Noesis Wallet

Self-custody wallet with crypto intelligence in plain English.
Keys stay on your device.

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

We're live and available on the Apple App Store! Enjoy!
https://t.co/3anxSd81cm

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Bitcoin has a bug that lets a majority miner drag difficulty to its floor in about 38 days.

The trick is timestamps. Difficulty compares the first and last block times of each period, but nothing ties the first block's time to the block before it.

BIP-54 proposes the fix.

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

9 years ago today, Bitcoin forked to bring back GPU mining.

Bitcoin Gold split off at block 491,407 on Oct 24, 2017. It swapped SHA-256 for Equihash, so a gaming graphics card could compete with ASIC farms again.

Did ASIC-resistance ever really work for any coin?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

The Bitcoin whitepaper turns 18 next week. It never uses the word "blockchain."

Satoshi wrote "chain of blocks" and "proof-of-work chain." Early code said "block chain," two words. The fused term came later, once people wanted the tech without the coin.

Who closed the gap?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

12 years ago today, the Bitcoin sidechains paper came out. It even named an opcode: OP_SIDECHAINPROOFVERIFY, a spare no-op repurposed by soft fork.

It was never added. The paper's stopgap, a federation holding the BTC, still runs the big sidechains. Will it ever land?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

In 7 weeks it'll be 16 years since Satoshi's last public forum post.

Dec 12, 2010. Topic: denial-of-service attacks. Final line: "There's more work to do on DoS, but I'm doing what I can."

An unfinished to-do list, then silence. It ended on routine maintenance.

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

17 years ago this month, Martti Malmi sold 5,050 bitcoin for $5.02 over PayPal, one of the first dollar-for-BTC trades ever. Roughly a tenth of a cent each. It's how the first exchange got its starting coins.

What's the oldest crypto trade you remember making?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Bitcoin's hashrate just crossed ~1,100 EH/s. Nobody actually measures it.

No node sees a miner's hashes. The number is inferred: difficulty × 2³² ÷ seconds per block, averaged over recent blocks.

The network's most-quoted stat is a statistical estimate. Is there a better way?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

One Bitcoin miner solved a block and took nothing.

Block 124,724 (2010) could have paid 50 BTC. Its coinbase claimed zero, so those coins never existed. Unclaimed rewards just vanish from the supply.

It's happened a few times since. Why would anyone leave it behind?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Five years ago this week, the first US Bitcoin ETF started trading. It didn't hold a single bitcoin.

ProShares' BITO owned futures contracts instead, and drew ~$1B in its first two days. Spot ETFs took another 27 months. Did the workaround change anything?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Bitcoin's next halving, in 2028, will be the 5th: 3.125 → 1.5625 BTC.

Every halving is an exact half until the 10th, ~2048. 50 BTC = 5,000,000,000 sats = 2⁹ × 9,765,625. Then the number goes odd and the code rounds down.

Who's still mining then?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Jan 2012: an anonymous 4chan post invited "intelligent individuals" to solve a puzzle. It ran through steganography and PGP, ending in a book called Liber Primus.

Almost 15 years on, most of it is unread. Cicada 3301 never unmasked. A cypherpunk recruiting drive?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Two weeks from now, Bitcoin's first ATM turns 13.

It sat in a Vancouver coffee shop, Waves Coffee House, switching on Oct 29, 2013. Reportedly $1M in volume within a month.

For plenty of people, a café kiosk was the first place they ever held bitcoin. Where was yours?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Bitcoin's difficulty can never move more than 4x in a single adjustment, up or down. The code clamps the measured two-week timespan to between 1/4 and 4x of target.

If 90% of miners vanished, blocks would crawl at ~100 minutes each until the next retarget. Would you wait it out?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Mt. Gox's repayment deadline is currently Oct 31, 2026 — under three weeks out. It's already been pushed back twice.

As of June, the trustee still held ~34,500 BTC from the 2014 collapse. Twelve years of creditors waiting.

Does it get extended a third time?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

The first Bitcoin ETF application came from the Winklevoss twins, filed in July 2013.

The SEC said no in 2017. Spot approval only came in January 2024 — over a decade of "no."

Wall Street's biggest Bitcoin door was first pushed by two rowers. Who else waited that long?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Nine years ago next week, Ethereum's Byzantium fork went live at block 4,370,000. It cut the mining reward from 5 ETH to 3 and added precompiles for elliptic-curve pairing, which made verifying zk-SNARKs on-chain affordable. Underrated upgrade in zk's story. Agree?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

18 years ago this month, Satoshi sent the Bitcoin whitepaper to a cryptography mailing list. It cites 8 sources, including Hashcash and b-money.

It never mentions Nick Szabo's bit gold, the closest ancestor of all. Oversight, or on purpose? Anyone have a theory?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

"When lambo" has an origin story, and it's real.

Dec 2013, the first time Bitcoin topped $1,000, an anonymous buyer reportedly paid ~217 BTC at a Newport Beach Lamborghini dealer and posted proof on 4chan.

The joke began as a receipt. Anyone know where that car ended up?

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

@eastern_oa @MitchellHeins Serious question for you - why are all the whales dumping BTC? They’ve been dumping for months.

[Noesis Wallet @NoesisWallet]

Bitcoin Script has a "negative zero."

Numbers on its stack are stored sign-magnitude, so 0x80 means -0. It's a different byte string than 0x00, yet the script engine treats both as false. Same value, two encodings.

A quirk every script has had to live with since 2009.