Articles

Reflections upon a SWATting

Jameson tells the full story of being targeted for SWATting.

28 July 2018 | Medium

Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Test

Jameson tests the limits of various metal key storage devices.

14 July 2018 | Medium

Casa’s Privacy Model

Describing what types of privacy Casa customers can expect to have.

25 June 2018 | Medium

Satoshi Roundtable IV Recap

Covering our discussions about tribalism, developer education, operational security, drivechains, and Tether.

10 February 2018 | Medium

What the Data Tells Us About Bitcoin in 2017

Statistics show bitcoin is at the forefront of an increasingly complex ecosystem that continues to grow in a variety of ways.

13 January 2018 | CoinDesk

The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure

Lopp covers a number of issues encountered while building a multisig smart contract wallet.

8 January 2018 | Medium

Securing Your Financial Sovereignty

An explanation of why fully validating nodes matter and how to make use of them.

22 October 2017 | Medium

Can SPV Support a Billion Bitcoin Users?

Lopp takes a deep dive into claims that it's safe to remove bitcoin's block size limit and instead rely on existing SPV methods.

30 July 2017 | CoinDesk

Bitcoin and the Benefits of Coopetition

Lopp makes an impassioned argument for the need for more cooperation between the players in the bitcoin space.

14 July 2017 | CoinDesk

The Challenges of Bitcoin Transaction Fee Estimation

Bitcoin transaction fee estimation is a goldilocks problem wrapped in a future prediction enigma shrouded...

10 May 2017 | BitGo

Announcing the Bitcoin Core Config Generator

Bitcoin Core is a complex piece of software. Because one of the primary goals of Bitcoin is to enable users to be self sovereign and...

30 March 2017 | Medium

Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And That's OK)

When I first became interested in bitcoin, I found myself spending countless hours absorbing as much information about it as possible, trying to put all of the pieces together...

13 March 2017 | CoinDesk

Moderation Methods vs Censorship Claims

One of the major points of contention in the Bitcoin community these days revolves around claims of censorship...

13 February 2017 | Medium

Statoshi’s Satoshi Roundtable Review

I was fortunate to attend the 2017 Satoshi Roundtable on behalf of BitGo. It was truly a pleasure to meet many...

30 January 2017 | BitGo

Review: Putting Ledger's New Bitcoin Hardware to the Test

Ledger's new hardware wallet is the most costly on the market. Does it have the features to justify the expense...

28 January 2017 | CoinDesk

SegWit: The Swiftest Safe Path Forward

I and many of my colleagues at BitGo and across the Bitcoin ecosystem are eager to see...

19 January 2017 | SegWit Resources

Bitcoin: 2016 in Review

In addition to my day job as a BitGo engineer, I run Statoshi.info, a site I created in 2014 to track Bitcoin metrics from the perspective...

9 January 2017 | BitGo

Bitcoin's Security Model: A Deep Dive

When discussing consensus mechanisms for different cryptocurrencies, one issue that often causes arguments is a lack...

13 November 2016 | CoinDesk

How to Run Bitcoin as a Tor Hidden Service on Ubuntu

Why should you run a Bitcoin hidden service on your node? * It increases the privacy of other Bitcoin users...

19 August 2016 | Medium

Bitcoin: The Trust Anchor in a Sea of Blockchains

Bitcoin has a number of properties that give it utility (and thus value)  such as  trustlessness, permissionlessness...

23 July 2016 | CoinDesk

Building a Better Bitcoin Fee Market

Over the past year we have seen the fee market for bitcoin transactions evolve at a rapid pace. As transaction volume continues to increase, so does the demand for block space, which remains...

8 May 2016 | CoinDesk

Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks

From bitcoin to blockchain to distributed ledgers, the cryptocurrency space is fast evolving, to the...

9 April 2016 | CoinDesk

Avoiding Stuck Transactions With BitGo

A lot happens under the hood when sending a Bitcoin transaction - I covered some of the details in a previous...

29 February 2016 | BitGo

VIEW ALL ARTICLES BY JAMESON LOPP

Lightning’s Balancing Act: Challenges Face Bitcoin’s Scalability Savior

The bitcoin community has been discussing the concept of the...

28 February 2016 | CoinDesk

How to Save Bitcoin's Node Network from Centralization

Decentralization is, I would argue, the most important property of the bitcoin network. Without it, many...

30 January 2016 | CoinDesk

Statoshi Developer’s Guide

Statoshi is a fork of Bitcoin Core with several hundred additional lines of code for emitting metrics to a StatsD instance. You can view the...

24 December 2015 | Medium

The Future of Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin mining has evolved rapidly over the last 7 years, with three distinct generations of miners in terms of power efficiency: 1.CPUs (2009–2010) 2. GPUs & FPGAs (2010–2013) 3. ASICs (2013-present)...

19 December 2015 | Medium

Scaling Bitcoin: Hong Kong Recap

While many were dubious that it would be successful, I attended the second Scaling Bitcoin workshop with...

8 December 2015 | Medium

Case Wallet Review

When I first heard about Case Wallet, I was intrigued. The fact that it used a 2-of-3 multi-sig setup like we do at BitGo made me interested to see if this product would be able...

21 November 2015 | Medium

Malevolent Malleability

Transaction malleability is a longstanding well-known issue in the Bitcoin technical community. One of the earliest discussions about it occurred in 2011. Malleability...

