Notable code changes this week in Bitcoin Core, LND, C-Lightning, Eclair, and libsecp256k1. The purpose of this article is to take an extreme example, the peak transaction rate of Visa, youtu.be and show that bitcoin could technically reach that kind of rate without any kind of questionable reasoning, changes in the core design, or non-existent overlays. Ethereum Classic is not some kind of "anti-Ethereum," as some are trying to misrepresent us. The three data structures are a finite blockchain (keep N blocks into the past), an "account tree" which keeps account balance for every address with a non-zero balance, and a "proof chain" which is an (ever growing) slimmed down version of the blockchain. In Bitcoin the hash value is also used as a reference to the block itself, so somebody might say that their transaction has been mined into block with hash 0000c3af42fc31103f1fdc0151fa747ff87349a4714df7cc52ea464e12dcd4e9. The header of a block contains the Merkle tree which depends on the included transactions. Fixing this to make blocks just list of hashes would resolve the issue and make the bandwidth needed for block broadcast negligable. If the bitcoin community isn't willing to point out some things would better be done by other systems then it becomes easy to make strawman arguments: If we admit that bitcoin could be used as a floor wax and desert topping, someone will always point out that it's not the best floorwax or best desert topping.

Compared to previous designs for payment pools (such as joinpool), the CoinPool design focuses on allowing participants to make offchain commitments to transactions between the members of the pool. We see the beginnings of this today with bitcoin exchange and wallet services allowing instant payments between members. ● Breez wallet enables spontaneous payments: Version 0.9 of Breez wallet adds the ability to send spontaneous payments to Lightning nodes that support keysend. 3821 adds anchor commitments for LN channels and enables them by default if both participating nodes of a channel signal support. 13451 that adds extra information that can be used to defeat the attack to the getblock RPC. ● Help test Bitcoin Core 0.18.1 release candidates: this upcoming maintenance release fixes several bugs that affected some RPC commands and caused unnecessarily high CPU use in certain cases. All release notes since the October 2018 release of Bitcoin Core 0.17 have announced that the only supported versions of Windows are version 7 or later.

As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers. Cryptocurrency miners agree to share the compute power of their machines to validate and process cryptocurrency transactions, and in exchange the miners receive small portions of the digital currency. A system which puts private individuals, or at least small groups of private parties, on equal footing with central banks could hardly be called a centralized one, though it would be less decentralized than the bitcoin we have today. U.S. dollar constitutes a dominant fraction of world currency reserves, most countries at least partially bear the cost of U.S. 4251 hashes on a modern computer is not very much work (most computers can achieve at least 4 million hashes per second). Bitcoin is currently able (with a couple of simple optimizations that are prototyped but not merged yet) to perform around 8000 signature verifications per second on an quad core Intel Core i7-2670QM 2.2Ghz processor. Perhaps most notably, no Bitcoin Core developer is party to the agreement, nor were any of them even present at the meeting.

● What is the motivation for separating Bitcoin Core into independent node, wallet, and GUI processes? If you want to pick a random node, the cost for an attacker to mine a block sequence containing a bogus transaction should be higher than the value to be obtained by defrauding you. By changing how deeply buried the block must be, you can trade off confirmation time vs cost of an attack. However there is potential for even greater optimizations to be made in future, at the cost of some additional complexity. The big cost is the crypto and block chain lookups involved with verifying the transaction. For a block to be valid it must hash to a value less than the current target; this means that each block indicates that work has been done generating it. When blocks are solved, the current protocol will send the transactions again, even if a peer has already seen it at broadcast time. The description above applies to the current software with only minor optimizations assumed (the type that can and have been done by one man in a few weeks).