The Metaverse Expo 2022 is a 3 day event held at the Las Vegas Convention Center on 8th – 10th July 2022 that will bring together entrepreneurs, industry experts and crypto enthusiasts in the Metaverse, Gaming and NFT Space.
Showcasing a wide range of exhibitors, The Metaverse Expo 2022 features a host of key speakers & panelists including motivational speaker Agon Hare, from Project Nightfall Organization and Academia Professor & TEDx speaker Justin Goldston, PHD. The Metaverse Expo will cover topics within Metaverse, NFTs and blockchain. These include:
• Introduction to Blockchain • Introduction to Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets • Artificial Intelligence • Introduction to the Metaverse • Metaverse Architecture • Digital Fashion and Technology • Business and Web3 Economics • Metaverse Entrepreneurship • Decentralized Finance • eSports and Blockchain Gaming • Understanding the power of the Metaverse • Reinventing Education in the Metaverse • Metaverse applications powered by blockchain
The event is taking place over three days in the renowned Las Vegas Convention Center and also includes on stage panel discussions, live performances, virtual land and NFT giveaways as well as the opportunity to network with a range of high value industry professionals.
Exhibitors can choose from three different sized booth packages, Diamond (30’x30’), Platinum (20’x20’) and Gold (10×10) which also includes 20 free tickets for the team and a speaking slot at the event. You can register for a booth at The Metaverse Expo 2022 through their website.
TCG World, is one of the largest open world metaverse projects currently in development on Binance Smart Chain and has recently started to roll out Alpha access to some of their users. Everything inside TCG World is owned as an NFT – virtual land, cars, pets and even player avatars.
Co-hosts JPiC is a company dedicated to the organization of the first ever Jigsaw Puzzle International Convention and will run alongside The Metaverse Expo 22 as well as offering free entry to individuals who purchase a Metaverse Expo 22 ticket. JPiC recently appeared on Shark Tank, Malta and secured a record breaking investment of €200,000 from Alexander Fenech, a Shark Tank investor, for a 15% stake in their Jigsaw Puzzle Convention business.
The 3 day event will bring over 6000 visitors from around the world.Tickets for The Metaverse Expo 22 and Jigsaw Puzzle International Convention can be found on their official website.
A new crypto fund report published by Cointelegraph Research investigates how the Dash protocol’s innovative design provides security benefits to its users, as well as a thorough examination of the tokenomics and value proposition. The report highlights how investors can participate in Dash, and what future possibilities for users and developers will emerge from Dash’s upcoming developments.
Cointelegraph Research presents facts and figures on all aspects of Dash in collaboration with multiple research partners including Allnodes, Staking Rewards, CryptoRefills, CoinRoutes, intotheblock, Bitwise, Santiment, and Rekt Capital. Dash’s unique features as a payment solution including its role as an asset for investments are examined. The report is intended for investors who want to learn more about the cryptocurrency.
Dash’s evolution will achieve a major milestone in 2022. With the launch of the Dash Platform on mainnet, developers and users will be able to take full advantage of a complete ecosystem for decentralized applications and data storage.
An original survey of over 2,000 crypto funds was conducted in 2021 to gain a better understanding of how investors feel about Dash. This 80+ page report, written by five authors from around the world, shows which funds currently hold Dash as well as the number of funds that plan to invest in Dash over the next year.
The 200 funds that participated in the survey manage an estimated total of $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency and blockchain investments. The survey revealed that:
20 funds already have Dash exposure in their investment portfolio.
An additional 40 funds indicated their intention to invest in Dash within the next 12 months.
70% of the survey respondents requested to receive the results of this crypto fund report.
Dash has distinguished itself from Bitcoin and other blockchains by emerging as one of the most prominent digital currencies focused on payments, i.e., becoming digital cash. The report not only explains how Dash’s masternode solution has helped to improve network scalability, but also elaborates on the regulatory environment for Dash and other cryptocurrencies in the world’s largest jurisdictions.
