Author Archives: rusty

TL;DR: exchanges are casinos and don’t want to onboard anyone into bitcoin. Avoid. There’s a classic scam in the “crypto” space: advertize Bitcoin to get people in, then sell suckers something else entirely. Over the last few years, this bait-and-switch has become the core competency of “bitcoin” exchanges. I recently visited the homepage of Australian […]

Two years ago, considering the blocksize debate, I made two attempts to measure average bandwidth growth, first using Akamai serving numbers (which gave an answer of 17% per year), and then using fixed-line broadband data from OFCOM UK, which gave an answer of 30% per annum. We have two years more of data since then, […]

Was looking at using zstd for backup, and wanted to see the effect of different compression levels. I backed up my (built) bitcoin source, which is a decent representation of my home directory, but only weighs in 2.3GB. zstd -1 compressed it 71.3%, zstd -22 compressed it 78.6%, and here’s a graph showing runtime (on […]

I ran some quick numbers on the last retargeting period (blocks 415296 through 416346 inclusive) which is roughly a week’s worth. Blocks were full: median 998k mean 818k (some miners blind mining on top of unknown blocks). Yet of the 1,618,170 non-coinbase transactions, 48% were still paying dumb, round fees (like 5000 satoshis). Another 5% […]

I’ve been implementing segregated witness support for c-lightning; it’s interesting that there’s no address format for the new form of addresses.  There’s a segregated-witness-inside-p2sh which uses the existing p2sh format, but if you want raw segregated witness (which is simply a “0” followed by a 20-byte or 32-byte hash), the only proposal is BIP142 which […]

Hi, I was one of the authors/bikeshedders of BIP9, which Pieter Wuille recently refined (and implemented) into its final form.  The bitcoin core plan is to use BIP9 for activations from now on, so let’s look at how it works! Some background: Blocks have a 32-bit “version” field.  If the top three bits are “001”, […]

One problem of filling blocks is that transactions with too-low fees will get “stuck”; I’ve read about such things happening on Reddit.  Then one of my coworkers told me that those he looked at were simply never broadcast properly, and broadcasting them manually fixed it.  Which lead both of us to wonder how often it’s […]

Six months ago in a previous post I showed that 45% of transactions have an output of less that $1, and estimated that they would get squeezed out first as blocks filled.  It’s time to review that prediction, and also to see several things: Are fees rising? Are fees detached from magic (default) numbers of […]

On Thursday I was writing some code, and I wanted to test if an array was all zero.  First I checked if ccan/mem had anything, in case I missed it, then jumped on IRC to ask the author (and overall CCAN co-maintainer) David Gibson about it. We bikeshedded around names: memallzero? memiszero? memeqz? memeqzero() won […]

Thanks to edmundedgar on reddit I have some more accurate data to update my previous bandwidth growth estimation post: OFCOM UK, who released their November 2014 report on average broadband speeds.  Whereas Akamai numbers could be lowered by the increase in mobile connections, this directly measures actual broadband speeds. Extracting the figures gives: Average download […]