An Essay From El Salvador: A Glass Half Full Or A Block Half Empty?
The success or failure of Bitcoin’s adoption in El Salvador, at the current moment, is largely defined by your expectations.This is the second installment in Okcoin’s “I am Satoshi” series, profiles of Salvadorans during the transition to bitcoin as legal tender. Read the first about Elina Marchenko’s visit with Enrique Barrios of Bitcoin Smiles.Impressions Of The State Of BitcoinOne of my favorite things to do in the midst of the craziness unleashed by the passing of “Ley Bitcoin” has been to get an off-the-record moment with journalists or Bitcoiners who are visiting El Salvador and ask....
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Last week, one of the most interesting topics of debate in the Bitcoin community was how the future of this disruptive virtual currency allegedly lies in Europe. While Europe has several things going for it as far as Bitcoin is concerned, there is no real reason why this part of the world favors Bitcoin more than anywhere else. In fact, there is a severe....
Blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain have a maximum size of 1 MB. Proof of work difficulty is calibrated so 1 block is created every 10 minutes. It is generally accepted a miner would want to maximise the number of transactions it includes in a block as it collects the transaction fees. Logically, with the growing popularity of Bitcoin, the average block size is getting closer to its limit. In this environment, it is surprising to see a number of empty blocks being mined. An empty block is not entirely empty, it has 1 transaction : the coinbase transaction which allocates the mining reward to....
For all the press Bitcoin has received, many contrarians are still attracted to sub-contrarians derived from the original contrarian. Many see Bitcoin's glass as half-empty, instead of half full. That doesn't apply to Coinbase head Brain Armstrong, who made news Monday morning with his Twitter commentary on the state of the digital currency universe. Coinbase CEO: The rest are just a distraction. Coinbase just launched their new Bitcoin exchange. Plus, Coinbase has received a major money-shot of venture capital funding last month, which rang in at over $100 million, so 2015 has already....
Empty blocks have turned into a controversial topic in the Bitcoin community over the past few months. This renewed attention on the topic has been sparked by the number of nearly-empty blocks mined by Antpool recently. An empty block is one that only contains a coinbase transaction. This may seem counterproductive, but there are incentives in place that make mining empty blocks a practical endeavor from the perspective of a miner. Why Do Miners Mine Empty Blocks? According to Bitcoin Core contributor Matt Corallo, there are three main reasons as to why empty blocks have been mined in the....
El Salvador was the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender. Though some speculations have given pessimistic forecasts on the implications for the nation, things seem to be moving in a contrary wave. El Salvador’s tourism record has shown a tremendous spike for the first half of 2022. According to government data, the country […]