Bitcoin for Pros

A BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) is the document standard used for proposing changes to Bitcoin.  Proposals are usually first roughly outlined using a mailing list of developers, where feedback and their feasibility are assessed before a decision is made to…

To mine Bitcoin, computers solve cryptographic puzzles to process and validate blocks and their transactions. However, as pointed out by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, the capability of computer hardware and processing power becomes more advanced over time. To solve this…

Bitcoin’s price is linked directly to supply and demand, and events that impact the economy on a national and global level impact people’s need to buy or own (hodl) the cryptocurrency. When the economy is in a funk investors tend…

A term similar to Bitcoin miners, a blockchain validator is someone who is responsible for verifying transactions on a blockchain. Once these transactions have been verified or ‘validated’, they are then added along with the new block to the chain. 

Bitcoin XT was a fork from Bitcoin Core. Proposed in BIP 101 and launched in August 2015, the split from the Bitcoin community was due to disagreements on rule changes with some of Bitcoin Core’s senior developers.

A BTC futures contract is an agreement between a buyer and seller to buy and sell BTC at an agreed price at a future date. The agreement (contract) is the traded commodity, not the actual underlying asset (Bitcoin). It gives investors exposure to BTC without having to hold actual cryptocurrency.

Every cryptocurrency transaction is recorded on a blockchain, but when exactly these transactions are recorded depends whether transactions happen on-chain or off-chain.

A Bitcoin flash crash is when the price of Bitcoin drops dramatically and then returns to its previous levels very quickly. Flash crashes are not unique to Bitcoin and can happen for other cryptocurrencies, as well as stocks.

Using the Bitcoin blockchain, anyone can view every transaction that has ever taken place on the network.

The Bitcoin community consists of members that support the Bitcoin network by hosting a version of the blockchain and its entire history of transactions on their computers, which are called nodes.

Bitcoin Classic was a proposed hard fork from Bitcoin Core that planned to increase Bitcoin’s block sizes from 1MB to 2MB to help the network scale. Although it failed to take off and gather support from the Bitcoin developer community,…

Bitcoin Unlimited was a proposed upgrade for Bitcoin block size limits which was a hard fork from Bitcoin Core. With Bitcoin’s block sizes limited to 1MB, some community developers were concerned about how the network would cope as more users…