Bitcoin Price Widget

What's a bitcoin blog without a bitcoin price display? Earlier this month, in Bitcoin in the News : 2016-03, I noted,

This blog's news feed (in the right navbar) has become problematic -- occasionally disappearing -- and the 'Bitcoin Price Widget' (ditto) has stopped functioning.

The news feed comes and goes, and is generally reliable, but the price widget (based on Bitcoin Price; weusecoins.com) hasn't updated for weeks. I've been displaying it since the post on 'Bitcoin Buy Online Books' (7 November 2015).

What else is available? Using the title of this post as a search term, I discovered quite a few and finally decided to use Bitcoin Price and News Widget (cryptocoinsnews.com; CCN). The news feed returns only stories from the CCN site, so it should supplememnt the Google news feed, which is general news (when it's working).

2015 Hong Kong Conference

At the end of my previous post, Bitcoin in the News : Satoshi Roundtable, I gave myself the action to look into the meaning of 'Segregated Witness'. While doing that I discovered a couple of posts on the domain gavinandresen.ninja ('Bitcoin developer. All-around geek.') that offer insights by a bitcoin insider.

• Segregated Witness Is Cool (December 2015)
• Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts (March 2016)

That first post links to 'a fantastic presentation on "Segregated Witness" in Hong Kong' by Pieter Wuille, which I embed here.

Scaling Bitcoin - Hong Kong (5:09:16) • 'Streamed live on 6 December 2015'

The presentation starts around 36:00 into the clip. I noted three other related videos on Youtube and tried to put them in order for later viewing; the running time is listed to differentiate them.

• 1:42:17; Day 1 AM, stream starts 15:30
• 2:58:12; Day 1 AM, stream starts 08:00; 'welcome back'
• 3:17:29; Day 1 PM, stream starts 16:11; 'mining panel'
• 5:09:16; Day 2 AM, stream starts 33:30; (agenda displayed 35:35)

The sponsor(?) of the conference is shown as 'Cyberport'. The Wuille presentation is laden with jargon and uses a few acronyms -- UTXO set, P2SH compatible, give time for IBLT, write BIP -- that I need to define. No surprise there. I'll do that in another post. No surprise there either.

Bitcoin in the News : Satoshi Roundtable

My previous post, Bitcoin in the News : 2016-03, mentioned a 'Satoshi Roundtable', but what exactly is that? Google points to SatoshiRoundtable.org, a page titled 'Satoshi Roundtable | Private Retreat'.

What is Satoshi Roundtable? • It’s a small group of leaders involved in Blockchain technology: developers, CEOs, investors early adopters etc. who meet for a weekend retreat. Private, without the distractions of media, pitches and crowds of a typical event. Dates for Satoshi Roundtable II are Feb 26-28, at a resort in North America. Limited to 75 members.

The list of 'Confirmed 2016 Participants' must be a Who's Who of the bitcoin space, with cottage-industry-looking-for-venture-capital written all over it. The only organizations with general name recognition might be Bain Capital [Ventures] and Fidelity Investments.

A sub-page, 'Satoshi Roundtable in the News', lists five reports, including one of the links from my 'News : 2016-03' post: TechCrunch.com's After the Satoshi Roundtable, is there a way to bridge the bitcoin divide?. It explains,

The Rift • The opposing views of those advocating for preserving the current implementation of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Core), and those who believe that the block size needs to be increased immediately to overcome scalability challenges, has balkanized the Bitcoin developer community into mainly two camps. [...] As Matt Corallo put it: 'At this point, however, the entire Bitcoin community seems to have unified around a single vision – roughly 2MB of transactions per block, whether via Segregated Witness or via a hard fork, is something that can be both technically supported and which adds more headroom before second-layer technologies must be in place.'

Down the rabbit hole! What on earth is 'Segregated Witness'? Ditto for 'second-layer technologies'. I'll come back to this in another post.

Bitcoin in the News : 2016-03

Unlike the previous news post, Bitcoin in the News : 2016-02, where there were no dominant news themes, the past month had a stunner.

• Bitcoin's nightmare scenario has come to pass (theverge.com) • Subtitled: 'The network's capacity to process transactions has maxed out'
• Bitcoin Transactions Get Stranded as Cryptocurrency Maxes Out (technologyreview.com)
• Transaction Bottleneck Could Kill Bitcoin, NYU Academic Warns (cryptocoinsnews.com)

That first link, 'Bitcoin's nightmare scenario', reported,

The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes.

along with a link to support the math. The problem appears to be related to the 'hard fork' debate, and a few other reports mentioned a 'Satoshi Roundtable' to tackle the issue.

• After the Satoshi Roundtable, is there a way to bridge the bitcoin divide? (techcrunch.com)
• Coinbase’s Armstrong Urges Switch To Bitcoin Classic To Fix Scaling Disaster (cryptocoinsnews.com)

If that wasn't enough to discourage bitcoin enthusiasts, the usual doubts added fuel to the fire.

• Dealing With Fraud In The Bitcoin World (forbes.com)
• Is Bitcoin the New Swiss Bank Account (And Is That a Problem?) (nasdaq.com)

Wherever there is money there is fraud, and wherever there is fraud there is money. Bitcoin enables another dark side of the information age: ransomware.

• State-Sponsored Chinese Hackers Deploy Bitcoin Ransomware En Masse (newsbtc.com)
• What Came First, Bitcoin or Ransomware? (newsbtc.com)

While bitcoin teetered on the brink of the abyss, interest in the blockchain continued unabated.

• As Banks Embrace Blockchains, Bitcoin Is Getting Left Behind (fortune.com)
• Bitcoin - A solution to the ad-blockers? (cnbc.com; micropayments)

If bitcoin ultimately fails, there are plenty of parallel concepts to fill any gap it might leave.

• Ethereum, a Virtual Currency, Enables Transactions That Rival Bitcoin’s (nytimes.com)

Closer to home, this blog's news feed (in the right navbar) has become problematic -- occasionally disappearing -- and the 'Bitcoin Price Widget' (ditto) has stopped functioning. Signs of the bitcoin times?