What crypto projects I'm looking looking forward to in 2018

2017 has been an important day for both Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. While hopefully not as tumultuous, 2018 is looking like it will bring us a lot of interesting innovation in the space. Here are some of the things I'm personally looking forward to seeing unfold in the new year.

ICO Securities

After the SEC's investigative report on The DAO, we have seen a number of companies (mine included) start looking into ICO Securities. This might be a start of a new wave of ICOs that will be bigger than the entirety of the current market.

If a lot of sentiments I've heard so far are to be believed, we might see such ICOs replace traditional VC funding, bring in more traditional investment industry into the market, and get a number of people from various governments to watch closely where this trend will unfold. If properly harnessed, Security ICOs could also drive real-world innovation while providing more sustainable, long-term growth than the current trend of "sell vaporware with hype and turn 100x profit in a few months".

I'm certainly the most excited to see where this trend will go and whether my guesses will turn out to be correct or not...

Lightning Network adoption

In 2017 we got SegWit activated on Bitcoin and a few other currencies. So far it has alleviated a bit of the transaction traffic, but it's nowhere near useful enough to solve the Bitcoin scaling problem on its own. Hence why I'm excited to see if the Lightning Network will be able to deliver on its promises and go mainstream allowing Bitcoin to once more be used for everyday purchases. Betting on SegWit without blocksize increase has certainly been a large gamble that has allowed a number of alts to grow into their own prominence. Hopefully we'll see this year if this bet pays off, or Bitcoin might lose its luster...

Ethereum POS change

The anticipation of Ethereum changing from POW to mostly POS has been heard many times through 2017. We've seen the technology delayed to (hopefully) later this year. If successful, it would make Ethereum the most prominent POS coin out there, possibly driving some people to invest in it for the staking returns. While I'm not sharing the paranoia surrounding Bitcoin's POW (claiming that its energy consumption will continue to grow at a massive rate eating a significant chunk of world's energy production in a few years), it's still a worthwhile experiment to see undertaken.

Interledger, Codius, etc.

Ripple is another company / crypto to look out for in 2018. While I might have my reservations about XRP the currency, I have strong respect for Ripple the network and its creators.

Other than the growth of the Ripple network itself, there are two interesting projects from Ripple Labs that might become more prominent in 2018. The first one is the Interledger Protocol, a protocol aiming to help facilitate payments across different ledgers / blockchains / etc. The second one I was surprised to see the light of day again was Codius (which has been shelved for some time in 2015) - a universal hosting standard for smart oracles.

Ripple Labs is definitely a company that will be doing interesting projects for years to come. It will be interesting to see what they will cook up for us in 2018...

Tether and other fiat IOUs

Tether has been an interesting fiat IOU these past few years. The space itself has been a bit paradoxical honestly - there have been a lot of fiat IOUs on Ripple, but only one prominent IOU on the Omni network and so far not all that much on the Ethereum network. Tether as a currency has been rather unremarkable until it started having some banking problems and despite that its market cap has increased to almost 1.5B USD at the time of writing. This has sparked at least one very prominent Twitter user to start calling it out on every given opportunity.

There are two ways I could see this play out in 2018. On one hand, we might see fiat IOUs to appear more prominently on the Ethereum blockchain (Tether has apparently already made that leap), possibly to compliment the above mentioned ICO Securities. On the other hand if some more paranoid people are to be believed, Tether might turn into another MtGox and implode with such a force as to crash the crypto prices by a lot.

One way or another 2018 is looking like a year where fiat IOUs might become more important in the crypto space.

Government-backed cryptos

For years a lot of Bitcoiners have been stating that some governments should adopt Bitcoin as a national currency. A few years back we saw Canada looking into doing the opposite - adopting its fiat currency into a crypto form with MintChip. Unfortunately, that project went nowhere, but it's looking like this year we might have the next serious contender - Venezuela aiming to launch its Petro.

Petro is designed to be "backed by oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves", making it a bit more of a commodity IOU than a fiat IOU. It might be an interesting experiment, especially if this creates an alternative to the hyper-inflating bolivar accessible to the people of Venezuela. It will remain to be seen whether the government will be able to keep the value of the new currency stable and keep it backed by the natural resources, or will we one day see the currency stop being backed by anything.

If successful, this might be the first time a government-created currency will have to complete on somewhat equal footing to private currencies and digital cats.

Conclusions

2018 is looking like another exciting year in crypto space. We will see how the echos of the prior year will play out, as well as get to experience entirely new developments shape the space. There is never a dull moment in this industry...

