Bitcoin Core 26.0
github.com
github.com
Like Luke, who made Knots. And other versions exist too.
The real pain comes from the choices in the past to keep bitcoin inclusive. Smaller blocks mean the ability to download and verify on simple cheap hardware.
Have a look at ETH, SOL or EOS. What kind of server park do you need to run those chains?
Ethereum shares the same philosophy of ensuring that clients are capable of being used on lower end hardware to ensure diversity of nodes.
Ethereum nodes can and are being run on Raspberry PI's + SSD drives.
You can even validate the Ethereum network on a Raspberry PI.
In Ethereum you "validate" instead of "mine" like in bitcoin, this is what keeps the network secure and validating is much more power efficient (99.995% less power use than Bitcoin for). See Proof of Stake vs Proof of Work.
My question to you is: Look at BTC. What kind of specialized, expensive, environmentally unfriendly, ASICS do you need to secure the chain?
Also, funny to see Bitcoiners talk about running censoring client implementations for Ordinals.
??? That has been possible for years: https://github.com/greenaddress/abcore
It looks like that is going to happen with https://zerosync.org/ steadily progressing...
Bitcoin Core, long ago, was "purchased" by Blockstream and they started pushing their own agenda for the protocol, and Luke Jr is one of the devs on their payroll.
Yes, of course, you can create your own wallet or node but unless 51% of the network uses it, your protocol changes will never reach the whole network.
It's absolutely not the case. It's more like a conspiracy theory that keeps getting pushed into Bitcoin-related threads at Hacker news (maybe to tilt future analysis?)
If we take a look at the past month of commits from https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulse/monthly, the top ten authors are:
- MarcoFalke
- fanquake
- hebasto
- ajtowns
- glozow
- ismaelsaadeq
- TheCharlatan
- instagibbs
- brunoerg
- mzumsande
None of them works at Blockstream.
When you say "long ago", it likely points to the "Bitcoin Cash" incident. Almost every person that knows of Bitcoin Cash thinks that Bitcoin is a scam; almost everyone else laughs at the idea of Bitcoin Cash working.
Long ago, that was also the case: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/61blfg/blockstream...
(edited for format)
(I am the longest serving engineer at Blockstream).
Bitcoin Core is a "Node", right? A software you run if you want to have the whole history of all Bitcoin transactions of your own hard drive? Therefore I would think it is only used by researchers and analysts?
If you want the fees, you need to be aware of potential transactions; and also verify that these are valid (at pain of seeing your block be seen as invalid). So you need to receive that information.
Also if you want to publish a block you found, you need to not only listen to information but also publish it to others as well. So yeah, you kind of need to run an up-to-date full node to get both reward and fee.
Now, this does not mean that your miners need to be full nodes. These only need the block to be mined (digest of previous block, header, transactions, your public address to giver the reward to) and then they can vary the nonce at the end to start mining. But this block information has to be up quite to date, otherwise you're mining aimlessly. I've read that while switching to a new block, miner setups send block data empty of transactions to be mined: so as not to waste the few tenths of seconds it takes to upload new block data to miners.
So you can run an operation with a single central full node that sends blocks to individual miner devices.
What does running a node on your laptop achieve? If two parties out there agree to call some roll of toilet paper a "Bitcoin", how will your laptop stop them from doing so? One of the two will hand the other one the roll, the other one will say "Thanks for the Bitcoin" and thats it, right? Why would they send TCP/IP packets to your laptop and ask for permission?
But to me it looks like people think just running a node is like voting for the rules on that node. Even if you do not do any business.
The idea is that every single user, even Grandma buying groceries, has a full copy of the Blockchain to buy her groceries. So no, it is supposed to be used by everyone. This is the reason why the block size is kept small. If it grows too big it is no longer decentralised.
Everyone gets a vote on what bitcoin is, but the definition of bitcoin that you vote for is that defined by the code running on the node you choose to connect to the network through.
Running your own node let's you speak for yourself. If you connect to someone else's node you're effectively saying "I vote for whatever they're voting for".
The two parties calling toilet roll "bitcoin", are not actually using the bitcoin network. They're using the "toilet roll" network and simply calling it bitcoin. Their transaction would not appear on my node, or the vast majority of any other bitcoin nodes and therefore it's not bitcoin by consensus.
If you don't run your own node, you're trusting that the node you're connecting to isn't actually running the "toilet roll" network and you didn't just sell your car for a 6 pack of Andrex. With Bitcoin you never have to trust - you are always able to (and encouraged to) verify, and this is what running your own node allows: verification, with no trust required.
But does a node on a lonely notebook have any real world impact? Do actors who accept Bitcoin payments connect to random nodes?
If so, what prevents someone from running one million nodes on a single laptop and "encircle" such an actor? There is no proof of work involved in running a node, right? So what gives a node any meaning or voting rights?
Regarding the impact of a single node on the network, that node is a way that _you_ can vote on what bitcoin is. You could equally shut it down and vote by connecting through someone else's node, but then you'd be trusting that their node defines bitcoin the way you want to.
In other words, the people decide what bitcoin is, not individual nodes, but the nodes that people connect through define what they are voting for. If you want to be _sure_ that your vote isn't being misdirected, that what the node is reporting as bitcoin really is bitcoin then connect to the network through your own node.
As long as you work for Blockstream Inc. If not you have effectively no say.
(I work for Blockstream, and we have no current employees in the top 10 contributors for this release AFAICT)
Cash transactions are more or less irreversible. Visa is very much not final until at least months after the fact.
Do your bankruptcy creditors know about your 'investments' in Bitcoin competitors that you're promoting here?
Do you mean that anyone will be concerned with bitcoin saftey after our banking system collapses along with other https dependent traffic (as its no longer http'S' ?
Just going to drop in here that we need to be working on these solutions faster than is commonly known. The SOTA in breaking large swaths of our security infrastructure, including SHA, is much farther along in certain rarified environments than is commonly understood.
It was one of the oddest stories in Bitcoin history how a for profit company led by Greg Maxwell and Adam Back wrestled the keys away from the one legitimate contributor Gavin Andresen, then put every remaining coder on the payroll.
As you say, Bitcoin Core is Not open source in the normal meaning.
I've read all the changes to the project for essentially its entire life and there is nothing like that nor would anything like that be accepted by many users or the ordinary review process.
[why should I upgrade such a simple protocol?!]
That's quite revolutionary.
I am still running 0.12.1 [last reliable non segwit bitcoin node release]