“As far as I know, there’s no other project that comes close to what we’re trying to build which is the ability to efficiently query information directly from the system database to users. We’ve seen a lot of DApps that store information on other blockchains, but they all require the use of oracles for their system to work. Dash Platform is going to be much more decentralized. Users on their mobile devices will be querying DAPI directly. There’s no oracle between them, users can query the blockchain directly with decentralized cryptographic proofs that the information is valid. You don’t have to trust any server. In my opinion, it will be a new paradigm of how decentralized systems can work.”
Sam Westrich, CTO at Dash Core Group
Aside from Dash’s vision and general features, the report delves into tokenomics, price performance, future development roadmap, and regulation. This report also outlines how Dash remains an innovative cryptocurrency that has evolved from a scalable payment solution to a Web3 ecosystem.
“Dash is a well-known, respected name in the payments space in many areas of the world, and has an engaged, loyal following. One of our goals at Valkyrie is to enable those underserved by traditional financial firms to have access to financial services, and expanding investment into the Dash ecosystem is part of that mission.”
Leah Wald, CEO at Valkyrie Investments
According to Cointelegraph Research, any amount of Dash can improve a traditional equity and bond portfolio by strengthening not only the cumulative return but also the sharpe ratio. Dash’s low correlation to traditional asset classes like equities and gold can also help investors manage their risk.
Six confirmations for a bitcoin payment means about 60 minutes of waiting time and even just one confirmation of 10 minutes would still be a long wait for a coffee, luckily there are approaches to solve this problem!
Since Nakamoto wanted to design an electronic cash system, his successors had to think about possible solutions to Bitcoin’s scalability problem. If BTC intends to be used for payments, multi-dollar transaction fees and hours-long wait times could not be tolerated.
After Bitcoin miners rejected a proposal to increase Bitcoin’s block size to 2 megabytes in May 2017, Bitcoin Cash was created as a hard fork of Bitcoin Core. In a hard fork, every holder of coins on the parent chain also holds coins of the offspring, but the blockchains diverge after that. Sometimes, most miners decide to ditch the older chain, and it fades into oblivion. But that was not the case with Bitcoin Cash, whose acceptance remains far below Bitcoin to this day. Bitcoin Cash can achieve 350 TPS, which is a welcomed improvement but still a far cry from real-world demands. The Visa network processes up to 56,000 TPS on busy shopping days.
Thankfully, a few clever developers found a solution and introduced the Lightning Network(1) in 2016, officially launching it in 2018.
The Lightning Network
The Lightning Network white paper was released on Jan. 14, 2016, and written by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. Since then, Lightning Labs’ team has made steady progress under CEO Elizabeth Stark.
Lightning specifies a peer-to-peer payment system on top of Bitcoin using payment channels. The mechanism is simple and elegant:
Alice tops up her Lightning payment channel to Bob with BTC (first on-chain transaction).
Alice sends Bob a transaction.
Alice can send Bob as many other transactions as she wants until her funds are depleted.
Alice and Bob agree on the total paid and close the payment channel (second on-chain transaction).
The fee for sending a Lightning transaction is zero if a direct connection exists between the parties. Lightning can also route a payment through many hops. The transaction propagates like, well, Lightning in the sky until it reaches its desired recipient. Hops charge minuscule fees, often fractions of 1 Satoshi, for their services in providing the necessary liquidity.
The Lightning Network is like a social network for payments. Since each hop can only facilitate less than what they topped up, network capacity can become an issue for large transactions. Mercifully, 2021 saw exponential network capacity growth, exceeding 3,000 BTC (~$150 million) in October 2021.
Figure: Visualisation of the Lightning Network
Source: Acinq
In December 2021, there were more than 17,100 Lightning nodes worldwide, most of which in the United States and the European Union. These nodes have more than 77,000 open payment channels. Lightning wallets for iOS and Android have matured enough to be usable by regular users. And in Venezuela, savvy residents shop with BTC.