Bitcoin's second near-death experience, aftermath of the scaling debate, the SEC - Crypto year 2017 and what's to come in 2018

2017 has been one of the most turbulent year in crypto history to date. We have seen important changes in technology and the political climate, divides in the community, as well as wild jumps in prices of many cryptos. I would like to take a moment to talk about a few key takeaways from this year and what I think had the most impact on the future of crypto.

Bitcoin's second near-death experience

Bitcoin has been declared dead so many times it has basically become a meme. As of the time of writing, there have been 222 obituaries proclaiming the death of the currency. I'm not here to talk about those, but about a feeling you could get from old-timer Bitcoiners.

I've been in the community since 2011, and I have experienced two moments where Bitcoin's future was uncertain. I came in right around the first notable bubble, when the price soared to the unthinkable... $30/BTC (or about ~$40 in the polish markets). After that bubble has popped, the price began to decline. Slowly creeping down, taking with it confidence of many bitcoiners. At the time nobody could tell for certain what was going to happen - whether the coins will become worthless, or will we see something different happen entirely.

People nowadays despair when Bitcoin drops 30% from all-time-high peak, but back in 2011, we saw Bitcoin go down to about $2 per coin, or a decline of about 93%. The future of the project was uncertain, everyone was depressed, and for me, that was Bitcoin's first near-death experience.

Of course, we recovered. After that, when the next bubble came, you had more confidence that Bitcoin will bounce back. We've seen it before. "There is no bubble like the 2011 bubble" I tend to say.

In 2017, we had to deal with the scaling problem that has been anticipated since at least 2015. We had to figure out what solution might be the best - whether to go with big blocks, or go off the chain. At the same time, we had to anticipate that ever since The DAO and Ethereum's split, any major, contentious change to the Bitcoin protocol would create a similar split. Piled on top of that we had the covert ASICBOOST scandal and over a year of the community being forcibly divided in discussing the scaling solutions.

In other words, the pressure was rising from all sides and something had to give. At the same time, many sides have remained rigid, not willing to make a compromise. Instead we saw warring solutions - SegWit, 2x, UASF, etc. In the end we saw a group trying to reach a solution - "SegWit now, 2x in half a year", which allowed SegWit to activate but would backfire when that second part was to come due.

However, before SegWit could be activated, we had a different fork be proposed - Bitcoin Cash. Increasing the block size and changing a few other things. However, this one didn't wait to reach a majority, instead opting to declare a fork happening and going through with it.

The period following the announcement has been Bitcoin's second near-death experience. The future was once again uncertain - would this split in mining power mean some crazy oscillations in the difficulty? Would the currency retain its value after the split? Would one chain dominate the other and just take over? These were uncertain times in which the altcoins thrived.

The forks came and went, Bitcoin is still around, so is Bitcoin Cash. We now know how Bitcoin responds in this situation, so we will be ready in the future once more. "There is no split like the 2017 split" I suppose?

The aftermath of the scaling debate

Even though SegWit has been activated, we are still seeing a lot of transactions waiting to be confirmed in the mempool. With the lightning network being months away from being ready, it seems the transaction fees will keep on increasing. We can also see an interesting trend lately - people trying to bully companies into integrating the "optional" SegWit into their system to lower fees. It's somewhat disheartening to see. I hope that in 2018 we will see an empty mempool again...

Another important event that took place this year was the failed attempt to follow through with the SegWit2x agreement and the subsequent backlash against the "transgressors". We've seen old-school bitcoiners wanting to change Bitcoin's POW to spite the miners or force various businesses to "sign a very simple pledge that acknowledges that Bitcoin is not ruled by miners in order to be linked from bitcoin.org". Luckily neither of those have gotten any traction and could be written off as a pendulum effect to the SegWit2x continuing up to the 11th hour before being called off.

The last unfortunate aftermath of the scaling debate has been the decisive split of the Bitcoin community. Up until the SegWit / Bitcoin Cash split I had hopes there could be some reconciliation (1, 2). After the scaling debate would be over and the project could be back on track that we could come back together and bury the hatchet. However, once a split happens and both sides survive long enough, there is no going back - there are people financially tied to one end but not the other that understandably won't leave their side. We had some high-profile people supporting one side or the other, and what seems like layers of narrative being spun on both sides (proclaiming something is being implemented because of X, but in reality it's done because of more selfish reason Y, for example - invading Iraq because of WMDs, while in reality it might be because of oil or the like). It's unfortunate that we have failed to keep the community together in the first place and to bring it back together before the differences were irreconcilable...

