Here we discuss an idea of special Computation Layer above Lightning Network which if implemented would enable “Turing completeness“ property for an arbitrary “Smart contract“ running on the permissionless network of Bitcoin nodes maintaining constant connection. Problem Statement The term “Smart Contract” was initially introduced by Nick Szabo in 1996. Shinobi does…

In the post, we evaluate the results of an international team of researchers who recently published preprint “Short Paper: A Centrality Analysis of the Lightning Network” for the 26th conference Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022. The authors researched the degree of decentralization of the Lightning Network via calculation of…

It is striking that we have approached the 100-year jubilee of German hyperinflation. The history rhymes with itself: everybody knows that everybody knows that we are in an accelerating inflation regime. Yet the consensus is about not calling price rise as inflation or debasement of money, and depreciation of savings…

Core developers design Bitcoin to sustain pressure and censorship. In many places of the world, it works despite various oppressive measures. These measures normally hinder adoption only in so-called casual situations. It is forbidden to import European cheese in Russia but skillful individuals could find gorgonzola with a solid premium…

One Law Many Networks There is a long history behind Metcalfe’s Law which allows measuring network effect. It was discovered in the 1980s and initially applied to Ethernet. This law derives the “value of a network” from the number of nodes so the network value is proportional to the square of its size. …

Introduction The idea of Virtual Payment Channels was initially outlined by Lightning Network (LN) developer Rene Pickhardt in his blogpost. The main advantage of these specific channels might be in increasing the scalability and reliability of large payment providers. In addition to the purely technical advantage, channels of this type might…

Or how to build a community with satoshis. We are in Eternal September. Even experienced members of the community can’t stop repeating the old and debunked mantras like “put everything on blockchain to make the world a better place”. Or, imagine Twitter, but every Tweet is appended to a blockchain…

When I was trying to restore access to an Ethereum multisig contract with then worthless vested tokens, I was thinking “Why the hell I did multisig” in the first place. All of sudden at the peak of the speculative DOGE frenzy they started to cost something and I needed to…

Starting series of posts covering LibWally, a simple and robust library to build wallets for Bitcoin as soon as its forks. To get access you shall use your Lightning Network wallet, if you have one, just click on the link below. 1. Programming With LibWally: Using secp256k1 Functions If you don’t have any non-custodial Lightning Wallet, consider using custodial Lightning Network wallet like WalletOfSatoshis or use Telegram messenger bot @lntxbot and find a way to refill these wallets with satoshis (via HodlHodl, for example, or using embedded lntxbot features).