Bitcoin is never in the middle. It is either first or last. That is not bad. It means people are paying attention to bitcoin all the time. You do not want to own the asset nobody has an opinion about.
On 25 September 2011, developer Amir Taaki suggested on the Bitcoin development mailing list that Bitcoin’s formal change documents should be called Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs).
The BIP process is the public specification system used to propose, discuss, and document changes to Bitcoin.
Individual BIPs are numbered papers covering protocol rules, peer-to-peer behavior, wallet standards, and process conventions.
Later upgrades such as Segregated Witness and Taproot were specified through this system.
Taaki’s idea is still used 15 years later.
The documents live in an open repository, are debated in public, and are adopted only if implementations and the network follow them.
The mailing-list note did not create Bitcoin’s governance. It named one of the formats through which that governance is written down.
An attacker broke into three hot wallets and one cold wallet, swapping everything into ETH within minutes, some of it at 5% above market price. Those wallets still hold $530 million.
Developers just figured out a way to hide who sent bitcoin, who received it, and how much moved, without changing Bitcoin itself.
This new proposed idea is not a fork around the protocol or new cryptocurrency. This is how Bitcoin was designed, a base layer people can innovate on without asking permission.
On Thursday, researcher Misha Komarov and colleagues published Shielded Bitcoin, a Zcash-style shielded pool for Bitcoin’s base layer.
Encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs ride along in ordinary Bitcoin transactions. Separate software checks that no coins are created from nothing and none are spent twice.
There is no company running the pool, no sidechain, and no soft fork. Funds go in and out through cryptographic vaults Komarov has been building, called PIPEs, so no federation has to hold the bitcoin.
Miners do not enforce the privacy rules. Invalid shielded data can still land in a block, indexers simply ignore it.
The trade is: Bitcoin stays conservative, and the experiment lives on top of it. If it works, private transfers arrive the way most of Bitcoin’s best ideas have, not by rewriting the constitution, but by building on the settlement layer everyone already trusts.
A difficult concept to wrap your head around is that a bitcoin can be divided into ever smaller units as needed, so it remains usable no matter how large the population becomes.
Even with a global population of a trillion people on Earth, anyone can send or receive amounts of any size because the unit itself can be split further and further, and further.
0.0000000001 bitcoins
The software could retain precision that its interface did not display. Satoshi Nakamoto discouraged developers from relying on those extra displayed digits: “I would not encourage using the extra decimal places. They’re only intended for future use.” He explained that a recipient would see the amount rounded down in the interface. This concerned precision beyond the client’s two displayed decimal places, not an extension beyond Bitcoin’s eight-decimal accounting.
Since this post by Satoshi on September 23rd, 2010, the price of bitcoin has increased exponentially and many people now use additional decimal places. $BTC
Forum user NeonFlash had just discovered bitcoin on September 19, 2011. They were using a Radeon 6770M graphics card, mining bitcoin at about 80 million hashes per second.
A calculator estimated approximately 0.046 bitcoin a day, 1.393 BTC a month, or 16.74 bitcoin a year.
They thought the new graphics card should do better and asked how other people managed to earn ten or fifteen bitcoins daily.
P4man eventually answered:
“In short, like me, you joined too late.”
They would have made $1,365,118 that year based on today’s current market price of 16.74 bitcoin.
The oldest producer of clean renewable electricity in the United States, Mechanicville Hydroelectric was saved by bitcoin mining.
The Mechanicville hydroelectric plant in New York dates to 1897. It was built on the Hudson River to supply electricity to General Electric’s operations in Schenectady. The company has since long abandoned the facility.
In 2021, the hydroelectric dam could not make a profit and was going to be decommissioned. Bitcoin mining fixed that when the CEO decided to use some of the electricity to run Bitcoin miners.
CEO Jim Besha said selling power to the grid brought in three cents per kilowatt-hour. Bitcoin mining brought in approximately three times as much.
He was buying used mining equipment and converting the bitcoin into cash rather than keeping it as an investment. This saved the facility.
DNA, the building blocks and foundational structure of life itself, can store computer data by translating information into sequences of its four chemical letters.
In January of 2015, geneticist Nick Goldman distributed tubes of synthetic DNA at Davos. The encoded files included the private key to 1 bitcoin.
Participants had three years to sequence the DNA and recover it. Belgian doctoral student Sander Wuyts solved the challenge shortly before the January 2018 deadline.
His first attempts failed because of an erroneous line in his decoding program, but removing it produced the files and the spendable key.
In September of 2014, a Finnish project called Kryptoradio began broadcasting the Bitcoin blockchain through the local television network.
The initial announcement described transmissions from ninety broadcast stations. The signal included bitcoin transactions, blocks, and exchange-rate information.
A receiver could follow the Bitcoin network without an ordinary internet connection. By November, the broadcast network used for the trial covered approximately 95% of Finland’s population.
It was a one-way service: receiving Bitcoin data through a television signal did not automatically provide a way to send transactions back.
The trial ended in December 2014, and the project subsequently reported that it lacked funding to continue. $BTC
A developer mined bitcoin on an Apple II, a home computer built in 1983 with an eight-bit processor.
Bitcoin’s hashing algorithm uses thirty-two-bit operations, so the program had to construct those operations from smaller pieces.
Programmer Peter Ferrie helped optimize the code until it reached approximately 3.8 hashes per second.
A modern Mac obtained mining work and passed it to the Apple II through a virtual floppy disk over a serial connection. A low-resolution Bitcoin symbol rotated when new work arrived.
The developer estimated an average of 256 trillion years to find a block at the difficulty then prevailing.
This website in June of 2010 gave away five bitcoin at a time for free. Yes, completely for free.
The developer stocked it with 1,100 bitcoin and the initial limit was five bitcoin per IP address. They wanted the website to be simple way to learn about bitcoin.
One visitor collected five bitcoin, felt bad, and donated fifty. Another used Tor to collect fifty in minutes, then returned them and explained how he had done it.
Two days after opening, the faucet held 1,570 bitcoin. People were donating faster than it was giving the coins away.
There was a time in history when you couldn’t even give away bitcoins for free because people thought they had no value.