Here's to hoping we can learn to at least respect and tolerate one another and remember what we were fighting for in the first place...

Crypto securities and the SEC report

The DAO has been an important project that has already shaped the industry despite or perhaps precisely because its failing. It has split the Ethereum blockchain in twine, and this year it has given us something rather unexpected - a SEC investigative report. It concluded that The DAO has been a security, which has had a significant impact on the ICO community. Now you have to seriously consider whether you're creating a security or a utility token when creating an ICO and follow with the appropriate requirements.

This has created a new wave of interest in the community. Some people are embracing being a security and taking a full advantage of that, while others are moving away from being a pseudo-security not to be found guilty of fraud or other regulations.

The crypto-securities have definitely been dominating my conversations over the last months and I have no doubt they will be the big news in 2018. I also heard some rumours from credible sources that at least one notable project has been declared to not be a security, but I can't disclose what it is until some official announcement unfortunately. So there is development happening on both sides of the spectrum, which is always good to hear.

Conclusions

The Bitcoin scaling forks and splits have been a major event in the Bitcoin's history. They have left a lasting effect on the community and technology. This year we have also seen some important report coming from the SEC that has already began to shape the ICO landscape. We are likely to see that become a major influence of what 2018 will look like.

Here's to 2018 and what's yet to come!

The next wave of ICOs

About half a year ago, SEC released an investigative report concluding that DAO Tokens were securities. Since then there have been a number of high profile cases reinforcing this classification world-wide - UIP, LLToken, CCC, and HMS had to issue refunds to the ICO purchasers in China, Protostarr closed up shop, REcoin and DRC World were charged with fraud and so on.

On one hand, the future of ICOs may be looking grim, with the law enforcement making it harder for various projects to raise money by issuing tokens. On the other hand, the new classification of (some) ICOs as securities might be one of the best things that has happened in the space lately. We might be on the bring of a new wave of ICOs, and here is why...

Historical waves

Long-term bitcoiners might start to see some pattern in history. Early on, we had the pioneering invention that was Bitcoin. After a few years, it became somewhat successful, earning its early adopters some hefty amount of money. We then saw a few other projects pop up saying "I too would like some money". We then saw first a trickle of new coins appearing, altering the Bitcoin codebase slightly, and then an entire wave of thousands of altcoins doing the same, tweaking the parameters and claiming they are better than Bitcoin, therefore they should get the money Bitcoin gets.

We then saw a new wave come in. Coins that were generally not mined, but created and pre-sold to raise the money the team needed to build their product. Mastercoin, Ethereum, etc. Soon after, once a few high-profile projects have made bank, we saw a repeat of what happened before - a large influx of projects also doing an ICO in a "me too" mentality.

It is rather likely that the next wave of altcoins / ICOs will follow the same trends - starting with a trickle of trail-blazers, following with a wave of followers.

ICO Securities and the next wave

For awhile now, you could see a number of ICOs skirting the line of being a security or a utility token. Perhaps giving a wink to their pre-purchasers - "of course you should not expect a profit, but you know we're just like that other ICO that made such great ROI. We're not promising ours will do the same, but you know...". Maybe they tacked on some functionality to have an excuse to call themselves a utility token - "this token will be used to pay for ads to display to our users. It only has a utility value of those ads. You should definitely not speculate on the token representing a share in the platform we're building" or something like that.

Now, with the SEC report, it seems that some ICO projects are taking things a bit more seriously. The grey area between a utility and a security token has become less of a safe harbour. We can expect ICOs to take a firmer stance on what they are. On one hand, we will have token ICOs staying far away from being a security to avoid the extra compliance burden associated with that, but on the other hand, we will see some new ICOs emerge - ICOs that fully embrace being a security and go all-out.

If you're already aiming to be a security and do all of the due diligence associated with it, you could drop the song and dance of utility from your token. We might see tokens that represent shares in a company, tokens that represent rights to dividends and so on, rather than trying to pretend they are tied to some specific functionality of a utility token.

More importantly, by embracing the due diligence of being a security, those tokens might attract the more traditional investors. Companies could do ICOs instead of IPOs, raise money through token presales rather than seed rounds and so on.

This might be the next big wave of ICOs - ICO securities. We will probably see first trailblazers like impak Coin soon, and we can expect the wave to come soon after. We might see a number of people trying to get rich quick, but hopefully we will also see some true innovators creating something new we haven't seen before in the crypto space. I have a few ideas of my own of what those might be, but one shouldn't give away the billion dollar ideas too quickly ;).

