Bitcoin on ma.ttias.be

Dissecting the code responsible for the Bitcoin halving

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote this in May 2020, the Bitcoin network was a few hours away from its third “halving”. So what is it and how does it work under the hood?

Resources to understanding Bitcoin

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last 3-4 years, I’ve been learning more about the inner workings of Bitcoin and all the tech & finance surrounding it. In this post, I’d like to share the resources I used to get a better understanding of how Bitcoin works, its strengths and weaknesses.

Is bitcoin dead yet?

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 13:41:32 +0000

Let’s find out together, shall we? In this post I’ll look at the current state of bitcoin, both in terms of technology and its usage.

Enable the RPC JSON API with password authentication in Bitcoin Core

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sat, 04 May 2019 20:09:26 +0000

The bitcoin daemon has a very useful & easy-to-use HTTP API built-in, that allows you to talk to it like a simple webserver and get JSON responses back.

How to upgrade to the latest Bitcoin Core version

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 02 May 2019 18:00:59 +0000

This guide assumes you’ve followed my other guide, where you compile Bitcoin Core from source . These steps will allow you to upgrade a running Bitcoin Core node to the latest version.

Retrieving the Genesis block in Bitcoin with bitcoin-cli

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 14:22:22 +0000

If you run a Bitcoin full node , you have access to every transaction and block that was ever created on the network. This also allows you to look at the content of, say, the genesis block. The first block ever created, over 10y ago.

Podcast: Exploring Bitcoin with Edd Mann

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 18:34:23 +0000

Last week I recorded a fun podcast with Edd Man about the tech behind Bitcoin.

Archiving the bitcoin-dev mailing lists

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 07:55:09 +0000

I’ve started yet another effort to index and archive a public mailing list in order to present it in a more readable, clean format.

Initial impressions on running a Bitcoin Core full node

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 20:19:30 +0000

Since about a week I’m running my own Bitcoin Core full node, one that keeps a full copy of the blockchain with all transactions included.

Run a Bitcoin Lightning Node on CentOS 7

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 20:57:34 +0000

Similar to installing a Bitcoin Core full node , you can run a Lightning Node too. The same developer dependencies are needed.

Limit the disk space consumed by Bitcoin Core nodes on Linux

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 20:57:06 +0000

If you run a Bitcoin Core node, by default it will download the entire blockchain on startup and keep a list of every block & transaction. If you’re limited in diskspace, you can instruct the Bitcoin Core daemon to limit the amount of storage the blockchain will take up.

Run a Bitcoin Core full node on CentOS 7

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 20:56:13 +0000

It’s fairly simple to run a full bitcoin node on CentOS 7, if you want to compile one from source. Alternatively, you can run the bitcoind daemon in a Docker container too. These steps will get your server ready to compile Bitcoin from source.

The convincing Bitcoin scam e-mail extorting you

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 12:51:02 +0000

A few months ago I received an e-mail that got me worried for a few seconds. It looked like this, and chances are you’ve seen it too.

A proposal for cryptocurrency addresses in DNS

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 19:43:08 +0000

By now it’s pretty clear that the idea of a _cryptocurrency _probably isn’t going away. It might not be Bitcoin or Litecoin, it might not have the same value as it does today, but the concept of cryptocurrency is here to stay: digital money.

Podcast: The Ceremony, the birth of Zcash

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 07:37:52 +0000

This was an interesting – an unexpected – podcast from the the folks at Radiolab .

A Distributed Web

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 21:06:45 +0000

Networks evolve every couple of years. The internet is no different. We’ve gone from having mainframes to shifting towards a system that distributes load on commodity hardware on premise to “the cloud”. In a couple of years, there’ll be something new.