Are Off-Block Chain Transactions Bad for Bitcoin?
Bitcoin was designed to be a decentralized and trustless payment network - with the power to do this provided by the block chain and its ability to publicly confirm the digital currency's digital transactions. Rather contentiously, however, as the bitcoin economy expands, more and more transactions are being carried out off the block chain. Such transactions are tracked on private databases instead of the block chain, and cannot be publicly tracked. There are pros and cons to both systems. So, which are better? Off-block chain or on-block chain transactions? Visible payments. Legitimate....
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Transactions are committed to the block chain about every 10 minutes. Zero confirmation transactions do not reside in a block yet. Instead, they reside in the memory pool of miners. Until a block is mined that includes the transaction, it is said to have 'zero confirmations.' Once included in a block and written to the block chain the transaction has one confirmation. Confirmation time is a measurement of a transaction's depth or age, in the block chain; the higher the number of confirmations, the older the transaction. When transactions are first broadcast to the network, they are zero....
Bitcoin will be the sixth largest global reserve currency by 2030, according to research by Silicon Valley investment firm Magister Advisors, which surveyed some 30 block chain companies, the International Business Times reported. The research also indicates banks will invest $1 billion in block chain technology in the next few years and that the block chain will become the rails on which finance runs. Block chain is "without question" the most important enterprise IT development in a decade, said Jeremy Millar, a partner in the investment firm. He characterized the block chain as being on....
Why are so many financial institutions investing in block chain innovation labs? Will the block chain, with its promise of rapid, secure and inexpensive transactions, really make many existing financial institutions obsolete as some have claimed? Thomas F. Dapp and Alexander Karollus examined the block chain's impact on traditional financial institutions in a "talking point" article for Deutsche Bank Research, which provides macroeconomic analysis for Deutsche Bank Group. The article is titled, "Blockchain - attack is probably the best form of defence." The authors noted that the block....
What are gambling transactions doing to the block chain? According to Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a large percentage of bitcoin transactions are gambling-based. With a block chain now over 9Gb in size, and becoming increasingly tedious and difficult for new clients to download, that's becoming a problem. How are gambling-based transactions contributing? Liew points to the most recent available financial report from SatoshiDice, which is the most popular bitcoin gambling site. That site processed 5,222,994 bets in 426 days of operation (that's an average of 12,260....
A Block Parser reads the Bitcoin block chain. There is no encryption of the data stored in the block chain. Bitcoin is a pseudonymous system. Meaning, ECDSA key pairs are used to abstract the identity of users. However, the binary data in the block chain can be read. The block chain is a transaction database. Every full node participating in the Bitcoin network has the same copy. The Bitcoin protocol dictates its structure and is the means through which each node maintains a duplicate copy. Overall, the block chain is just a data structure for storing blocks. The block chain stores blocks....