Conclusions

In the past, we have seen a wave of altcoins and a wave of ICOs sweep into the crypto world. Due to the recent SEC report, we might soon see a new wave of ICO securities repeat the same cycle, hopefully bringing in a wave of new kinds of investors into the space.

If you're interested in launching an ICO compliant with the securities regulation, perhaps you'd be interested in checking out the new company I work for - https://www.icomplyico.com/ . We're focused on helping new projects launch compliant ICOs.

The need for universal opt-in replay protection

SegWit2x got cancelled, and with it probably the most heated "battle" in the Bitcoin space thus far draws to a close. There are many lessons to be learned from this ordeal as well as some other forks that are happening around Bitcoin - what constitutes "consensus" in the community, how will the future forks be handled and so on. One important aspect I haven't seen discussed as much currently is the ongoing issue of fork-proof replay protection - a feature that caused some controversy by its absence in SegWit2x and made Bitcoin Gold a laughing stock when they created a bounty for it very close to their forking date.

Strong vs opt-in replay protection

There is an important distinction to be made between strong and opt-in replay protection. When a fork occurs, the former is always on and prevents any transaction on one side of the fork from being valid on the other side of the chain. Bitcoin Cash has strong replay protection for example.

Opt-in replay protection on the other hand is optional - you can create a transaction that won't be valid on the other side of the fork, but you are also able to have a transaction that is valid on both sides.

Strong replay protection is useful when you want to split from the main chain and remain an independent project. However, it can be detrimental when the changes you're proposing are meant to be an upgrade to the current code rather than forking off into a new project. This is why SegWit2x didn't opt to have a replay protection - it was meant to be an upgrade to the Bitcoin project and be the only version used. The only way to achieve that was to make it hard for both sides of the fork to coexist.

Problem with opt-in replay protection

While opt-in replay protection sounds like the proper way to go, there is one important problem to consider - how do you implement it in a way that will apply to all future forks?

In a perfect world, every fork would be carefully maintained and it would make sure to make its opt-in replay protection create transactions only valid on its own chain. However, as Bitcoin Gold and other projects have proven - we can't rely on forks being managed competently. Hence, we need a universal opt-in replay protection, one that is agnostic to any future forks (even those that don't honour any replay protection whatsoever) and creates transactions that will be only valid on one chain.

Universal opt-in replay protection

A fork that splits off from the main project can be caused by any alteration to the protocol. There is no universal way to differentiate between both sides of the fork ahead of time save for one - the blockchain history. You can mimic anything about the code, even pretend to be some different client, but for certain at some points the blockchains will diverge - otherwise we wouldn't be dealing with a fork. Once that is done, the data can be used to implement the replay protection.

If one could flag a transaction to only be valid if a given block hash is present in the blockchain, that would be enough to ensure it will always be possible to safely move coins around on any fork that might occur in the future.

If both sides of the fork honour that flag, only one side will include the transaction in the block. Do this on both sides and the coins will be safe to spend on two sides of the fork.

If only one side of the fork honours the flag however, the replay protection could still work, albeit with some limitations. You would need to create a transaction with the flag on the chain that doesn't honour it. This way the chain will include the transaction in its blockchain, but the main chain will reject it, since it would not recognise the block hash. After the first transaction is confirmed, it would be safe to spend the coins on the other side of the fork.

Conclusions

It is possible to implement a universal opt-in replay protection that will still be effective even if only one side of a given fork will respect its rules. This should be sufficient to protect one's bitcoins in an event of a possible future bitcoin fork.

The proposed implementation is rather simple and elegant. I came up with this idea when contemplating SegWit2x awhile back, but then became pleasantly surprised when I found out someone else already proposed it as a BIP115 a year before :). It's not part of the main codebase yet, but maybe by the time next fork rolls around we'll have something to protect our bitcoins with...

What is Bitcoin in the light of hard forks?

This year has been one of the more controversial years for Bitcoin thus far. We have already seen a number of important forks happen - SegWit, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold, and we're scheduled to witness some other forks soon - Bitcoin Cash doing a hard fork, SegWit2x looming ever closer, and we might even see some emergency PoW change hardfork in response to SegWit2x. Amidst all of that, many people are asking themselves, debating and fighting over an important question - "What is Bitcoin?" (that iconic question).

The power of the name

Earlier this year, there was a small debacle as to what Bitcoin Cash should be called. It seems that some of its opponents wanted to dismiss the fork by calling it "Bcash" to further distance it from the Bitcoin project. It seems the "Bitcoin" name by itself holds value like any other brand, otherwise we wouldn't have so many projects using it:

How many Bitcoins do we have? (source)

In response to Bitcoin Cash being called Bcash, some supporters of that project started calling Bitcoin Cash by just "Bitcoin", and referring to the SegWit side of the fork as "SegWit Coin".

