BEST OF BITCOIN MAGAZINE

MAKING BITCOIN MORE PRIVATE

Bitcoin is not private, it is merely pseudonymous. But, with the importance of privacy baked directly into its core ideals, many Bitcoiners have developed powerful privacy-enhancing techniques for use in combination with the base technology.

• Taproot
  • Taproot Is Coming: What It Is, and How It Will Benefit Bitcoin
  • Graftroot: How Delegating Signatures Allows for Near-Infinite Spending Variations
  • Building on Taproot: Payment Pools Could Be Bitcoin’s Next Layer Two Protocol
  • Taproot Merged Into Bitcoin Core
• CoinJoin
  • CoinJoin’s First Steps: How Dark Wallet Paved the Way for a More Private Bitcoin
  • CoinJoin: Combining Bitcoin Transactions To Obfuscate Trails And Increase Privacy
  • Do CoinJoins Really Require Equal Transaction Amounts for Privacy? Part One: CashFusion
  • Do CoinJoin Mixes Really Require Equal Transaction Amounts for Privacy? Part Two: Knapsack
• Confidential Transactions
  • Confidential Transactions: How Hiding Transaction Amounts Increases Bitcoin Privacy
  • Bitcoin Privacy: “Confidential Transactions” Feature Can Fix Some of CoinJoin’s Problems
• Schnorr Signatures
  • The Power of Schnorr: The Signature Algorithm to Increase Bitcoin’s Scale and Privacy
• Additional Options
  • Paying Yourself? Self-Payments Could Be a Key to Lightning Privacy
  • SNICKER: How Alice and Bob Can Mix Bitcoin With No Interaction
  • How Payswap Can Confuse Blockchain Analysts, Benefiting Bitcoin Privacy for All
  • The Anatomy of Anonymity: How Dandelion Could Make Bitcoin More Private

BITCOIN'S WORST HACKS AND SCAMS

As a relatively complex technology with no public face, no central authority and lots of money at stake, Bitcoin has seen its fair share of hacks and scams. But what can these unfortunate events teach us about the future of the technology and how we should be protecting ourselves today?

• Hacks
  • Infographic: An Overview of Compromised Bitcoin Exchange Events – Winter 2020
  • Mt. Gox May Have Been A Ponzi Scheme (But Bitcoin Isn’t)
  • Bitfloor Hacked, $250,000 Missing
  • How to Secure Bitcoin Exchanges, or Why All Hope Is Not Lost
• Scams
  • Shadow Banking Explained: How Crypto Companies Play With Money in the Dark
  • QuadrigaCX and the Million Dollar Questions: What We Do and Don’t Know
  • Latest Report on QuadrigaCX Confirms Fears of Mass Fraud
  • How the PlusToken Scam Absconded With Over 1 Percent of the Bitcoin Supply
• Craig Wright
  • How Many Wrongs Make a Wright?

CORE PROTOCOL

Ultimately, the rules that make Bitcoin what it is are determined by the Core protocol and, in a sense, the story of Bitcoin is the story of this open-source project.

• Bitcoin Core Development
  • Want to Learn How to Contribute to Bitcoin? Try A "Good First Issue"
  • Developer’s Introduction to Bitcoin
  • Infographic: Who Has Funded Bitcoin Core Development?
  • Miniscript: How Blockstream Engineers Are Making Bitcoin Programming Easy(er)
  • What Will Bitcoin Development Look Like After Hyperbitcoinization?
  • Guix Makes Bitcoin Core Development More Trustless
  • How Bitcoin Optech Is Connecting the Open-Source and Corporate Worlds
• Consensus Algorithm
  • Why Some Changes to Bitcoin Require Consensus: Bitcoin’s 4 Layers
  • A Primer on Bitcoin Governance, or Why Developers Aren’t in Charge of the Protocol
• History Of Releases
  • Bitcoin Core 0.21.0 Released: What’s New?
  • Bitcoin Core 0.20.0 Released: What’s New
  • Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 Released: Here’s What’s New
  • Bitcoin Core 0.18.0 Release: Here’s What’s New
  • Bitcoin Core 0.17.0 Is Released: Here’s What’s New
  • Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 Is Released: Here’s What’s New
  • Bitcoin Core 0.15.0 Is Released: Here’s What’s New
  • Bitcoin Core 0.14.1: SegWit Signalling and Memory Accounting
  • Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 Released: What’s New?
  • Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 Release: Graceful Recovery
  • What’s New in Bitcoin Core 0.13.0?
  • Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 Released, Major Step Forward for Scalability
  • Bitcoin Core 0.12.0 Released: What’s New?
  • The Battle For P2SH: The Untold Story Of The First Bitcoin War

