Cryptocurrency Blog

The size of the bitcoin block has bothered a number of developers, miners, and others involved in the popular cryptocurrency. It seems that the limit of 1 megabyte as the block size means that only 7 transactions can be handled in one second. Because of the number of transactions increasing, this can cause the system to lag. On August 1, 2017, the protocol was changed making the block size limit 8 megabytes. The result was that the new currency was not the same as the bitcoin core so it had to fork into two streams of currency. The first bitcoin cash block was mined 6 hours after bitcoin’s block 478558 was mined. This was the last entry in the blockchain before mining the first bitcoin cash block. It held 6,985 transactions and was nearly 2 MB in size – 1.915 MB. Holders as of block 478558 were suddenly owners of both versions of bitcoin. If you owned a bitcoin on that date, it split into two and for every bitcoin you had, you received bitcoin cash. After that, you had bo...

A bitcoin wallet is software that connects you to the bitcoin network. This is the first step in acquiring bitcoin. You know how it is when you send someone an email. You have to have an email address, a password, and a way of connecting to the network. It can be webmail or a program such as Thunderbird or Outlook. You open up your email program and send an email to someone, using the email address that they gave you. The email is sent using your email address. If someone gets your password, they can log into your email account and send out messages pretending they are you. With bitcoin, you also need software to connect to the network. Your wallet is the software that allows you to connect to the bitcoin network. You have a public key and a private key instead of an email address and a password. You have to protect your private key because if anyone gets access to your wallet, they can clean it out. Think of it as leaving a tangible wallet stuffed with cash out where any...

Forking is when the basic protocol of bitcoin has been changed and suddenly the blockchain splits. There is a fork in the road. One of the limitations of bitcoin that seems to plague many users is the size cap on the block. One megabyte seems to be too small to make sense. In 2010, it might have been okay but in the streaming world of today, it seems to be prohibitive. Developers tried to find ways to improve bitcoin, at least to their way of thinking, their changes would be improvements. The issue is that the changes had to appeal to enough people in the crypto currency community so that the new cryptocurrency would be accepted. A shot at changing this protocol was Bitcoin XT. This forked bitcoin core which is the basis of the bitcoin network. In 2015, the plan was to allow the block to have a cap of 8 megabytes. It would increase the number of transactions that could be contained in each block. It was not a popular idea and it quickly faded and within a year, it was re...