A wave passes and fills the pool Thousands of transactions accumulate Little wriggling, self-centered fish Just waiting to be caught With a powerful stroke of the net A Mentat catches them and gathers them in a basket. Carrying the basket at eye level He analyzes, thinks, weighs He computes and calculates In a flash of lucidity he guesses their true name The one that, revealed, will make all the others cry out:...
One of our most prominent voices in the Bitcoin ecosystem in France is Jacques Favier. Having been a historian before becoming a Bitcoiner, Jacques often has a very interesting point of view on many aspects of the revolution we’re seeing happen before our eyes. When asked about what money is, Jacques often answers that the moneyness of any good cannot be analysed separately from the space in which this good is presumably used as money....
NFC seems to be all over Bitcoin Twitter recently, between Square/Spiral annoucement of a NFC enabled hardware wallet, Coinkite teasing their Satscard and Coin Corner messing around with hilarious NFC Lightning payment demos. What the hell is NFC? NFC stants for Near Field Communication. It leverages one of the most elegant physical phenomenon Mother Nature gave us1 to enable communication between two devices that are very close to each other. A varying current in one circuit creates a magnetic field which in turn induces a current in the other circuit....
Last week’s article dealt with Turbo Channels. Today, I’ll cover Hosted Channels, another kind of channels that seek to enhance the Lightning channels UX while staying in line with the specification and mitigating the required tradeoffs. Not on-chain enforceable channels The big difference between a hosted channel and a regular Lightning channel is that the former is not enforceable on-chain, simply because there is no channel opening transaction to spend from....
Today’s article is a fun one. The story it describes is not new, but it has resurfaced recently following a blog post by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG). A story of how a group of criminals has used (and, to the extent to what we know, still uses) Bitcoin in a quite unexpected way: to send data to their malware. Its name was Glupteba Quoting Google, Glupteba is “known to steal user credentials and cookies, mine cryptocurrencies on infected hosts, deploy and operate proxy components targeting Windows systems and IoT devices”....