BITCOIN FORKS

Forks are a unique result of Bitcoin’s network consensus requirements, which have resulted in some complex yet critical divisions in the network.

• Visual Map Of Bitcoin Forks
  • Infographic: A Map of Bitcoin Forks
• Modern Soft Fork Activation
  • BIP 8, BIP 9 or Modern Soft Fork Activation: How Bitcoin Could Upgrade Next
• Alternative Bitcoin Core Implementations
  • What Libbitcoin And SX Are And Why They Matter
• Forking Free For All
  • With Forkgen, Anyone Can Now Create Their Own Bitcoin Fork (Even Us)
  • The Great Plague Of Shitcoinery
• Bitcoin Cash Fork
  • When the Fork Forks: What You Need to Know as Bitcoin Cash Goes to War
  • One Day After the Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork: Takeaways and Latest Developments
  • After the Fork: Here’s How Exchanges Are Dealing With Bitcoin Cash
  • One Week Later: The Latest Developments in the Bitcoin Cash Split
  • Week 2: How the Bitcoin Cash “Hash War” Came and Went and Not Much Happened
  • A Beginner’s Guide to Claiming Your “Bitcoin Cash” (and Selling It)
  • Cherry on Top: Bitcoin ABC, Bitmain, Ver Target of Suit Following BCH Split
• Other Significant Forks
  • How Bitcoin Unlimited Users May End Up on Different Blockchains
  • This Security Researcher Found the Bug That Knocked Out Bitcoin Unlimited
  • Bitcoin Gold Launches on November 12
  • A Beginner’s Guide to Claiming Your Bitcoin Gold (and Selling It)
  • A Bitcoin Beginner’s Guide to Surviving the Bgold and SegWit2x Forks

THE LIGHTNING NETWORK

The Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s most popular second layer network, designed to facilitate cheap, fast and private payments. As the Lightning Network grows, so too does Bitcoin’s potential to facilitate every transaction in the world.

• History Of Lightning
  • The History Of Lightning: From Brainstorm To Beta
• Understanding Lightning
  • Understanding the Lightning Network, Part 3: Completing The Puzzle And Closing The Channel
  • Understanding the Lightning Network, Part 2: Creating The Network
  • Understanding The Lightning Network, Part 1: Building A Bidirectional Bitcoin Payment Channel
• Future Of Lightning
  • The Future of Bitcoin: What Lightning Could Look Like
  • Lightning Network Consensus Is a Marketplace and That’s Okay!
• Lightning Projects
  • Sending Money Instantly, Around the World: A Q&A With Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark
  • Lightning Loop Lets Users Empty Lightning Channels Without Closing Them
  • We Used Lightning Payments for Private SMS Messaging: Here’s How It Worked
• The Lightning Torch
  • Vidi, Vici, Satoshi: The Lightning Torch Has Reached Its Final Destination
  • What We Can Learn About Lightning From #LNTrustChain2: Part 1
  • What We Can Learn About Lightning From #LNTrustChain2: Part 2

SCALING ON TOP OF BITCOIN

With a programmed block size cap, relatively slow transaction times and other fundamental limitations, Bitcoin requires scaling efforts to reach its full potential. As Bitcoin’s most infamous block size scaling debate, the SegWit chronicles have much to teach us about the technology’s history and potential. And, beyond the Lightning Network, many other scaling projects have emerged to add new features and use cases to Bitcoin’s toolkit.

