This is an extension to my previous article series discussing the different sidechain proposals that exist. Those articles can be found here: Spacechains, Spacechain Use Cases, Softchains, Drivechains, Federated Chains, and Trade Offs Of Sidechains. Botanix Labs has proposed a completely new sidechain design recently, called spiderchains, for the purposes of porting the Ethereum Virtual Machine to a platform anchored to the Bitcoin network. The architecture is a pretty large deviation from most prior proposals for concrete designs. Firstly, it does not involve miners directly in consensus or use merge-mining…
Read MoreDay: September 18, 2023
Coming To Terms With The Economic Reality Of Scaling
The blocksize war marked a pivotal chapter in Bitcoin’s nascent history, illuminating the ability of node operators to withstand systemic changes that could undermine the network’s foundational principles of decentralization and censorship resistance. At the crux of the controversy was the issue of scaling Bitcoin to accommodate growing transaction volumes. While one camp advocated sacrificing a degree of decentralization through a block size increase, their opponents maintained that the cost to Bitcoin’s core ethos was untenable. The ensuing deadlock culminated in a contentious change, Segregated Witness (SegWit). By restructuring how…
Read MoreOrdinals Creator Breaks Seclusion with Rare Public Appearance
Casey Rodarmor, the creator of the Ordinals protocol, made a surprising return to the public eye during the Ordinals Summit held in Singapore this week. The appearance marks Rodarmor’s first public engagement in months, following a period of isolation after the protocol’s launch in January of this year. He previously broke his silence most recently with a lengthy podcast in which he aired his concerns about Paul Storzc’s drivechains upgrade proposal. The Ordinals Summit, a gathering of NFT enthusiasts, was a notable celebration of the protocol at a time…
Read MoreBitcoin Marks 8th Year of US Commodity Status
On September 17, 2015, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) officially declared Bitcoin a commodity, a distinction that eight years later continues to set it apart from other cryptocurrencies that have yet to earn this status. While regulatory uncertainty still looms over other more centralized, digital assets, the CFTC’s classification of Bitcoin as a commodity established a regulatory framework for Bitcoin, one that allows it to be treated like other classical commodities including gold and precious metals. In its ruling, the CFTC stated that Section 1a(9) of the CEA defines…
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