It has never been easier to buy a coffee with Bitcoin. This is something that has come just in time, especially for the inhabitants of the Latin American country of El Salvador!
Living on cryptocurrency in the United States has become a reality thanks to Bitrefill’s crypto bill payments.
Through Bitrefill’s new Bill Payments service, US citizens can now pay any bill in the US with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Dogecoin, Litecoin, and USDT on Ethereum & Tron, as well as 50 other altcoins and stablecoins.
The service works for taxes, credit card bills, utilities, auto loans, healthcare, mortgage, social security, and 20,000 other forms of expenses.
Bill payments are a game changer for people who make money with cryptocurrency by trading, working from home, or selling their goods and services to others in exchange for cryptocurrency. You may now pay for almost everything with crypto without ever touching a government-issued national currency.
“They say there are only two certain things in life – death and taxes. now you can pay both your tax and funeral costs with crypto.”
Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill
Bitrefill requires users to have an ID-verified account with a US residency to use this service. Bitrefill is rolling out bill payments with a waiting list, which is first come, first served. In the blog post announcement, Bitrefill stated they are working around the clock to make their new service available to every Bitrefill customer in the United States, but it’ll take some time.
Bitrefill will apply a 2% convenience fee on the total bill paid to cover the costs of paying and processing each bill payment.
The new service will also be available in Bitrefill’s iOS and Android apps.
DeepSquare and Pledged Capital, two blockchain projects, each pioneer in their own field, announced a partnership aiming to boost fundraising idle funds with artificial intelligence. Milestone based investments is something that Pledged Capital has been working on since the beginning. This approach introduces a trustless third party that holds the funds. Blockchain and more specifically the DeFi space offers many innovative ways to generate interesting yields on those funds such as yield farming, staking, lending/borrowing. There are hundreds of smart contract protocols that allow this like Curve, BENQI or yield aggregators namely Yield Yak on Avalanche. Due to this diversity, finding the best strategy to maximise yield while guaranteeing a certain level of risk is a very time consuming and tedious task. Bringing artificial intelligence in the loop is the next step. AI algorithms will learn the best low risk strategy to maximise the return on the idle fund. This is exactly where DeepSquare HPC and AI features fit in, to use onchain data to train algorithms to optimise the desired requirements of yield vs risk level. The ultimate goal is to create an environment in which both investors and new projects will feel secure and collaborate on the milestone basis in order to grow and achieve goals while taking advantage of DeFi’s wonders.
The Power Behind Web 3.0, Metaverse and HPC
DeepSquare is a distributed compute cloud, and the community response to big tech giant cloud providers. The open and interoperable grid that DeepSquare is building will allow real competition to take place and allow cloud providers, that are part of the grid, to sell their spare compute resources at their desired prices. On the other hand, in this ecosystem, end users choose where they want to run their computing workloads with a clear and transparent pricing. This inclusive ecosystem also addresses security concerns as users can choose to use providers/ services within desired jurisdictions. DeepSquare is poised to disrupt the cloud-industry and challenge the status quo by turning everything on its head. While hyperscalers rely on closed, centralised systems, DeepSquare promotes transparency and operates in a decentralized and open network centred around a blockchain compute protocol. This is the engine behind HPC, Metaverse and Web3.
“Partnering with Pledged Capital comes natural as both projects come from the decentralised state of mind, and we are in fact quite compatible projects. Bringing our AI expertise and cloud computing technology to meet the vision of decentralised crowdfunding is something we are excited about.” – Diarmuid Daltún, Co-founder and Head of Business Development
Pledged Capital is a decentralized trust fund that combines traditional crowdfunding with Blockchain technology with white label services to allow safe and controlled investment. Powered by DAO, Pledged Capital delivers a solution that understands how investments are used. Start-up projects seeking funding can lay out roadmap milestones and timelines according to their actual capacity and contingent upon realistic performance targets, establishing measurable criteria for delivering payments upon only fulfillable promises. It is about taking responsibility. Pledged Capital’s incremental funding system allows for ICO funding to be managed post-raise with milestone-based micropayments and unprecedented investor oversight. Investors will have the opportunity to provide feedback, and vote on the evolution of the project using a smart governance system, based on users behaviour.
