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New on LearnBitcoin: Bitcoin's history on one timeline.
61 dated events, from the whitepaper in 2008 to this year. Each one links to the page that tells the story, and to the source its date was checked against.
https://t.co/uDmLVxg9da
Each event has its own link, so you can send someone straight to a date.
We will post a few new events on their anniversaries. The next one is tomorrow.
Pieter Wuille on why the time warp is worse than an ordinary 51% attack:
“it allows a majority of the hashrate that colludes to steal subsidy from future miners”
In our simulation that’s about 888,300 BTC, 113 years of block rewards, pulled forward, on paper at least.
@BitcoinNewsCom Bitcoin’s version of that number is in the code: 3.125 BTC a block, about 450 a day, roughly 0.8% a year, and about half that after the 2028 halving.
This week it’s a little lower still. Blocks are running at 10.8 minutes, so about 420 a day until Friday’s retarget.
@bokiko@AntPoolofficial What filled it: about 9 in 10 were one tiny transaction, repeated in chains. Each spends a pay-to-anchor output, mints the UNCOMMON•GOODS rune in an OP_RETURN, and passes the anchor on with 1 sat less.
@QmoCrypto The catch: halvings also land every four years, so every midterm year so far has also been the second year after a halving. The chart can’t say which one is doing the work.
And 2010 was a midterm too: about 9 cents in July, 30 cents by December.
How a multisig setup spreads that risk across keys and places: https://t.co/LG2sXvV6QR
And the honest trade-offs of letting someone else hold your coins: https://t.co/7yMeNHO7UA
The fine print: only authorized participants can redeem IBIT shares with the trust. Put coins in and you hold a brokerage position. To get coins back you sell shares and buy again. If the worry is one key or one location, multisig answers that without a custodian.
JUST IN: The world's largest asset manager BlackRock says demand is surging to convert self-custodied bitcoin into ETF shares, citing security concerns 👀
@TFTC21 Same math on market cap is a bit kinder. About 1.24M more coins exist now than at that high (18.87M then, 20.11M today), so in real terms the whole network is about 5% below its 2021 peak, not 11%.
Check any retarget yourself against block headers: https://t.co/y0UPPgYUgD
Those timestamps are also the weak point. How a miner with most of the hash rate could lie about them: https://t.co/E2pULGSlgp
Bitcoin is on pace for its biggest difficulty cut since June.
The current window is 73% done and blocks are averaging 10.7 minutes, so the retarget at block 975,744, due around Friday, is tracking about -6.5%.
Nobody votes on it. Every node works it out from two timestamps.
Antoine Poinsot (@darosior), one of BIP-54's authors, reproduced our worst seam with Bitcoin Core itself, running BIP-54's time warp check over the whole chain.
Block 203,616, October 2012: stamped 18 min 47 s earlier than the block before it. Same answer, to the second.
New rabbit hole: The Time Warp.
Bitcoin sets its own difficulty from timestamps that miners write themselves. One line in Satoshi's 2009 code leaves a seam a miner with most of the hash rate could use to drive difficulty to the minimum. Nobody has used it on Bitcoin, and it has been open since 2011.
https://t.co/d7t4KNuClM