While at the start it might not seem like much, a definition of what "Bitcoin" is and which side of a fork gets to call itself that is really important. Bitcoin is a currency with over 125B USD market cap, a liquid market on numerous exchanges, and countless of projects using it, many of whom would barely be able to follow what's going on in this debate. A fork of Bitcoin, on the other hand, has to start out with nothing and build up that market almost from scratch.

This is why contentious forks are so problematic and why such a simple thing as replay protection is controversial - whoever wins in the fork and gets to call itself "Bitcoin" will be the project that matters, while the loser won't matter anymore. A fork with a hard replay protection is easy to dismiss as an altcoin, while one without is much easier to pass on as an upgrade to the protocol, as Bitcoin has historically never done replay protection (while it seems Ethereum might be getting that as a standard in the future).

So what is Bitcoin, really?

With all of those forks past and future, many people have to ask themselves - "What is Bitcoin, really?". Gavin Andresen's definition has been a good guide so far:

“Bitcoin” is the ledger of not-previously-spent, validly signed transactions contained in the chain of blocks that begins with the genesis block (hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f), follows the 21-million coin creation schedule, and has the most cumulative double-SHA256-proof-of-work.

It might, however, be worthwhile to start drilling down the definition and listing all of the important semantics that have or might be important in the future.

So Bitcoin could be defined as:

1. A blockchain
2. Beginning with the genesis block hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
3. Containing only validly signed transactions
4. Containing only not-previously-spent transactions
5. Containing no more than ~21M coins
6. Following the ~130 year coin distribution
7. Continuously, publicly mined
8. Double-SHA hashed
9. With a difficulty adjustment every 2016 blocks
10. Mined using a PoW algorithm
11. Following the chain with the most cumulative work
12. With a block limit of 1MB
13. ...

There are many such nitty-gritty details to list and rank. An important exercise for a lot of people is to rank these various features, and in case of a contentious fork - figure out which of those features might be changed.

So for example, if Bitcoin Gold is creating a fork that changes the PoW algorithm and doing private mining for awhile, versus Bitcoin Cash changing the block limit and changing the difficulty adjustment algorithm, we have forks that change the features 10 and 7, vs 12 and 9. Following this ordered list, Bitcoin Cash would be less contentious (which is not to say - not contentious at all) as it alters features lower down the list.

So would Bitcoin be Bitcoin under Script being changed to Simplicity? SegWit2x changing the block size? A fork that changes the PoW? Which part of the fork would be "more Bitcoin" than the other?

Of course, there is more to a fork than just such rules - there is a lot of politics involved, and sometimes a more controversial fork still remains dominant. Ethereum's DAO fork for example meant the "main" chain violated a very important rule - containing only valid transactions, but that side of the chain is still a lot more widely used than the "purer" alternative - Ethereum Classic.

Conclusions

Battling over which side of the fork is "the real Bitcoin" is more than just fighting over a name. It is the battle for market dominance, wide acceptance and legitimacy in the eyes of the laymen. The winner will be the world's best know cryptocurrency, while the loser will be hardly talked about outside of the crypto circles.

Seeing which side of the debate will endure the upcoming forks will definitely be a seminal point in the story of Bitcoin.

Blockstream vs miners - looking at the incentives around the SegWit2x fork

The past few months in the Bitcoin community have been filled with discussion of an upcoming hardfork - SegWit2x. There have been a lot of people voicing their opinion on the matter of whether that fork should be allowed to pass or not, but today I would like to look at who I believe to be two key players in this debate - Blockstream (opposing SegWit2x) and the miners, the core signatories of the New York Agreement. More specifically, I will be focusing on the incentives both of those parties have when it comes to dealing with SegWit2x.

What is SegWit2x?

SegWit2x was first proposed as a compromise between the various factions in Bitcoin that were trying to solve the problem of blocks being full. It aimed to both enable the activation of SegWit to enable off-chain transactions, and to increase the block size to 2MB to increase the number of transactions that can be processed on-chain. It was to be deployed in two stages - first by activating SegWit in the summer (which already took place), and then by increasing the block size in winter (which is still pending).

