After one full viewing, I can't say that I've grasped it completely, but I'll watch it a few more times until it sinks in.
The Youtube page for that clip says, 'Published on Nov 26, 2016', which is the date on this current post. (How lucky is that?) It's part of another course playlist,
Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation,
that currently stops at '43 Quantum factoring : Period finding', so I assume it will be updated wth the new clip(s) in due time.
From all of this it looks like the cryptographic underpinnings of bitcoin might indeed be at risk in the not-too-distant future, especially if there is an equivalent of Moore's law that applies to quantum computer hardware. Not to worry too much, because
Quantum cryptography
(Wikipedia) promises a parallel evolution:-
Quantum cryptography is the science of exploiting quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks. The best known example of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution which offers an information-theoretically secure solution to the key exchange problem. Currently used popular public-key encryption and signature schemes (e.g., RSA and ElGamal) can be broken by quantum adversaries. The advantage of quantum cryptography lies in the fact that it allows the completion of various cryptographic tasks that are proven or conjectured to be impossible using only classical (i.e. non-quantum) communication.
With all of that in mind, I'll continue any further investigation of the quantum world outside the confines of this blog. After two posts on a quantum detour, I'm ready to return to the main subject: bitcoin.
'Is Bitcoin Doomed?' (newsweek.com)
•
'Cyber security experts say bitcoin will disappear when the first quantum computer appears.'
•
Since I know little about quantum computing, I'll digress for the next few posts to spend time on it.
I spent a pleasant few hours watching Youtube videos on quantum computing and chose the following as a good introduction.
Quantum Computer in a Nutshell (Documentary) (30:01) • 'The reservoir of possibilities offered by the fundamental laws of Nature, is the key point in the development of science and technology.'
The description continued,
Quantum computing is the next step on the road to broaden our perspective from which we currently look at the Universe. The movie shows the history of progress in this fascinating field of science, introduces the most promising models and algorithms, explains the advantages of quantum computers over classical solutions, and finally presents wonderful people thanks to which the quality of our lives is constantly being improved. Even if you don't want to understand the video, please watch till the end at least to realise how big is the human thirst for knowledge.
An important message I picked up from another video was that quantum computers don't replace traditional computers -- they allow us to tackle problems that traditional computers can't handle because of algorithmic complexity. That topic is covered briefly at the end of the video. In my next post I'll try to learn more about quantum algorithms.
After the previous post,
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-10 'Trust Disrupted',
what other bitcoin stories were noteworthy last month? The most mentioned was a concept called 'Bitcoin Unlimited'.
2016-10-14:
‘Bitcoin Unlimited’ Hopes to Save Bitcoin from Itself
(motherboard.vice.com)
•
'Bitcoin Unlimited, an alternative to the popular Bitcoin Core client that has been at the epicenter of the block size debate, is taking a more brazen approach compared to the slow process of community deliberation. Bitcoin Unlimited allows miners to decide the size of blocks they create and the upper limit of blocks they’re willing to process on their own and independent of any hard-coded limit.'
2016-10-20:
ViaBTC Rises: How A Mysterious Miner Could Decide Bitcoin's Future
(coindesk.com)
•
'In recent weeks, China's ViaBTC became one of the first providers of mining software to switch its client from the official version provided by Bitcoin Core to an option provided by Bitcoin Unlimited, a rival development group that supports alternative methods of scaling that is focused on creating a more variable bitcoin block size.
But unlike Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Unlimited does not have support for that developer group's signature scaling solution, Segregated Witness, a planned technical fix that would effectively make bitcoin's block size about 1.8 times larger than it is today by changing how information is counted toward this total.
Further, because the rules for Segregated Witness require 95% of bitcoin's hashing power to approve the transition, ViaBTC could effectively block its wider release.'
We've already seen 'Segregated Witness' on this blog. I last mentioned it in
2015 Hong Kong Conference
(April 2016), including a link to an explanatory video. It was back last month.
2016-10-28:
Bitcoin Begins Segregated Witness Era, What Happens Now?
(cointelegraph.com)
•
'October 27, 2016. Segregated Witness (or SegWit) was added to Bitcoin Core. Will that day be the official end of the two-year-old “Block Size Debate?” will yesterday be the first step towards a mainstream-ready global decentralized digital currency? Whether you know it or not, Bitcoin has officially stepped into a new era of expansion and usability with the release of Bitcoin Core 0.13.1. Here, we’ll give you a cliffnotes version of what happens next and if we are even ready for SegWit.'
2016-10-31:
Bitcoin is closing in on its 2016 peak. A handful of theories attempt to explain the rally
•
No.3 of 4:
'A solution to bitcoin's "civil war" is at hand; A long awaited update to the bitcoin core, the software that governs the cryptocurrency, includes a "soft fork" solution to the problem of limited transaction capacity on the bitcoin network. The solution is called "segregated witness" and it allows bitcoin miners and others running the core software to up transaction capacity without running the existential risk of a "hard fork" that would split the currency’s blockchain.'
