July 15, 2024
Mining Pool Behavior during Forks
I have recently been looking at mining pool behavior during forks. Which block does a pool choose to mine on during a fork? Do they behave rationally and mine on their own block? In this post, I’ll detail the mining pool behavior during forks and give some recent examples of pool behavior.
March 28, 2024
Update on LinkingLion: Reduced activity and a statement by LionLink Networks
This is an update on the LinkingLion entity, presumably linking Bitcoin transactions to IP addresses, I published about a year ago. Yesterday, LionLink Networks AS issued a statement on their non-affiliation with the LinkingLion entity and on the same day, LinkingLion activity significantly dropped.
March 20, 2024
Vulnerability Disclosure: Wasting ViaBTC's 60 EH/s hashrate by sending a P2P message
In January, while investigating a misbehaving client on the Bitcoin P2P network, I found a vulnerability in ViaBTC’s, the fourth largest Bitcoin mining pool, SPV mining code that allowed a remote attacker to waste ViaBTC’s 60 EH/s hashrate by sending a single, crafted Bitcoin P2P …
September 18, 2022
Are you a real Bitcoiner?
It’s well known that you are only a real Bitcoiner if you are a carnivore, eat red meat at least three times a week but never consume seed oils, lift heavy weights, are straight, white, unvaccinated, believe in the Christian god, got into Bitcoin before 2015, are a maximalist, stack sats …
January 17, 2022
Extracting the Private Key from Schnorr Signatures that reuse a Nonce
Elliott (aka @robot__dreams) posted a Bitcoin-flavored cryptography challenge on Twitter. The goal is to extract the private key from two Schnorr signatures that reuse a nonce. I’ve recently reviewed and merged Kalle Rosenbaum’s cross-post of his Schnorr Basics post to bitcoin-dev.blog. …
August 30, 2021
Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support for Bitcoin Core
This report updates on what 0xB10C, Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient, has been working on over the first half of his year-long Bitcoin development grant. This specifically covers his work on Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support for Bitcoin Core. This report was published on …
July 23, 2021
On anyone-can-spend Pay-to-Taproot outputs before activation
While working on taproot support for transactionfee.info, it became apparent that there already exist a few Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) outputs on mainnet. Anyone can spend these outputs, but they are non-standard and thus not relayed between nodes in the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. However, a mining …
November 10, 2020
Evolution of the signature size in Bitcoin
Digital signatures are an essential building block of the Bitcoin protocol and account for a large part of the data stored on the blockchain. We detail how the size of the encoded ECDSA signatures reduced multiple times over the last years and how the proposed Schnorr signature compares to the …
October 10, 2019
Frequently Asked Questions: Bitcoin Transaction Monitor
The Bitcoin Transaction Monitor provides deeper insights into the usage of the Bitcoin network by showing transactions by time and feerate. This post answers frequently asked questions about the Bitcoin Transaction Monitor itself.
August 4, 2019
The Incomplete History of Bitcoin Development
To fully understand the rationale behind the current state of Bitcoin development, knowledge about historical events is essential. This blog post highlights selected historical events, software releases and bug fixes before and after Satoshi left the project. It additionally contains a section about …
June 29, 2019
A List of Public Bitcoin Feerate Estimation APIs
My search for a list of public Bitcoin feerate estimation APIs ended without any real results. Jameson Lopp has a section on feerate estimators on his bitcoin.page and Antoine Le Calvez’s dashboard txstats.com provides a visualization of different estimation APIs. But that is not what I was …
March 18, 2018
Plotting the Bitcoin Feerate Distribution
How did the median Bitcoin feerate evolve from 2013 to 2015? When were the feerate spikes in 2017? Visualizing the Bitcoin feerate distribution per block was on my todo list since I’ve started working on the first version of my mempool.observer project in mid-2017. But acquiring the data …