• Learning From SegWit
  • Bitcoin Core Developer Eric Lombrozo on Misunderstandings in Block Size Debate
  • The Long Road to SegWit: How Bitcoin’s Biggest Protocol Upgrade Became Reality
  • Segregated Witness Activates on Bitcoin: This is What to Expect
  • BIP 91 Has Locked In. Here’s What That Means (And What It Does Not)
  • Litecoin Has Now Deployed Segregated Witness
  • Segregated Witness Officially Introduced With Release of Bitcoin Core 0.13.1
  • The Segregated Witness Timeline: From Idea to Adoption in Six Steps
  • Bitcoin Independence Day: How This Watershed Day Defines Community Consensus
• Sidechains And Statechains
  • Eric Lombrozo on 3 Ways to Scale Bitcoin That Don’t Involve the Block Size
  • Side Chains: The How, The Challenges and the Potential
  • The Value of Sidechains and Leveraging Their Potential
  • Greg Maxwell: Lightning Network Better Than Sidechains for Scaling Bitcoin
  • Blockstream Releases Sidechain White Paper on Liquid and Strong Federations
  • RSK Imagines "Decentralized Finance Systems" Coming to Bitcoin
• Other Notable Projects
  • Microsoft’s ION Is an Open-Source Bet on Bitcoin
  • Video Interview: Giacomo Zucco and RGB Tokens Built on Bitcoin
  • DLCs Are On Bitcoin, Bringing New Functionality And Major Potential

MINING

Bitcoin mining is a central process to the technology. Through mining, new bitcoin are released into the ecosystem, double spending is prevented and transactions are verified. If you care about Bitcoin, you’ll need to pay attention to what’s happening in mining.

• Decentralization Of Mining
  • Bitcoin Mining Attacks Are Overblown
  • Blockstream Mining: A Grassroots Vision for Redistributing Hashrate
  • Beyond China and North America: The Decentralization of Bitcoin Mining
  • Crypto For Congress Puts “American-Made” Bitcoin Into The Hands Of Policymakers
• Energy Use
  • The Wasted Electricity Objection to Bitcoin
  • Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption Is Neither Frivolous Nor Excessive
  • Bitcoin Doesn’t Waste Electricity, It’s Used for Security
  • Bitcoin Uses a Lot of Energy, So Where Are the Energy Companies?
  • Oil Field Alchemy: How Bitcoin Can Turn Waste, Emissions into Proof-of-Work
  • Mining Like a Viking: How the Fjords of Norway Offer a Greener Alternative
  • Eco-Friendly Bitcoin Mining Can Reduce Carbon Footprints (Yes, Really)
• The Halving
  • How Bitcoin’s Second Halving Came And Went, And Not Much Happened
  • The Halving: Then And Now – A Bitcoin Magazine Infographic
  • Our 21-hour Livestream Coverage of the 202 Halving

RELATED PROJECTS AND CONCEPTS

You can’t tell the story of Bitcoin without providing fundamental information about some of its related projects. Whether they help Bitcoiners maintain privacy, secure freedom or iterate on foundational decentralization, these projects are ultimately part of BTC, even if they’re seperate.

• DAOs
  • DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law
  • DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 2: Reducing Barriers
• TOR
  • Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous and Tor Users Are Forgetting This
  • Privacy Isn’t Radical: How Tor Supports Dissent as a Human Right
• Mesh Networks
  • From ISP to P2P: How Mesh Networks Take Bitcoin Off The Grid
• Darknet Markets
  • The Story Of Silk Road
  • Darknet Markets Can’t Live With — Or Without — Bitcoin