It looks to me like two competing technological solutions -- code-named 'Bitcoin Unlimited' and 'Segregated Witness' -- are operational and that only one of them will eventually survive. Another example of competing solutions is occurring at the macro-economics level.
2016-10-04:
Bill Gross Says Bitcoin, Blockchain May Counter Central Banks
(bloomberg.com w/ video)
•
'New financial technologies such as bitcoin may become increasingly attractive to investors as a protection against central bank low- and negative-interest-rate policies that threaten capitalism, according to billionaire bond manager Bill Gross.
Policies by the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and European Central Bank are destroying historical business models that foster savings, investment and economic growth, Gross, who runs the $1.5 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, said in an October investment outlook released Tuesday. He said that as investors lose faith in the system, they will increasingly seek havens.'
2016-10-12:
Central banks consider Bitcoin’s technology, if not Bitcoin
(cnbc.com; reprinting Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times)
•
'Bitcoin was created by libertarian-minded programmers with a deep suspicion of central banks and the national currencies they issue. Yet it is central banks that are doing some of the most ambitious work of late in trying to harness the technology introduced by Bitcoin. '
2016-10-19:
The European Central Bank Wants Tighter Control over Bitcoin
(cryptocoinsnews.com)
•
'The European Central Bank (ECB) has proposed a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council stating that ‘virtual currencies do not qualify as currencies from a Union perspective,’ and wants digital currencies to be explicitly defined as not legal currencies or money.'
As long as I'm on the concept of 'competing solutions', there's also a political aspect.
2016-10-18:
Review: "The Politics of Bitcoin" Offers a Flawed and Misleading Partisan View
(bitcoinmagazine.com)
•
'David Golumbia, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, an aspiring political pundit, and the author of the recently published book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, denounces Bitcoin in a recent blog post titled Trump, Clinton, and the Electoral Politics of Bitcoin. "[What] concerns me about Bitcoin is how it contributes to the spread of deeply right-wing ideas in economics and political philosophy without those right-wing associations being made at all explicit."'
2016-10-30:
Making Sense of Hillary Clinton's Bitcoin Rejection
(coindesk.com)
•
'For Hillary Clinton's campaign, accepting bitcoin was "too libertarian". That's what we learned last week when it was revealed senior campaign aides for the US presidential candidate considered taking bitcoin campaign donations, but dismissed the idea.'
Given the result of the U.S. election that took place this past week, what Hillary Clinton thinks about bitcoin is no longer relevant. What President-elect Donald J. Trump thinks must be extremely relevant (if he thinks about it at all), and I expect to see something about that in next month's news post. If not, I'll examine the subject myself. Another subject I would like to examine is mentioned in my final link.
2016-10-12:
Is Bitcoin Doomed?
(newsweek.com)
•
'Cyber security experts say bitcoin will disappear when the first quantum computer appears.'
That could be the most important message in this current post. Since I know little about quantum computing, I'll digress for the next few posts to spend time on it.
Last month, starting with
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-09,
I ended up with three 'In the News' posts and I can see I'm on track to do the same this month. After a quiet start to the month's news, things started to pick up:-
Unfortunately, the embedded video in that link uses a 30 second ad to introduce the 40 second trailer. Another TechCrunch page in the series used the same ad to introduce another clip, with no option to terminate it after a few seconds. Life is too short to lose time on irrelevant ads so I located the same series on Youtube.
Trust Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain (trailer) (0:39) • 'Traces the rise of Bitcoin and the technology that made it happen: the open, distributed ledger known as the blockchain. As blockchain technology has outpaced Bitcoin, an array of new apps has proliferated across the globe.'
The description continued,
Trust Disrupted is based on the book Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. Produced by Stateless Media, it is an exclusive TechCrunch series that offers an in-depth look into the how and why of bitcoin.
The description also included a link to a playlist for the series:
Trust Disrupted.
After this welcome interruption to the month's quiet start, I discovered another dozen topics worth exploring. I'll continue with those for my next post.
The current issue of Cornell Alumni Magazine (CAM; September/October 2016) has a relevant article,
Beyond Bitcoin
subtitled, 'The CU-based Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts ponders the future of financial tech'. It starts,
In April, an experimental crowdfunding project started accepting online investments. This system, called the DAO (for Decentralized Autonomous Organization), was like a cross between Kickstarter and a venture capital fund, but with a twist: interested parties had to convert their money into a new type of digital currency before they could invest. Participants could then vote "yes" or "no" on submitted proposals, deciding as a group what to invest in. When a project got enough "yes" votes, computer code would automatically disperse the funds.
The story had already popped up a few times in this blog, for example
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-07,
but I had never taken the time to understand it properly. The article continued,
By the end of May, the DAO had amassed the equivalent of $150 million. But a few weeks later, an anonymous hacker identified a flaw in the voting system and siphoned off more than a third of the funds. "You can think of this as a bank robbery of sorts," says Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell, "except one much bigger than any before it."
That Cornell connection goes deeper than that.
