About author: Christine Chiang

If you have heard of an ICO, chances are someone was trying to sell you a “coin” that sounded like bitcoin but cheaper, faster, and better. Diving into the ICO phenomenon that is quickly gaining in popularity amongst blockchain startups, BTCManager had a conversation with the man who started it all. Brock Pierce is a venture capitalist and something of…

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Bitcoin has a problem; the demand for Bitcoin far outweighs the bandwidth of transaction throughput that the network can sustain. The Bitcoin “highway” is constrained at 1MB per block, or one single analogous lane, which permits a “speed limit” of between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second. For comparison, VISA verifies transactions at a rate of 2000 per second, which…

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The Bitcoin community is at risk of bifurcation in all senses of the word. We are now witnessing a contentious political split between “small blockers” and “big blockers” while simultaneously facing the possibility of a hard fork. On the afternoon of March 14, SegWit “small block” supporters aimed, fired, and reloaded round after round of 150 character tweets, aimed at…

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The blockchain gold rush is among us, and those at the fore are infected with the “fever,” racing to secure prominent roles in the revolution ahead. Among the droves seeking to ensure future profitability in staking claims to the open-source technology, our favorite major banks, and payment networks have been diligently pushing through blockchain-related patents. Not to be left out,…

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BTC.com successfully completed midwife duties for the very first Bcoin block that made it onto Bitcoin’s mainnet. Block #457010 timestamped 04:30:51 on March 13 was found; some blocks were orphaned in the making. On February 10, Bcoin, Purse.io’s Bitcoin full node reimplementation of the Bitcoin consensus protocol, was publicly released into the wild. BitPagos had been the first to run…

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“Holy shit, this is really bad,” wrote one Redditor reacting to the CloudFlare bug discovered on February 17 by Tavis Ormandy, a Project Zero vulnerability researcher at Google. The bug that was detected had been dumping confusing chunks of data “interspersed with valid data” for almost four months between September 22, 2016, and February 18, 2017, before it was caught…

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The developmental landscape for smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) is rife with the challenges of several key issues; interoperability, governance, open standardization, technical infrastructure, and secure exchange functionality. The 0x Project is an attempt to address these problems. As pointed out in the white paper, “While 0x is fundamentally a network protocol used to facilitate signaling between buyers and…

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In the context of Satoshi Nakamoto’s early warning to Gavin Andresen in 2010 on Bitcointalk against building minority versions of the Bitcoin protocol, secondary implementations were at the time dubbed “menace” to the network. “I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly…

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People in the mainstream segment of the United States have, by now, at least heard about Bitcoin. But many still hold reservations about the digital currency and its legality, since the US government has not explicitly given its verdict. Even without government permission, bitcoin, the currency, and its decentralized nature do not give away a single point of failure for…

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In 2016, the United States saw the Dakota Access Pipeline protests unfold and resolve over the course of many months. After a drawn out event, which can only be described as a human struggle involving sacrifice, courage, and resolve, a key component to the protest’s success was the collective’s opt-out of the banking system which funded the corporations behind the…

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