Basic incentives for everyone

When examining why people would be for or against a certain change, it is often useful to look at the incentives they have for being on either side of the fence. An incentive shared by every Bitcoin user and company is to see Bitcoin succeed, be used by more and more people and to gain in value. You can occasionally see someone stating the opposite (along the lines of "it's good the price is going down, it will slow the adoption rate so the project will be developed further before mainstream starts to use it", or people wanting to buy the dip in price), but most people that are invested in Bitcoin want to see it grow, that's pretty much a given.

Beyond that, things tend to get murky. You can see some ideologies come into play and so on. But if you focus on SegWit2x, the basic incentive for both sides appears to come down to the good old money...

Incentives of Blockstream and the miners

Blockstream is a for-profit company. As such, it is expected it will increase in value and, at least eventually, start generating revenue. While it had some projects that seem to be a money sink, the core business plan seems to still focus on sidechains - "sell[ing] side chains to enterprises, charging a fixed monthly fee, taking transaction fees and even selling hardware" (which the Blockstream CEO even explicitly confirmed). The original SegWit proposal was introduced by Blockstream's co-founder.

So with this, we have a clear picture - Blockstream's revenue stream will come from off-chain transactions. Now, let's look at the other side of the debate.

Miners are paid directly in BTC by the blocks they mine. They mint new coins with each block, and they also collect fees for any transactions they include in that block. At the moment the block reward is 12.5BTC, and the fees add up to about 0.5 to 2 BTC on average. Pretty straightforward and as described in the original whitepaper.

So the miners are incentivised to include as many transactions in their blocks as they can, giving priority to those that pay more fees than the others per unit of size.

Clash of incentives

Both sides of this debate get their money from the same source - transaction fees. Blockstream wants more transactions to flow through their proprietary service to collect more fees from institutions and individuals. The miners on the other hand benefit from more transactions taking place on the blockchain - they earn transaction fees only for the transactions that are included in the block and get nothing from off-chain transactions until they come back onto the chain. With finite amount of money flowing through the network, this is a classic zero-sum game - the more transactions flow through your preferred channel, the more money you have and the less money your opponent has.

In an ideal scenario, we would let both of those options onto the free market and let the consumer choose what they want to use. Some would choose off-chain transactions for their speed, others would prefer on-chain transactions for the immutable records, etc. In a truly free market, the best product will win and the market will reach equilibrium. However, one side is currently at a disadvantage.

The size of the blocks is currently fixed at 1MB and SegWit has been activated on the network. This means that the miners have a finite amount of space to work with, while Blockstream and similar service providers don't have to do much to promote themselves - when the consumer will see on-chain transactions being too expensive for them and the blocks being full, they will by necessity make their way onto their platform to be able to transact.

Moreover, SegWit transactions have a smaller "weight" to them, meaning you can put more of them in a block and even go over the 1MB block limit with them.

So we have a company that benefits from the traditional blocks being filled, while also giving preferential treatment to on board onto and off board from its proprietary services, while blocking others from increasing the overall throughput, all for "the benefit of the consumer". This is basically the Net Neutrality battle all over...

Internet access or block throughput, it's all the same in the end...

Dynamics of power

Looking at this only from the lens of money is of course a bit of a simplistic view of things. There is probably a lot more politics, ideology and power in play - SegWit2x is a hard fork to the Bitcoin network being pushed by the miners rather than the traditional core developers. If it is allowed to pass, it will show that they don't have full control over the project and thus remove them from a position of power, while giving the miners more power on top of the computing power they already hold.

Conclusions

If you look at things from pure monetary perspective, the fight over SegWit2x is a fight about where the transaction fees will flow - whether they will be on or off the chain. Increasing the block size will mean more money will be going to the miners, while keeping it low will force more money to flow through SegWit-enabled services, and to a degree, through Blockstream.

SegWit2x is also a struggle for power in the space - who will be able to make changes to the protocol and how things will be handled in the future.

The struggle might be framed in many ways - allowing an average user to run Bitcoin on RaspberryPi, the centralisation of power in the hands of the miners or core developers, an attack on the Bitcoin network, etc. How much of that is genuine concern and how much of it is propaganda from either side it will be hard to discern.

But in the end, it's probably about money and power...

A mark of one's existence - records in the blockchain

Part of being a human is wanting to leave a mark on the world. Within us lies the deep need to be remembered, in some form, after we die. We see it in the Cueva de las Manos - Cave of the Hands, where the inhabitants left the outlines of their hands painted on the walls as early as 13'000 years ago.

Cave of the Hands

We hear the same plight from Horace some 2000 years ago in his Odes when he states "non omnis moriar" - "not all of me will die". Similarly, to condemn someone to be forgotten was a fate worse than death for the ancient Romans. It was called damnatio memoriae, or "the condemnation of memory".