Sirer's work on the DAO -- studying a new type of financial technology and advising the industry on how it can be implemented and improved -- epitomizes the work that he and his colleagues do at the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). Founded in January, it's led by Sirer and two other co-directors -- Elaine Shi, an associate professor of computer science on the Hill, and Ari Juels, a professor at Cornell Tech -- and includes collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley, and two other institutions. They comprise what Sirer calls a "dream team" of about fifty people who are looking for ways to make next-generation financial technology systems more secure, scalable, confidential, and safe, while also developing new technology-based financial products with industry partners.
For more about IC3, see
Initc3.org,
'IC3: Advancing the science and applications of blockchains'.
This is the second time I've used CAM as a source on a blog post. The first was
'Not a Sane Bone in His Body'
(November 2012), about Bobby Fischer.
I've sometimes wondered how I would explain bitcoin to someone who knew nothing about it.
While I was working on the previous post,
Bitcoin in the News : Sources,
I kept looking for a good introductory article on the subject. The best one I found (there are others) was the following:-
That's too much explanation and too much extraneous detail. Here are the most important sentences with some editing suggestions:-
[Bitcoin is; S/P] the digital equivalent of cash online, a system that lets participants [to] send value to anyone else with a Bitcoin address the same way they [like you] might send an email (A).
Every ten [few] minutes, new Bitcoin enter [S/P] the system. "Miners" [use] donate spare or dedicated processing power to help validate transactions around the globe. Bitcoin come [S/P] as rewards [is a reward] for that work (B).
If you want to [To] own Bitcoin, you [first] have to first get a Bitcoin address [wallet], then you have to either get someone who owns Bitcoin to give you some [bitcoin from someone else] or buy it from an exchange (C).
When you own Bitcoin, you’re assigned a value [quantity] and a cryptographic key. With the key, you’re the only person able to transfer that value [quantity] to someone else.
First some notes:-
(A) Doesn't differentiate from interbank transfers or Paypal.
(B) Rearrange.
(C) Or mine it! (but good luck with that)
Then some conventions for the word 'bitcoin':-
- Singular or plural? [S/P] -> I prefer singular, 'bitcoins' as plural
- Capitalized or not? -> No.
Putting that together gives:-
Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of cash, a system to send value like you might send an email.
When you own bitcoin, you’re assigned a quantity and a cryptographic key. With the key, you’re the only person able to transfer that quantity to someone else.
To own bitcoin, you first have to get a bitcoin wallet, then you have to either get bitcoin from someone else or buy it from an exchange.
Every few minutes new bitcoin enters the system as 'miners' use processing power to validate transactions. Bitcoin is a reward for that work.
Maybe I should have started with a dictionary definition. And what about 'blockchain'?
Notes:
(A) e.g. Nathaniel Popper
(B) 'PYMNTS.com is reinventing the way in which companies share relevant information about the initiatives that shape the future of payments and commerce...'
(C) Popular Science
In my previous post,
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-09,
although I could find only one real news story, there were other journalistic pieces worthy of attention.
The best of the bunch was a tutorial:-
The "Reference Implementation"
•
The question whether alternative software implementations for Bitcoin are desirable has been discussed for years. These implementations, or clients, are essentially computer programs that connect to, and therefore become part of, the network. The debates surrounding their role date from the early days of Bitcoin's history, back when the community mostly consisted of tinkering techies.
The first Bitcoin implementation was of course Satoshi Nakamoto's version of Bitcoin, written in the coding language C++. This client later become known as Bitcoin-Qt, and now Bitcoin Core ; it is sometimes also referred to as Bitcoin's "reference client" or the "Satoshi client." For a while, this was the only Bitcoin implementation - although over time Satoshi released updates; i.e., slightly different versions of the same client.
...it moved through a logical point/counterpoint exposition that might be a model for any discussion of strategies for clients in distributed computing:
'The First Alternatives
•
Criticism
•
Counter-criticism
•
Ethereum
•
Future Strategies'.
Another story caught my attention because it raised an issue that I wasn't aware of: 'crowdfunding platforms do not take kindly to bitcoin'. Why should this be?
The article didn't provide an answer and I had to do a little research to discover
What are the obstacles for the widespread adoption of Bitcoin in crowdfunding and micro-financing?
(quora.com).
Of the many reasons that were proposed, most of which work against adoption of bitcoin for any purpose, the 'volatility of bitcoin' seemed to be the most important for crowdfunding.
Going back to an insight I had a year ago,
It's for Speculating, Not Buying Stuff
(October 2015), crowdfunding is already speculative enough without adding currency risk.
In contrast to the crowdfunding chimera, another pair of stories focused on an aspect of bitcoin that is often touted as a key application: remittance markets. This might be a suitable subject for a followup post.
Another story caught my eye because it used the phrase 'Yet Another', implying a tired subject. When I looked for previous instances, I kept coming back to the Santander report. Mark this as another candidate for a followup post.
It helps to know that 'Brave' is the name of a browser. Why is this concept important?
To start, a monthly payment content budget is configured and funded by the user, and as the user surfs across the Internet, visiting various sites, those sites are tracked on a “time spent” basis. [...]