“After many years as a crypto-passionate, GEM hunter, and specialist developers in cybersecurity, we understood the importance of using all the tools available in WEB3 to make our investment more reassuring, more secure, and more interactive. The creation of this protocol, combining DeFI, DAO, NFT and social experience, was obvious to us. Associated these uses with AI, in order to find the best return, or to predict the behavior of users, is a very interesting vision, to provide quality investor projects, and for investors, advice, and superior returns. Finding quality partners is not always easy, however, since our meeting with DeepSquare, our possibilities seem limitless.” – Guillaume Provent, CEO & CTO
The buy and hold strategy represents a passive investment where an investor buys stocks and keeps them for the long run regardless of market fluctuations.
Passive investing is based on assuming that a market functions efficiently and that buying and keeping investments produces long-term returns.
But sometimes, that’s not the case; there’s more than meets the eye. Stay tuned to learn the pros and cons of a passive buy and hold strategy!
The Difference Between Active and Passive Investing
Because investors tend to favor one method, any conversation regarding active or passive investing can soon turn into an argument.
While passive investment is more prevalent among investors, active investing also has its own set of advantages.
Active investing represents an investment strategy that involves ongoing buying and selling. The aim is to purchase and sell stocks to profit from short-term price fluctuations.
Passive investing is buying stocks or other securities and keeping them for a lengthy period. Unlike active investments, passive investors do not attempt to profit from short-term price fluctuations.
Even though both methods have benefits, passive investments have attracted more capital. Simply put, passive investments have outperformed active ones in terms of returns. However, active investments have become more prevalent in the last few years, particularly during market upheavals.
If you plan to step into the crypto world and do passive investing, crypto DCA is a good thing to start with.
The buy and hold strategy has certain benefits over active investing. As we mentioned, it represents a long-term, passive strategy in which investors keep a constant portfolio over time despite short-term fluctuations.
Buy and hold investing has been proven to be very successful. As proof, it has been the favorite investing approach of business titans such as Warren Buffet.
A passive strategy is suitable for investors who do not have much time to investigate financial trends. But if you plan on doing active investing, you will be obligated to check the data constantly.
The biggest downside of the buy and hold approach is that it requires a significant amount of investments which might not be suitable for people or even brands on the budget.
A crypto wallet is an app, software, service, or physical device that allows cryptocurrency owners to access and manage their digital assets.
Crypto exchange is a platform where customers can buy, sell, and exchange cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets. They can also track the cryptocurrency market changes, monitor prices, and convert fiat money into digital and reverse.
If you decide to invest in your financial independence, sign up to MyWallSt for free, and start your investment today.
The Pros and Cons of a Passive Buy and Hold Strategy
The key to successful investing is maintaining a well-diversified portfolio, and passive investing via indexing is an excellent way to achieve this goal.
Before we can move on to the pros and cons of the buy and hold strategy, we need to understand what’s index found and how it works.
What’s Index Found and How It Works?
An index fund represents an exchange-traded or mutual fund. It is designed to follow certain rules to track a specified basket of underlying investments.
Index funds track a target benchmark or index rather than trying to pick winners, thus avoiding the need to continuously buy and sell stocks.
It provides an easy way to invest in a chosen market since it tends to track an index. The users won’t need to select and monitor individual managers or choose between investment themes.
However, a passive buy-and-hold strategy largely depends on the total market risk. Therefore, it withdraws certain things.
Index funds track the market; thus, when the stock market falls, index funds fall with it.
The index found lacks flexibility. Even if the management believes share prices will fall, defensive actions such as lowering a stake in shares are forbidden for index fund managers.
They are limited in terms of performance since they are meant to closely match their benchmark index rather than beat it. Due to financial running expenses, they generally return significantly less due to seldom outperforming the index.
