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?

Going Deeper into Bitcoin

I ended my previous post, Online Bitcoin Course, with a task to accomplish.

About ten minutes into the first video, I suddenly realized I wasn't understanding the lecture. Then when I reached the end, I couldn't answer the first question. Looks like I'll have to apply some real brainpower to this thing if I want to make it work.

It turned out that I had a preconceived idea about a piece of the logic underlying bitcoin that contained a misperception on my part. Once I recognized this and eliminated it, the rest was easier. The course's 'Welcome' section says,

This week, your main tasks are to watch lectures 1 and 2 and to complete the embedded quizzes. [...] We also encourage you to read the book chapters that closely follow the lectures. For technically complex explanations, you may find it helpful to use the text and go at your own pace.

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.

The 'Welcome' section points to another resource, Bitcoin.org - Open source P2P money, that I don't remember seeing before. I'll look at this another time.

Online Bitcoin Course

At the end of my previous post, Bitcoin at Princeton, I noted a free online course Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. The signup page says,

There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin, but also a lot of confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We’re offering this course focusing on the computer science behind Bitcoin to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique.

The signup process was quick and within minutes I was watching the first video.

'Welcome to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies'

The course starts with 'Lecture 1: Intro to Crypto and Cryptocurrencies', where the first video is 'Cryptographic Hash Functions'. I have a degree in math and computer science and have worked all of my professional career with various aspects of computing. About ten minutes into the first video, I suddenly realized I wasn't understanding the lecture. Then when I reached the end, I couldn't answer the first question. Looks like I'll have to apply some real brainpower to this thing if I want to make it work.

Bitcoin at Princeton

In my previous post, Bitcoin in the News : 2016-02, there was another news item worth special mention: Crypto connoisseurs - Curl up with Princeton's 300-page ode to Bitcoin (theregister.co.uk).

It points to princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf, 'Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies' by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder, with a preface by Jeremy Clark, ('Draft — Feb 9, 2016'). Since the draft doesn't include a table of contents, I constructed one myself (with page numbers):-

003 Preface — The Long Road to Bitcoin
023 Chapter 1: Introduction to Cryptography & Cryptocurrencies
051 Chapter 2: How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization
075 Chapter 3: Mechanics of Bitcoin
101 Chapter 4: How to Store and Use Bitcoins
131 Chapter 5: Bitcoin Mining
165 Chapter 6: Bitcoin and Anonymity
194 Chapter 7: Community, Politics, and Regulation
216 Chapter 8: Alternative Mining Puzzles
237 Chapter 9: Bitcoin as a Platform
265 Chapter 10: Altcoins and the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
293 Chapter 11: Decentralized Institutions: The Future of Bitcoin?
307 Conclusion to the book
308 About the authors

The preface includes the following chart.

Notable electronic payment systems and proposals

A second link in The Register article worth noting is 'Narayanan's free online Bitcoin course': Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (coursera.org).

Bitcoin in the News : 2016-02

After spending most of my February posts on 'Bitcoin in the News : 2016-01' -- Predictions, More++, and Davos -- the month of February itself offered no dominant news themes. Except for the continuing debate on the so-called 'hard fork', the few repeated stories I found were tied together geographically.

Europe:

• Europe wants end to anonymous Bitcoin transactions (theregister.co.uk)
• Here's Why Europe Is About To Crack Down On Bitcoin Anonymity (fortune.com)

China:

• China's Role In Bitcoin: How Cultural Differences Are Affecting The Technology's Progress (forbes.com)
• Why the Great Firewall of China Is Causing Serious Issues for Bitcoin Miners (nasdaq.com)

Russia:

• Putin Advisor: Accepting Bitcoin Payments in Russia is a Crime (coindesk.com)
• Russian Narcotics Claim Bitcoin has Doubled-Up Drug Trades (newsbtc.com)

Japan:

• Japan Considers Deeming Bitcoin as a Currency (cryptocoinsnews.com)
• Japan considers making bitcoin a legal currency (theguardian.com)

Those second Europe and China stories, 'Why Europe Is About To Crack Down...' and 'Why the Great Firewall of China...', are typical of many bitcoin stories. I'll call them the 'Why?' stories.

• Why Bitcoin Will Thrive First in the Developing World (wired.com) • 'send money across borders without paying the steep fees charged by traditional gatekeepers like Western Union'
• Why Bitcoin Looked Much More Grown Up This week (nasdaq.com) • 'bitcoin behaved just like any other currency and strengthened against a weakening dollar'
• Why the Banks See Bitcoin as their Number One Enemy (huffingtonpost.com) • 'bitcoin is something they can`t control because the system works without a central repository'
• The Fifth Amendment and Bitcoin: Why the Battle is About to Begin (coindesk.com) • 'whether the Fifth Amendment protects a person from government compelled disclosure of his or her bitcoin private key or keys'
• What Apple's Privacy Fight Means For Bitcoin (nasdaq.com) • 'the anonymous nature of bitcoin and to what extent, if any, that should be sacrificed for public safety and security'

Those last two stories are related. It's curious that the 'Why?' stories can all be reduced to a single 'Because' sentence.