Quick back-of-the-napkin math would indicate that if 750,000 users visited CoinDesk using a Brave browser with a $5.00 monthly budget, and 6% of their browsing time was spent, on average, across all users, CoinDesk’s escrow account would be holding $213,750 at the end of the month.
All of this without a single ad, without employing a single ad salesperson, sales infrastructure, any of that overhead.
The math would have been easier assuming 1,000,000 users, but it's all pie-in-the-sky anyway; a handful of comments explain why. The last paragraph of that article is also worth a further look (think 'organizational structures'):-
Disclaimer: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Brave.
Note to myself: If you do follow up any of these ideas, don't forget to check the forums.
September was a quiet month for bitcoin, both on this blog and in general. After posting
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-08,
I managed only to highlight a
New Online Bitcoin Course
followed by two posts on the old course.
As for general news, at least half of the stories served by Google alerts had to do with bitcoin price action -- which was a yawner as far as I could tell -- and the other half were lists like
The 5 Greatest Moments in Bitcoin History
(cointelegraph.com). No.1 was 'The Dawn of The Bitcoin Era (31 October 2008 - 12 February 2009)'
-- who could have guessed that would be first? -- and you can read the article for the nos. 2 through 5.
As for 'news' -- with emphasis on the 'new' portion of the word -- the newsiest story was probably about bitcoin on the small screen:
How Sony's New Show 'Startup' Gets Bitcoin Right
(fortune.com):-
It was only a matter of time until someone made a TV show featuring bitcoin. Well, that show is here in the form of a 10-episode series called Startup, and, frankly, it does a good job of depicting the weird world of crypto-currency.
That story -- one of several about the show -- was complete with an embedded video and links to reviews. And that -- he said parenthetically -- was that!
'If you just want the lectures, simply subscribe to this channel. In this lecture (click the time to jump to the section): [...]' The 'jump to sections' correspond to the section headings of the first chapter of the course textbook.
The course textbook,
'Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies' by Arvind Narayanan et al (Draft — Feb 9, 2016),
doesn't include a table of contents, so I created one myself. It can also be used as a general guide to the Youtube lectures, to locate the lecture on a a specific section.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Cryptography & Cryptocurrencies
1.1 Cryptographic Hash Functions
1.2 Hash Pointers and Data Structures
1.3 Digital Signatures
1.4 Public Keys as Identities
1.5 A Simple Cryptocurrency [GoofyCoin]
Chapter 2: How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization
2.1 Centralization vs. Decentralization
2.2 Distributed consensus
2.3 Consensus without identity using a block chain
2.4 Incentives and proof of work
2.5 Putting it all together [Cost of mining; Getting a cryptocurrency off the ground; 51-percent attack]
Chapter 3: Mechanics of Bitcoin
3.1 Bitcoin transactions
3.2 Bitcoin Scripts
3.3 Applications of Bitcoin scripts
3.4 Bitcoin blocks
3.5 The Bitcoin network
3.6 Limitations and improvements
Chapter 4: How to Store and Use Bitcoins
4.1 Simple Local Storage
4.2 Hot and Cold Storage
4.3 Splitting and Sharing Keys
4.4 Online Wallets and Exchanges
4.5 Payment Services
4.6 Transaction Fees
4.7 Currency Exchange Markets
Chapter 5: Bitcoin Mining
5.1 The task of Bitcoin miners
5.2 Mining Hardware
5.3 Energy consumption and ecology
5.4 Mining pools
Chapter 6: Bitcoin and Anonymity
6.1 Anonymity Basics
6.2 How to De-anonymize Bitcoin
6.3 Mixing
6.4 Decentralized Mixing
6.5 Zerocoin and Zerocash
Chapter 7: Community, Politics, and Regulation
7.1: Consensus in Bitcoin
7.2: Bitcoin Core Software
7.3: Stakeholders: Who's in Charge?
7.4: Roots of Bitcoin [Cypherpunk and digital cash; Satoshi Nakamoto]
7.5: Governments Notice Bitcoin
7.6: Anti Money-Laundering
7.7: Regulation
7.8: New York's BitLicense Proposal
Chapter 9: Bitcoin as a Platform
9.1 Bitcoin as an Append-Only Log
9.2 Bitcoins as “Smart Property”
9.3 Secure Multi-Party Lotteries in Bitcoin
9.4 Bitcoin as Public Randomness Source
9.5 Prediction Markets and Real World Data Feeds
Chapter 10: Altcoins and the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
10.1 Altcoins: History and Motivation
10.2 A Few Altcoins in Detail [Namecoin; Litecoin; Peercoin; Dogecoin]
10.3 Relationship Between Bitcoin and Altcoins
10.4 Merge Mining
10.5 Atomic Cross-chain Swaps
10.6 Bitcoin-Backed Altcoins, “Side Chains”
10.7 Ethereum and Smart Contracts
Chapter 11: Decentralized Institutions: The Future of Bitcoin?
