Deep reorgs protection

Before I started working with Bitcoin I had worked in a Fintech company that built tools for traders. When I first got there the IT team was very proud of the stability of the platform. I asked how they did maintenance and the answer was: after market close. Which is when I learned that most of the financial tech had to keep their systems up only about 10 hours every day. Continue reading

My report on the Instant Transactions Workshop

In the past week the very well organised workshop for instant transactions (also called zero-conf) took place in lovely Italy where we had 3 days with a schedule packed with the main goal of aligning the views of the different implementer and players in the Bitcoin Cash space. Practically all Bitcoin Cash node implementer were represented with actual developers present. This meant the discussions went from high level to quite intense technical detail. Continue reading

Everything you know about (Bitcoin) wallets is wrong

In Bitcoin Cash the level of innovation is amazing, and we have several wallets that used to be for Bitcoin Core that have now been made compatible with Bitcoin Cash. The problem is that new wallets coming to market are essentially doing the same as the old wallets, with very minor changes. And here is the thing, all current wallets are doing it wrong. The first wallet that existed was the one that Satoshi put in the full node software. Continue reading

Flowee just got easier to build

Flowee is about helping creators to connect to Bitcoin (BCH). In today’s world we still are missing a lot of very useful components which allow us to integrate Bitcoin into every day life. Creators are the ones coming in and building those solutions. Today I finished a little project (took me almost a week) to upgrade the Flowee the Hub git repository so it can be build using cmake. An action taken after having seen too many people fail at the building step. Continue reading

Are SPV payments safe?

There are still a lot of misconceptions out about SPV wallets, people make it seem like they are less useful than they are, and this is a shame.

SPV wallets are wallets with “Simplified Payment Verification”. A term that actually shows up in the original Bitcoin whitepaper from Satoshi Nakamoto.

The trick is that SPV wallets (which in practice is almost all wallets) check all the Bitcoin blocks, validate if the miners did their work but they do not download and check all the transactions. This limits the download and check of the entire 8 year blockchain to about 39 MB. Pretty neat eh?

So, what are people worried about?

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Flowee the Hub

My motivation for working on Bitcoin is actually several decades old. In one of my first jobs we had some consultants visit us explaining all the ins and outs of a retirement plan. As most people young and naive do, I signed up for monthly payments. When less than a year later the company went under I tried to recover the funds paid and to my surprise there was only maybe 10% left of it. Continue reading