Since the market is constantly changing, and we can never predict how much something will be worth, you can look up crypto and gold price forecast in 2022 and rely on their predictions!
Now that we explained what’s index found, we can move on to the advantages and disadvantages of passive investments. Let’s check them!
Extremely low fees – Because no one picks stocks, oversight is significantly less costly. Therefore, passive investments and their funds follow the index as their benchmark.
Simplicity – Having an index is far simpler to implement and understand than a dynamic strategy that requires ongoing research and adapting.
Tax efficiency – The buy-and-hold strategy does not result in a significant capital gains tax bill for the year.
Transparency – You will always have a clear view of which assets are in index fund.
Cons of passive buy and hold strategy:
Smaller potential for profit – Passive funds will never outperform the market because their main assets are set to track the market. There will be times when a passive fund may beat the market by a little. However, until the market as whole flourishes, it will never produce the high returns that active managers want.
Limitations – Passive funds have minimal to no fluctuation and are confined to a certain index or fixed selection of investments. Therefore, investors are locked into those holdings no matter what happens in the market.
The Bottom Line
The passive buy-and-hold strategy is one of the most popular strategies for investing. Choose this account type when you’re looking for a hassle-free balanced investment portfolio and want to invest for the long term.
In passive strategies, you generally buy the stock once it has bottomed out. It then recovers and retests the old high price. This is what makes passive strategies appealing to many investors.
The main difference between passive and active investment is that you keep the stock for an extended period in passive investing. This is the ultimate goal of buying inexpensive stocks and then waiting for them to rise in value over time.
Because Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, users should be able to pay for the purchase of coffee or pizza with Bitcoin. We will take a closer look at the difficulties and solutions in the next few articles.
This article on transaction speed will explain why Bitcoin cannot facilitate these kinds of transactions on a large scale on its own. Transaction fees and transaction times make it impossible to pay with BTC at the local deli. Fees are auction-based. Miners include the most lucrative transactions in their version of the next block, so transaction senders need to include a large enough payment to have their transaction processed quickly — otherwise, they will have to wait. During price crashes, when everyone and their dog wants to sell BTC at once, prices are at a premium, and desperate sellers bid $100 or more for transaction fees. Recently, fees have oscillated between $1 and $3.
Figure 1: Bitcoin transaction fees rarely breached the $3 mark in Q4 2021
Source: CoinMetrics
Bitcoin transactions are still much cheaper than Ethereum’s, where simple transactions routinely cost more than $10, but the lower price is a sign of less demand, too. A $1 transaction fee is still too much for a coffee purchase.
Theoretical transactions per second (TPS) on the Bitcoin network
Bitcoin transactions consist of information about the senders, the recipients and the amount, plus some security information. Since a Bitcoin block cannot be larger than 1 megabyte in total, it can include a maximum of 3,500 average-sized transactions. This boils down to a maximum of 5.83 TPS, as a block is mined every 10 minutes.
Some blocks contain smaller transactions, and miners now process Segregated Witness transactions, which optimize space inside a block, making up to 7 TPS possible.
Average transactions per second
Since Bitcoin transactions are slow, somewhat expensive, and faster blockchains exist, the number of actual transactions on Bitcoin rarely reaches the theoretical maximum. In October 2021, the protocol processed 3.18 TPS on average.
The Bitcoin protocol was a bit more active during most of 2020 with 3.85 TPS on average but saw a downturn in usage during the May 2021 crash, from which it has only partly recovered — a fact that is visible in the amount of blockspace used. Blocks are rarely more than half full in the second half of 2021.
Figure 2: Full capacity blocks until July 2021 and only half capacity later
Source:Coinmetrics
Time to finality for Bitcoin Core
Transactions are considered final after they are confirmed three to six times, depending on security requirements. The reasoning behind this is that alternatives could still overtake one block, but the effort needed to write a longer chain and catch up with more than three or six blocks is enormous.