11.1 The Block Chain as a Vehicle for Decentralization
11.2 Routes to Block Chain Integration
11.3 Template for Decentralization
11.4 When is Decentralization a Good Idea?
For the full experience, sign up via the link on that page. If you just want the lectures, simply subscribe to this channel.
In this lecture (click the time to jump to the section):
[...]
The 'jump to sections' correspond to the section headings of the first chapter of the course textbook.
This first lecture and subsequent lectures are on the Youtube channel, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course, which is dedicated to the course.
My guess is that this is the first incarnation of the course that eventually appeared on Coursera.
One of the few 'fortunately' stories harks back to 'Online Bitcoin Course' (March 2016), which was taken down at the end of June. Is that the same course or a new course? I'll find out in a future post.
I signed up for the new course and was informed via email,
You’re enrolled in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. We’ll let you know the moment the course opens for learners. For now, we’re busy putting the final touches on things. See you soon!
About this course:
To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. We’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin, such as: How does Bitcoin work? [...] After this course, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
That leads to the same final question as my previous post: 'Is that the same course or a new course? I'll find out in a future post.' Title this current post; 'Kicking the Can'...
August was not a good month for bitcoin. Even though I lost five days of Google news alerts (11-15 August; see
Site Available Again),
I can't imagine that the missing days would have changed the month's tone significantly. The first story of note, a continuation from July's
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-07 More++:
'Bitcoin not money Miami judge rules', sounds like an unfortunately/fortunately scenario.
That story says 'hack', the next says 'attack'. When all is said and done, what's the difference?
2016-08-18:
Bitcoin 'targeted by state sponsored attackers' says Bitcoin.org
(theregister.co.uk)
•
'"Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers," the organisation says'
I have time for one post before I have to get back to this month's news. Let's continue with
Bitcoin at Princeton,
where the last post was
Core Developers
(June 2016):-
While working through the lectures, I've noted a few topics worth pursuing on this blog.
The next lecture topic I noted is 'Bitcoins as "Smart Property"', which is covered in section 9.2 of the course textbook:-
Now we’ll talk about using bitcoins to represent something other than a unit of currency in the Bitcoin
system. [...]
Fungibility: This also leads to an interesting observation: bitcoins aren't fungible. In economics, a
fungible good is one where all individual units are equivalent and can be substituted for one another.
For example, gold is fungible since one ounce of (pure) gold can be substituted for any other ounce of
gold. But this isn’t always true of Bitcoin because every bitcoin is unique and has a different history. [...]
Smart Property: Could this non-fungibility property be useful? We’ve already seen why it can be bad
for privacy because of the potential for deanonymizing users. In this section we’ll look at why it can
also be useful to give meaning to the history of a bitcoin.
The clever example to illustrate this topic is 'writing on currency'. A few examples were given in the corresponding lecture.
Left to right, top to bottom:
'I [George Washington] grew hemp'
'HAWAII'
'Not to be used for bribing politicians'
'This is $1 more than Bank of America paid in taxes!'
The textbook explains,
Let's think about what it would mean to give meaning to the history of ordinary offline physical
currency. Suppose we wanted to add metadata to offline currency. In fact, some people already do
this. For example, they like to write various messages on banknotes, often as a joke or a political
protest. This generally doesn’t affect the value of the banknote, and is just a novelty.
I wasn't sure about the legality of this, but
Yes, It's Legal!
(stampstampede.org):-
Many people assume that it’s illegal to stamp or write on paper currency, but that’s not the case. It’s illegal to destroy paper currency or deface it so much that it’s no longer recognizable and has to be taken out of circulation.
That is not the case in the examples shown above. Back to bitcoin and the Princeton text:-
But what if we could have authenticated metadata attached to our currency -- metadata that cannot
easily be duplicated? One way to achieve this is to include a cryptographic signature in the metadata
we write, and tie this metadata to the serial number of the banknote.
And that opens the blockchain to a new universe of potential uses. I'll explore these in another post.
I'd be surprised if anyone noticed, but I skipped my previous weekly post on this blog for reasons explained on another one of my blogs in
Site Available Again:
It's been a week since my previous post on this blog, Site Unavailable, where I noted, 'I'm suspending new posts until the [m-w.com] site is available again. Apologies for the interruption!'
In this post, I'll continue with
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-07 Halving.
That was already the third consecutive 'Bitcoin in the News' post -- making this the fourth -- and since I'm talking about events from last month, the word 'news' is a stretch.
Along with the 'Halving', there were a number of other recurring topics in July.
While none of the above topics casts a particularly favorable light on bitcoin -- except perhaps the ETF news -- other stories were distinctly negative.
This is the third consecutive 'Bitcoin in the News' post on this blog, since the previous posts --
2016-06 Price
and
2016-06 More++
-- were followed by a break in blogging.
Like the price action in the previous month, the month of July was dominated by a single story: 'the Halving'. I counted four types of stories that appeared during the month.
In the previous post,
Bitcoin in the News : 2016-06 Price,
I used a chart showing the wild price movements of bitcoin in June. How do the pundits explain those movements?
