Cryptocurrency security is a concern to anyone who has a significant amount of money in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other crypto assets. Most Bitcoin is held in either a Bitcoin wallet or a Bitcoin bank. Your Bitcoin holdings are recorded on a public ledger. You access these holdings by authenticating with your private

A token is a unit of virtual currency. Most tokens are built on a blockchain-based cryptocurrency platform, such as Ethereum. Building on top of a platform like Ethereum allows these tokens to form their own financial ecosystem while leveraging the scale of an existing currency. Tokens became highly popular in early 2018, with the boom

Big blocks or small blocks: this is the fundamental question of Bitcoin scalability. The argument for big blocks is also known as “on-chain scalability.” Under this strategy, each block in the append-only chain of Bitcoin transaction blocks would grow in size to be able to support lower transaction fees and higher on-chain throughput. A set

Cryptocurrency infrastructure is a new form of software. Thousands of developers are submitting transactions to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and this transaction volume tests the scalability of current blockchain implementations. The bottlenecks in scalability lead to slow transaction times and high fees. Over the last twenty years, engineers have learned how to scale databases. We’ve learned

Podcasting about cryptocurrencies is a strange occupation. You get emails all the time from companies doing a token sale that you would never want to be affiliated with. You get angry tweets from anonymous Twitter accounts that are on one side of the Bitcoin scaling debate. You get to interview extreme personalities, and the technical

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are two cryptocurrencies with similar properties. But the supporters of each of these Bitcoin versions have strongly divergent opinions on the direction of the Bitcoin project. At the center of this debate is the subject of block size. Bitcoin’s block size determines how many transactions fit into each block that is

Let’s Talk Bitcoin is one of the most popular podcasts about cryptocurrencies. Adam B. Levine started it after three other podcasts he started did not get the traction he had hoped for. Adam parlayed the success of Let’s Talk Bitcoin into a network of podcasts–the Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network–which also includes one of my favorite

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized global, peer-to-peer file system. IPFS combines ideas from BitTorrent, Git, and Bitcoin, creating a new way to store and access objects across the Internet. When you access an object on almost any website, you are accessing the object via a location address—a URL. The URL tells you

The Ethereum community started as a small group of dedicated engineers. It has ballooned to thousands of engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors, all of whom have a stake in the direction of Ethereum. Ethereum is an open source project, and the direction of a popular open source project can get complex. Ethereum is figuring out how

The pubsub pattern allows a developer to create channels, which messages can be written to and read from. Pubsub messaging is useful for multicast messaging–when you want to publish messages from a producer, and have multiple consumers who are subscribed to the publisher receive those messages. Almost any application that reaches a high level of