5 November 2015 | BitGo

Bitcoin Legislation in North Carolina

I’ve lived in North Carolina my entire life. It’s a great place to live and has a thriving tech scene...

2 October 2015 | Medium

To Node or Not to Node?

Over a year ago I wondered: how many Bitcoin nodes is enough? It turns out that there are several different perspectives from which one can ask...

26 September 2015 | Medium

How to Solo Mine on Bitcoin’s Testnet

I’m a Bitcoin engineer, so I often need to test new code but I don’t want to risk losing valuable bitcoins in case there is a bug. Thankfully...

14 September 2015 | Medium

Statoshi.info Account Creation Guide

Now you can create, save, and share your own custom dashboards on statoshi.info! It only takes a couple minutes...

24 June 2015 | Medium

The Challenges of Block Chain Indexing

Over the past several months I’ve had the pleasure of enhancing BitGo’s block chain indexing service — a core...

1 June 2015 | BitGo

(De)centralized Block Chain Scaling

Lately there has been a great deal of debate around increasing the maximum block size allowed by the Bitcoin protocol because we’re approaching the current 1 MB limit. While this...

17 May 2015 | Medium

How to Create a BitGo Wallet with a Mycelium Entropy Generated Offline Key

BitGo provides a secure non-custodial Bitcoin wallet using our P2SH Safe Address multisignature tech...

7 April 2015 | BitGo

The Challenges of Optimizing Unspent Output Selection

When we talk about bitcoins being stored on the block chain, most people speak in terms of “address balances” which makes sense from an accounting perspective, but this is not...

23 February 2015 | BitGo

How to Fix Amazon Instant Video Streaming in Ubuntu

If you’re an Ubuntu user who is trying to play Amazon Instant Videos but you’re encountering an error that looks like this: "Player Update: An error occurred and your player could not...

20 December 2014 | Medium

Graphite & Grafana Performance Tips

If you’re using Graphite to monitor your systems, your dashboards are probably only accessible to a few people in your organization and page load performance...

13 December 2014 | Medium

A Puzzling Bitcoin Treasure Hunt

After reading about Coin Artist’s epic Dark Wallet puzzle I decided to try my hand at crafting a (slightly less difficult) steganographic bitcoin treasure hunt...

9 December 2014 | Medium

How to Generate a Custom Bitcoin Address with an AMD GPU on Ubuntu

Have you ever wanted a bitcoin address that was more personalized and recognizable than the standard...

8 November 2014 | Medium

Thoughts on Secure Storage of Bitcoins and Other Crypto Backed Assets

Depending upon the value of your crypto assets, you’ll need to take different levels of precautions in order to provide sufficient...

5 October 2014 | Medium

The Future of Statoshi

I am a software engineer who has spent the past 7 years scaling my employer’s web application from a several server infrastructure capable of sending a hundred thousand emails a day to a several hundred server infrastructure that sends a hundred...

23 August 2014 | Medium

Bitcoin Baron Bios: The Who’s Who of the Cryptocurrency Community

I’m not sure if it was YTCracker who coined the term “Bitcoin Baron,” but I’ve found it fascinating to observe the Bitcoin early adopters who have played public roles in shaping...

7 June 2014 | Medium

The State of the Bitcoin Network

Friends, followers, fellow Internet denizens: twenty-six years ago, Timothy May predicted that cryptologic methods would fundamentally...

7 June 2014 | Medium

Announcing Statoshi.info: A public Statoshi dashboard

A common criticism of Statoshi is that it is too complicated for the average person to configure and...

7 June 2014 | Medium

Announcing Statoshi: Realtime Bitcoin Node Statistics

I’ve been on a quest for the past several months since I first asked the question: how many Bitcoin...

7 June 2014 | Medium

Bitcoin Nodes: How Many is Enough?

Should we be worried about the declining number of nodes? It’s fairly straightforward to see the computational strength of the Bitcoin mining infrastructure growing...

7 June 2014 | Medium

Peeking Under the Hood of a Running Bitcoin Node

I’ve been running a Bitcoin full node for over a year now, but the only insight I ever had into what it was doing was how many...

7 June 2014 | Medium

How to Set Up a Bitcoin Full Node

Help support the network at little cost! In a previous post I discussed the functions of full nodes and how the complexity of Bitcoin’s network makes it difficult to discern how many nodes are actually needed...

7 June 2014 | Medium

The Multifaceted Nature of Bitcoin

It’s indisputable that Bitcoin is a controversial topic. It results in people to asking questions like “what is money?” and “what is value?” — questions that many people live...

7 June 2014 | Medium

How to set up an IDE for developing Bitcoin Core on Linux

Recently I decided that browsing the Bitcoin Core source code in a text editor was not sufficient; I wanted to leverage the features...

7 June 2014 | Medium

The Value of Bitcoin’s Infrastructure

Debunking the myth of “intrinsic value”. We often hear from naysayers that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it’s simply software, a hodgepodge of digital bits and bytes that only exist in the ether of the Internet...

7 June 2014 | Medium

Zerocoin: Zero Knowledge for Infinite Anonymity

Many people mistakenly describe Bitcoin as an anonymous digital currency. This is not true by a long shot — Bitcoin can be best described...

7 June 2014 | Medium

How to Invest in Bitcoin Within a Tax Advantaged Retirement Account

Note that the following does not constitute investment advice. Investing in cryptocurrency is high risk...

7 June 2014 | Medium