I count five explanations --
Halving,
Ethereum,
China,
Brexit,
Globalization
-- of which the only reason that explains repeated, short-term volatility is China. Brexit was a one-off and the others are long-term trends. Here's more about China.
Nytimes.com:How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War
(29 June; Nathaniel Popper)
•
'Bitcoin, which is both a new kind of digital money and an unusual financial network, is having something of an identity crisis. Like so many technologies before it, the virtual currency is coming up against the inevitable push and pull between commercial growth and the purity of its original ambitions.'
Shifting gears, I noted another story that appeared in June.
[I] discovered that the bitcoin price spiked as the result of the [Brexit] vote became known. Since the price of gold also spiked, I wondered if there was any correlation.
Looking at the bitcoin price for the entire month of June shows plenty of unusual action.
First, consider the spike separating the left third of the chart from the rest. Since the bottom of the spike is marked 10 June (Friday) and the top is marked
13 June (Monday), the action occurred over a weekend. From
Bitcoin Price Hits Two-Year High
(wsj.com; 13 June 2016):-
The price of the digital currency bitcoin hit a two-year high Monday, trading above $700 for the first time since 2014, after it jumped 21% over the weekend. The surge came days before an unusual event called the "halving", an adjustment to bitcoin’s protocol designed to control the creation of new coins.
Bitcoin and ether both surged this week, the former hitting a 28-month high and the latter surpassing $20 for the first time. The combined rally of these two digital currencies from 10th June to 17th June helped shed further light on their relationship, a matter that has frequently drawn the attention of market analysts.
The price of bitcoin fell $100 during a five-hour span today, dropping 15% to reach a low of $551 on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI). The move represents a continuation of the recent price correction that began when bitcoin hit a high of $774 on 18th June, a move market observers suggested was indicative of the idea that the digital currency was "overbought" after reaching two-year highs.
Global currencies might be plunging in the wake of the historic Brexit vote, but it’s had a much different effect on Bitcoin. Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that had been plunging in recent days, is soaring on Friday after the Brexit vote.
Although the Brexit explanation makes some sense, it was preceded by big moves up and down that defy explanation. I doubt that the 'halving' played much of a role. Something else was behind the moves.
The previous post mentioned,
'While working through [bitcoin] lectures, I've noted a few topics worth pursuing on this blog. The first is'
Core Developers.
The second should have been this current post, but I'm taking a short detour because of the excitement and chaos provoked by Brexit, aka
United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union
(wikipedia.org).
The UK electorate again addressed the question on 23 June 2016, in a referendum on the country's membership. This referendum was arranged by Parliament when it passed the European Union Referendum Act 2015.
The result of this referendum held in June 2016 was 51.9% in support of an exit (17,410,742 votes) and 48.1% (16,141,241 votes) to remain.
On a whim, I looked at 'bitcoin brexit', and discovered that the bitcoin price spiked as the result of the vote became known. Since the price of gold also spiked, I wondered if there was any correlation.
The following charts, from finance.yahoo.com, show the price action in both commodities over the last week.
Although other factors were moving the price of bitcoin on the days before the vote, the Brexit result moved the price over the next hours before finding an equilibrium. Bitcoin enthusiasts like to promote the crypto-currency as a stable
Store of value
(wikipedia.org again)...
A store of value is the function of an asset that can be saved, retrieved and exchanged at a later time, and be predictably useful when retrieved. The most common store of value in modern times has been money, currency, or a commodity like gold, or financial capital. The point of any store of value is risk management due to a stable demand for the underlying asset.
While continuing to follow the
Online Bitcoin Course
(started March 2016), I received a message from the domain hosting the course.
In 2014, Coursera began developing a new technology platform to improve your learning experience, and to allow courses to run more frequently. The majority of our courses are now offered on the new platform. This month, we are closing the old platform. One or more courses you joined are on the old platform. Effective June 30, 2016, courses on the old platform will no longer be available. You should use this opportunity to save any relevant course materials or assignments.
That meant I had to finish the course by the end of this month. I'm already on the last lecture -- 'Lecture 11: The Future of Bitcoin' -- with only a 'bonus' lecture to follow, so I should finish in time. In any case, the last lectures are somewhat less interesting than the first, as they deal with topics that are mainly of interest to the academic community.
While working through the lectures, I've noted a few topics worth pursuing on this blog. The first is shown below.
Lecture 7.2 - Bitcoin core software (3:00)
Pictured are a handful of core developers at the time the course was created, around mid-2014. While researching this post, I discovered that the term 'bitcoin core developers' means different things to different people. Exluding Satoshi Nakamoto, the other five are listed on the page
Bitcoin Development
(bitcoin.org), under 'Bitcoin Core contributors (ordered by number of commits)'.
Their names, along with the number of results returned by a Google search are as follows:-
Wladimir van der Laan (10.800 results)
Gavin Andresen (107.000)
Jeff Garzik (42.700)
Gregory Maxwell (84.700)
Pieter Wuille (16.900)
A Reddit.com discussion appeared this week titled
A thank you to Bitcoin Core developers.
Although it's largely political, as is much of the noise around bitcoin, it's a sentiment shared by many.