In our digital age it is perhaps easier than ever to remove someone from history. While it is easier than ever to record what's going on, it is similarly just as easy to alter and distort the events thanks to tools like Photoshop.

Frequency of miracles

Photos can be altered, memories can be called into question, records could be rewritten, and we can end up with the Mandela Effect. Add to it the right to be forgotten, and soon it might be hard to believe any record or lack of it on the Internet. George Orwell would be proud of what we could do to make someone an unperson.

Everything could be subject to change. Everything that is, except blockchains.

Proof of Existence

While working at Factom I heard a great tagline - "It is hard to guess today what lie you want to tell tomorrow". It might be a very profound statement in today's world of digital records - if you can't backdate, alter historical records or the like, you'd better be completely sure how you want to proceed ahead of time.

All of this is of course only possible through the Proof of Existence and the blockchain technology. Only networks such as Bitcoin or Ethereum can be seen as objective records of history anymore. They alone are big enough to be secure from tampering (if you can't 51% attack the blockchain, you can't rewrite the history) and public enough to ensure any attempt at tempering with them will be a publicly known event. Because of that, any data embedded in the blockchain will remain unchanged and hopefully preserved as long as the blockchain persists.

Record of my data

Today is my 30th birthday, and I decided to celebrate with a little experiment.

A few months back I contacted the Personal Genome Project Canada to participate in their research and get my genome sequenced. It has been an interesting experience, and I did find some correlation between my genetic predispositions and the health quirks I've been experiencing my whole life.

During the study I requested a copy of my sequenced genomic data. It was shipped to me on an external hard drive as the files themselves were 200GB. After leaving my computer to crunch the numbers, the SHA256 results was spit out - "de7a8430be51538ebcdd031390e0de3f7cde74a9c88a76e64406e88b6259d4fe". That was the hash of my genetic information - probably the most elegant version of a digital hand print I could find.

After playing with the debug options in BitcoinQT, I managed to wrap it up neatly in the transaction 32a0f8febb0f9f9c7fe1ce9a6b2a59356f443e27186d2e4b5c5a9a3e5e16f4cd, sent from my two favourite addresses - 17TQLZvXjKTrUyRnV9DuQs4RVDgNjUPeXQ, the address in which I received my first coins in 2011, and 1PiachuEVn6sh52Ez7o6Fymvw54qvQ4RBm, my own geeky little vanity address. And so, in block 1597975 (000000000000000000b43bb4162374befa73a882efa6279d87cd3f11548cff59) my transaction was anchored and became part of the blockchain history, along things like the blockchain marriage, a tribute to Len Sassaman, and the infamous Times headline chosen by Satoshi Nakamoto. To the best of my knowledge, I'm the first person to have embedded a hash of their full genetic information this way.

It wasn't my first foray into embedding data into the Bitcoin history. That honour had to go to the illegal number from 2012 that was done as part of my master thesis research.

Larger records of data

Admittedly, the process of saving the data into the Bitcoin blockchain was a bit complicated. Preparing the inputs by hand, making sure the data itself is fairly small, it can all be rather limiting and potentially get expensive with larger amounts of records. Hence why it might be worthwhile to consider protocols that extend the Bitcoin protocol, while still offering the same cryptographic proof of existence. In comes Factom (full disclosure: I work for Factom).

With the intent of storing the same data, I created a new chain with my name and alias - ef020b0dc14223ca454cb69b36143ffbafa8b09c0ff962b18742cd97a02735c9. The hash was anchored in transaction cdeb46cad69c01f79864e20a56cb227b94c9738b79d8291e4181f5cbd9b86f27 that became part of the block 96731 (d8fea7d7df13f0e629817a552719a7e7e9860023313ddaa5fa76ad34d655ace1).

Now, there is an extra step that needs to be taken between here and Bitcoin - the anchoring process. That is performed externally by the an automatic server. It created a transaction bebfc29801239ad254da97b253c864736257143f17e3519e03e05e3761f57a8f that made its way into the Bitcoin block 1598016. And here comes the magic trick that gets us between a Factom transaction into a Bitcoin block, "the receipt":

{

   "receipt":{

      "entry":{

         "entryhash":"cdeb46cad69c01f79864e20a56cb227b94c9738b79d8291e4181f5cbd9b86f27"

      },

      "merklebranch":[

         {

            "left":"cdeb46cad69c01f79864e20a56cb227b94c9738b79d8291e4181f5cbd9b86f27",

            "right":"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003",

            "top":"07e5e997757ce1c4e935aecff3e1fb4bb9f7c466329de38ae19c342106283e7b"