Six confirmations mean a minimum of 60 minutes until finality. Just two confirmations mean between 10.1 and 20 minutes of waiting time before a merchant would be wise to accept a BTC payment. That’s a long wait for a coffee.
In order to realize Nakamoto’s idea of an “electronic cash system,” his successors had to think about possible solutions to Bitcoin’s scalability problem. One of these solutions is the Lightning network, which is considered the most important layer 2 solution.
(9.1) Dynamic Minting Price As of April 20, 2022, CryptoBlades character minting underwent a core update to its pricing and process called Dynamic Minting. Dynamic Minting is a new formula designed to regulate the amount of minting possible. Like the game’s Multi-Farm feature, a constant multiplier oscillates based on activity to control the outflow of minting—each costing more as activity and time go on. There is currently a floor price mechanic in place that does not let the minting price fall beneath a set amount. This amount will be updated as the price doubles from its current value, creating intense deflation over the coming weeks for CryptoBlades’ NFTs.
(9.2) CryptoBlades Genesis Event
The CBC (CryptoBlades Characters) Genesis Event will be the end of CryptoBlades generation one characters being able to be minted, meaning the current characters minted before then will be the only ones of their kind. With this, they will become 100% deflationary, increasing value over time as players continue to burn them using the character burn feature. This step is to dramatically increase generation one NFTs’ value and rewards for each individually.
(9.3) Implementing New Fee Structure and Increasing Rewards
By playing CryptoBlades, players earn rewards after each successful combat that they can claim for a steady profit. The third step involves implementing a 25% generation one native gas fee on rewards, scaling with players’ earnings. However, this will be counteracted by increasing rewards by 25%. The purpose of this is to use a portion of gas fees to buy back SKILL and permanently fill Gold and Silver Multi-Farms. This liquidity incentive allows CryptoBlades to benefit from every smart chain they deploy to, regardless of involvement from the exchanges or smart chains themselves. It also will provide a permanent solution to multipliers on chains that lack adequate Knighthood partnerships.
(9.4) CryptoBlades Characters Second Generation
However, this is not the end for creating CryptoBlades teams. The second generation of characters will be released. One key difference will be with their own reward and minting structure. These will have similar prices to that of the NFTs currently and be affordable to many. Generation two will utilize its own Multi-Farm apart from generation one. It can be thought of as generation one earning “Gold” and generation two earning “Silver”.
(9.5) IGO Initiative for New Wallets
This will give players funds to craft weapons, spend in the shop, and create dust to power up their blades. They want players to have the most success and fun while earning!
(9.6) Increasing Reforge Bonuses
Existing and future reforge bonuses will be increased providing more incentive to burn weapons, increasing the floor price of CryptoBlades weapon NFTs. More bonuses mean more power which will bring more rewards for players!
(9.7) Multiple Smart Chain Additions
These will provide significant financial incentives for bridging monthly active users. These chains will also be provided with high-quality farm percentages to ensure they maintain the incentive requirements, with a portion of these incentives going directly into the reward pools. This allows our community to work together to achieve the active users’ benchmarks and win these rewards.
(9.8) Launch BAS and/or Avalanche Subnets These will operate through SKILL token to add permanent utility for SKILL by offering a full suite of GameFi and DeFi services on our chains.
Using “hashcash” and other cryptographic approaches, Nakamoto found an ingenious and novel way to set financial incentives in such a way that fraud always leads to more losses than gains. But Bitcoin’s development did not end there!
Bitcoin’s Script programming language
Satoshi Nakamoto foresaw the need for programs to efficiently interact with the Bitcoin blockchain and developed the “Script” programming language.
Script has limited functionality compared to Ethereum’s Solidity or general-purpose languages, such as Rust, used by Solana. The main limitation is that Script prevents programs from looping. Loops are helpful for enumerations or working through datasets, but they can be used to empty wallets quickly in a series of smaller transactions.
Ethereum got to know what the vicious downsides of loops can entail when “The DAO heist” enabled a hacker to steal a large portion of all Ether (ETH) from a poorly designed smart contract.