Trendy names are part of the bitcoin mystique. Here's another one. [Ethereum news story] A Google search on this blog picks up scattered transient references to 'Ethereum', apparently from the embedded news feeds in the right navbar, plus a couple of real references, including News : 2016-03. Time for a separate post on this topic?
Yes, it's time. The main site for the product/service is
Ethereum Project
(ethereum.org). It starts,
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.
Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality. It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. [...]
History:
Ethereum was initially described in a white paper by Russian Canadian Vitalik Buterin, a programmer involved with Bitcoin, in late 2013 with a goal of building decentralized applications. As opposed to other "bitcoin 2.0" projects that were being built on top of the Bitcoin protocol, Ethereum created its own blockchain to provide greater development flexibility by inclusion of a Turing complete programming language.'
The phrase 'Turing complete' is computer science jargon for a full programming language. Also relevant is Wikipedia's
Smart contract:-
Smart contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that make a contractual clause unnecessary. Smart contracts usually also have a user interface and often emulate the logic of contractual clauses.
A new virtual gold rush is underway. Even as Bitcoin, riven by internal divisions, has struggled, a rival virtual currency -- known as Ethereum -- has soared in value, climbing 1,000 percent over the last three months. [...] Since Bitcoin was invented, there have been many so-called alt-coins that have tried to improve on Bitcoin, but none have won the following of Ethereum.
I had already picked up the NYT article in
News : 2016-03,
but neglected to mention Popper. He first appeared in
News : 2016-01:-
[Two] stories were by Nathaniel Popper, writing for NYT's DealBook. Popper is the author of 'Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money' (Harper, 2015).
That's enough for this post. Keywords: smart contracts, gold rush.
Australia also figured in the bitcoin news towards the end of the month.
Australia to sell £8m of seized bitcoins
(bbc.com);
'A collection of bitcoins worth about £8m, which had been confiscated by police in Australia, will be auctioned off in June. The 24,518 bitcoins will be sold mostly in blocks of 2,000 - each with a market value of about £680,000.'
Other sources reported the total value in dollars as a range $12m - $16m, reflecting uncertainty over the pound-to-dollar exchange rate, the dollar-to-bitcoin rate, and the auction bids. The current price of bitcoin is $573. What would I bid for 2,000 of them?
That post 'News : 2016-04' also made the not-so-startling observation that 'web "journalism" is based on lists'. The current post, 'News : 2016-05', once again confirms this.
What's 'Consensus' when you start the word with an upper-case 'C'? The Yahoo article explained, 'The big bitcoin conference Consensus descended on Manhattan this week, and a number of significant companies chose it as a venue to announce news.' Trendy names are part of the bitcoin mystique. Here's another one.
A Google search on this blog picks up scattered transient references to 'Ethereum', apparently from the embedded news feeds in the right navbar, plus a couple of real references, including
News : 2016-03.
Time for a separate post on this topic?
Another story interested me because long ago I made a couple of business trips to the town. It's small stories like this one that make the big picture.
Why a Swiss Tax Haven is Embracing Bitcoin
(fortune.com);
'Zug wants to be "Crypto Valley" : Municipal bosses in the Swiss town of Zug have decided to accept the bitcoin cryptocurrency for payments up to the value to 200 francs ($206), in a new pilot project.'
I'll skip this month's scandals and jump to future months' news.
Both stories will certainly appear in a follow-up news post. And let's not forget the Australian auction -- $573 times 2000 -- suppose I bid an even million? (Australian dollars, of course, because I have no idea what they're worth either. Maybe I should just place my bid in bitcoin myself : 'Bidding 2000 bitcoin for 2000 bitcoin'. Is that really so silly? Do I buy the bitcoin to pay the bitcoin before or after the auction? And how much is the auctioneer's commission?)
How's it going with that 'online bitcoin course', last mentioned in
Going Deeper into Bitcoin
(March 2016)? At that time I wrote,
It took me exactly a week to work through the first two lectures. I'm sure that I won't be able to maintain this pace week after week, and I only skimmed the readings.
I've reached lecture six where I found an interesting image in '6.2 Overview of Bitcoin Deanonymization'. At about 11:40 into the video, the following chart is shown.
Figure 6: A visualization of the user network. The area of the cluster represents the external incoming value; i.e., the bitcoins received from
other clusters but not itself, and for an edge to appear between two nodes there must have been at least 200 transactions between them. The
nodes are colored by category: blue nodes are mining pools; orange are fixed-rate exchanges; green are wallets; red are vendors; purple are
(bank) exchanges; brown are gambling; pink are investment schemes; and grey are uncategorized.
Also interesting -- to me, at least -- are the 16 bitcoin services listed in the chart:-
Adsense is everywhere. A few days ago I was working on a different topic when Google served an ad for bitcoin. I followed it and received something about an MIT white paper. Going further required me to enter an email address and since the ad promised only an 'excerpt' of the document, I stopped there.
Afterwards I started to wonder if I could locate the original document. Using the obvious search terms I discovered
Enigma
(enigma.media.mit.edu).
Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy. Private data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it. [...] Want to dive in the technical details? See our whitepaper!
Sounds interesting, but first I wanted to look into the MIT Media Lab, a group whose name pops up repeatedly in bitcoin discussions. More search terms led to
The Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative.
The goal of the Media Lab Digital Currency initiative is to bring together global experts in areas ranging from cryptography, to economics, to privacy, to distributed systems, to take on this important new area of research.
Anything else of interest from MIT? There's the
MIT Bitcoin Club
(bitcoin.mit.edu; 'Come discover Bitcoin!').
We believe Bitcoin has the potential to be not just a digital currency, but the future of money. While it is still in the early stages, we see Bitcoin as a protocol or platform on which financial and non-financial transactions can be conducted and verified as part of a global public ledger. Bitcoin lies at the intersection of several important academic research areas, including cryptography, distributed computing, graph theory, finance, and economics.
The MIT Bitcoin Club seeks to provide forums where Bitcoin-related ideas, projects, programs, events, and businesses can be studied, discussed, and developed. Through club activities, we seek to increase awareness and use of Bitcoin within and beyond the MIT community.
MIT announced today it has raised $900,000 to fund the work of three bitcoin developers. The Bitcoin Developer Fund, backed by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others is intended to give the three bitcoin coders working to resolve the block-size debate and other similar technical challenges an academic platform from which to work.
These days $900K doesn't buy much development time ('the money will cover salaries, travel and support of bitcoin protocol development efforts'), but with bitcoin evolving so quickly, short time frames are probably best.
The most repeated stories involved a couple of products. The first product was something called 'lightning'. [...] Since neither story explained what 'lightning' is, I'll pursue that in a future post.
The obvious search parameters lead to the product's home page (the term 'service' would be more accurate):
Lightning Network,
'Scalable, Instant Bitcoin/Blockchain Transactions', explained with a 55 minute video. The site's 'How it Works' page explains,
The Lightning Network is dependent upon the underlying technology of the blockchain. By using real Bitcoin/blockchain transactions and using its native smart-contract scripting language, it is possible to create a secure network of participants which are able to transact at high volume and high speed.
The blockchain's increasing size continues to raise concerns about its ability to accommodate transaction growth. But, could a decentralised system where transactions are sent over a network of off-blockchain micropayment channels solve the ledger's scalability problems? Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja, the developers behind the Bitcoin Lightning Network, think so.
That article points to a (much-referenced) white paper, the lightning-network
paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf:-
Abstract:
•
The bitcoin protocol can encompass the global financial transaction volume
in all electronic payment systems today, without a single custodial 3rd party holding
funds or requiring participants to have any more than a computer on a home broadband
connection. A decentralized system is proposed whereby transactions are sent over a
network of micropayment channels (a.k.a. payment channels or transaction channels)
whose transfer of value occurs off-blockchain. If Bitcoin transactions can be signed with
a new sighash type which addresses malleability, these transfers may occur between
untrusted parties along the transfer route by contracts which are enforceable via broadcast
over the bitcoin blockchain in the event of uncooperative or hostile participants, through
a series of decrementing timelocks.
Malleability?
simple.wikipedia.org:
•
Malleability is the ability of a metal to be hammered into thin sheets. Gold and silver are highly malleable. When a piece of hot iron is hammered it takes the shape of a sheet. The property is not seen in non-metals.
The ability of someone to change (mutate) unconfirmed transactions without making them invalid, which changes the transaction’s txid, making child transactions invalid.
For the past several days, the Bitcoin network has been plagued by a so-called “transaction malleability attack.” Bitcoin users have experienced a number of annoyances, causing confusion and frustration. And while the transaction malleability issue is well-known and has plagued the Bitcoin network before, to many it is still unclear what it is, why it is a problem, who is causing the attack right now, and what can be done about it.
That's good to know, but I'm getting off track. Malleability might be an issue, but there are more fundamental concerns. From
Debunking the 11 Most Stubborn Lightning Network Myths
(bitcoinmagazine.com; October 2015, a week after the previous link -- a coincidence?):-
Earlier this year, [Poon & Dryja] released the Lightning Network white paper. In it they theorize how a layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain can allow for instant and cheap bitcoin transactions, while vastly improving its scalability.
As a result of the block-size limit debate, the Lightning Network has been getting a lot of attention lately. But, unfortunately, wild myths have started to dominate the discourse. Suddenly thrown in the middle of a long-lasting conflict of visions, Poon and Dryja's concept is hailed both as the great savior solving all of Bitcoin's problems – and as a source of deep corruption within Bitcoin's development community.
[...]
• Myth #1: Core developers are crippling Bitcoin to force users onto the Lightning Network.
• Myth #2: There is no conflict of interest for the Core developers employed by Blockstream.
[...]
• Myth #11: The Lightning Network is urgently needed.
That's enough for now. I might not know how Lightning works in detail, but I know enough to understand that it's controversial. I'll let the controversies play out and come back to the subject if its evolution merits a deeper look.