         },

         {

            "left":"c48f1c742f8aea8c834b07615776e6c9f79d2300b4e1eb29ea6e295a55823402",

            "right":"07e5e997757ce1c4e935aecff3e1fb4bb9f7c466329de38ae19c342106283e7b",

            "top":"6d423f0c963ce0a9744eec94e07816263b82c1514c048fc43c791e19a44b7458"

         },

         {

            "left":"ef020b0dc14223ca454cb69b36143ffbafa8b09c0ff962b18742cd97a02735c9",

            "right":"6d423f0c963ce0a9744eec94e07816263b82c1514c048fc43c791e19a44b7458",

            "top":"d985f353aa34b1b7f021a30816019eac3cfd486743eb81b63295d12e7aa182f6"

         },

         {

            "left":"76c2296711dfc90eff2cec432b5592155ce13c4bd0f9cc15b01f842994358f35",

            "right":"d985f353aa34b1b7f021a30816019eac3cfd486743eb81b63295d12e7aa182f6",

            "top":"cb75287e2e1b170e5f5dc99ae7b738139305ad822e0c311cbdfb82ab0fa5d31d"

         },

         {

            "left":"3c00225e5d9f6d5e62c2926c02c5c03c31eaa831ee48d6e216dbe3b637125665",

            "right":"cb75287e2e1b170e5f5dc99ae7b738139305ad822e0c311cbdfb82ab0fa5d31d",

            "top":"fd03d8be680bb8c36ba01f224c71160f934c732a42de1c6d1d106b678e0f23a6"

         },

         {

            "left":"fabbd3f11bb85847530a6493361f3654d8617ab82ea3e34ddcc337c976917ec9",

            "right":"fd03d8be680bb8c36ba01f224c71160f934c732a42de1c6d1d106b678e0f23a6",

            "top":"92545cf4f7485731b6ee9007f9d3348759cd2edda60a9e5e7bc6ef2fa4f11cd1"

         },

         {

            "left":"35f75955731e0cfd98653a5979c6e53a0e97cd49ae91b06ec31001a96625666c",

            "right":"92545cf4f7485731b6ee9007f9d3348759cd2edda60a9e5e7bc6ef2fa4f11cd1",

            "top":"4c9d45d122337f6a85084b1492bbd3fe5fcd8a2bbfc71e7bacf283668fa0770b"

         },

         {

            "left":"4c9d45d122337f6a85084b1492bbd3fe5fcd8a2bbfc71e7bacf283668fa0770b",

            "right":"d9d488d0ddc24aae887d86ce094de1579fe10ce06e8f6b8cdb434f45c8d0cdcd",

            "top":"c0ee8f8410515485de6ca7831dcd09856e08ec89799cf90778ea3211b41b4ba5"

         },

         {

            "left":"e327276f2bbfa0bb9dc9d89095abcb0fe7dc3373a31392892099824c89c332a4",

            "right":"c0ee8f8410515485de6ca7831dcd09856e08ec89799cf90778ea3211b41b4ba5",

            "top":"d8fea7d7df13f0e629817a552719a7e7e9860023313ddaa5fa76ad34d655ace1"

         }

      ],

      "entryblockkeymr":"6d423f0c963ce0a9744eec94e07816263b82c1514c048fc43c791e19a44b7458",

      "directoryblockkeymr":"d8fea7d7df13f0e629817a552719a7e7e9860023313ddaa5fa76ad34d655ace1",

      "bitcointransactionhash":"bebfc29801239ad254da97b253c864736257143f17e3519e03e05e3761f57a8f",

      "bitcoinblockhash":"000000000000000000746bcc20463036af6deb09931d78fbd02546042b80f1d1"

   }

}

While it might look like gibberish, it's a simplified payment verification-style merkle branch leading from the transaction hash through the entry block key merkle root, the directory block key merkle root, up to the Bitcoin transaction itself. As the chain of hashes is complete, one is able to mathematically prove that the transaction indeed made its way into the Factom block and got anchored into the Bitcoin blockchain.

The same mechanism could be used to anchor data such as text into the blockchain, for example securing entire blog posts to prove they existed unaltered in their current state at a given point in time. I intend on doing that for this blog once I narrow down the ideal format, but that's a story for another day.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is probably the first, objective, immutable record of history we have. Any data saved into the blockchain will hopefully remain preserved for a long time. It is possible to extend the Proof of Existence into larger data sets without needlessly expanding the Bitcoin blockchain.