This limitation makes Script “Turing Incomplete,” a fancy name for not having as many instructions as a general-purpose language. Turing incompleteness makes Bitcoin much more secure because it limits the potential for nasty bugs; however, it hinders what can be developed. There will never be native NFTs or DeFi applications on the Bitcoin network. Clever developers have had to create more complex solutions built atop Bitcoin for security but process elsewhere, so-called layer-two solutions.
Bitcoin Core developers have not been sleeping in the meantime and updated Script to Tapscript with the Taproot upgrade, which allows more complex transactions.
The Taproot update to Bitcoin Core
The “Block wars” over Bitcoin’s block size in 2017 left a deep and lasting wound on developers and stifled innovation. Bitcoin’s Taproot update is as much a healing process as it is a big step forward for the network’s technology.
Updates used to need a one-year announcement period during which miners could signify their approval. The “Speedy Trial” overlay in the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 8 reduced this timeframe to three months.
After the third try, 90% of miners signalled approval of BIP-340 and BIP-342, known as the Taproot update, on June 12, 2021. The update was locked in on Nov. 14 and went live without a hitch. The corresponding software updates to nodes propagated through the network in the months afterwards.
Taproot features two significant upgrades:
Schnorr signatures: Replacing ECDSA signatures, Schnorr’s algorithm allows keys to sign transactions in aggregate. Bitcoin becomes more private this way because transactions signed by multiple parties are indistinguishable from single-signer transactions. They also enable Bitcoin scripts to sign transactions, expanding the possibilities of Bitcoin native programs.
Tapscript: Expands the functionality of the Script programming language to facilitate more complex transaction conditions, helping the Lightning Network and other layer-two solutions become more private and efficient.
Most importantly of all, Bitcoin developers may have found a new confidence in their ability to innovate and fully support miners.
This confidence is key to keeping Bitcoin relevant with meaningful innovation in the future.
The Bitcoin core developers have proven cautious about making changes to the foundation created by Nakamoto. Back in 2016/2017, when it took six days for transactions to settle, some users demanded a remedy in the form of larger block sizes to allow for more transactions per second.
This proposal did not meet developer support or miner acceptance. The situation became untenable for some, and Bitcoin Cash was born as a result of this confrontation. Bitcoin Cash increased the block size eightfold and can process up to 250 transactions per second (TPS).
How Bitcoin miners agree on transactions
Bitcoin uses the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, which was first implemented in Hashcash. PoW forces miners to try quintillions of different numbers (called nonces), which get appended to the data in a block, and are then hashed using the SHA256 cryptographic function. The resulting hash is 256 bit (32 characters) long and changes radically with even the slightest alteration of the underlying data.
Hashing is a sound way to make data tamper-proof. The Bitcoin protocol only accepts hashes with a certain number of leading “0” characters. Since SHA256 is a unidirectional function, miners cannot work backwards from the desired hash to a fitting nonce but must try different numbers until one produces the desired result.
The number of leading 0s is set to such a length that all the miners in the world combined can only compute one block every 10 minutes on average. This is Bitcoin’s block time.
The Bitcoin hash rate is a measure of network security — currently at 185 EH/s (185*10^18)
Every block is linked to the block before, hence the moniker “blockchain.” Other miners verify a submitted block to ensure the same coins are not sent twice, or from an address a user doesn’t control. Only if they agree can a miner claim their rewards. Fraudulent activity means doing all the calculations in vain and wasted work.
Miners follow the longest possible chain of blocks. If an alternative version is proposed, it would need to recalculate all the blocks from the point of deviation onwards and overtake the main chain to write a different transaction history, known as a 51% attack, because the attacker would need the majority of the entire network’s hashing power to succeed. Hackers could use such an attack to reroute payments and empty wallets without controlling their private keys.
Since the Bitcoin Core network currently has an astounding 185 quintillion hashes per second capacity, it is not economically possible to mount such an attack.
