This post explores Bitcoin Mining Centralization in 2025 by looking at the hashrate share of the current five biggest mining pools. It presents a Mining Centralization Index and updates it with the assumed proxy pooling by AntPool & friends. It shows that Bitcoin mining is highly centralized today, with only six pools mining more than 95% of the blocks.| 0xB10C's Blog
I have recently been looking at mining pool behavior during forks. Which block does a pool choose to mine on during a fork? Do they behave rationally and mine on their own block? In this post, I’ll detail the mining pool behavior during forks and give some recent examples of pool behavior.| 0xB10C's Blog
This is an update on the LinkingLion entity, presumably linking Bitcoin transactions to IP addresses, I published about a year ago. Yesterday, LionLink Networks AS issued a statement on their non-affiliation with the LinkingLion entity and on the same day, LinkingLion activity significantly dropped.| b10c.me
In January, while investigating a misbehaving client on the Bitcoin P2P network, I found a vulnerability in ViaBTC’s, the fourth largest Bitcoin mining pool, SPV mining code that allowed a remote attacker to waste ViaBTC’s 60 EH/s hashrate by sending a single, crafted Bitcoin P2P message. I responsibly disclosed this to ViaBTC, and they awarded a bug bounty of 2000 USDT.| b10c.me
It’s well known that you are only a real Bitcoiner if you are a carnivore, eat red meat at least three times a week but never consume seed oils, lift heavy weights, are straight, white, unvaccinated, believe in the Christian god, got into Bitcoin before 2015, are a maximalist, stack sats regularly, and own at least 6.15 BTC and two or more guns with plenty of ammunition.| b10c.me
Elliott (aka @robot__dreams) posted a Bitcoin-flavored cryptography challenge on Twitter. The goal is to extract the private key from two Schnorr signatures that reuse a nonce. I’ve recently reviewed and merged Kalle Rosenbaum’s cross-post of his Schnorr Basics post to bitcoin-dev.blog. His post shows, for example, why nonce reuse leaks the private key. The challenge was the perfect opportunity for me to apply the theory the blog post explains. This post is a write-up of how I solved the ...| b10c.me
To fully understand the rationale behind the current state of Bitcoin development, knowledge about historical events is essential. This blog post highlights selected historical events, software releases and bug fixes before and after Satoshi left the project. It additionally contains a section about the current state of Bitcoin development. The linked timeline provides extra detail for each event.| b10c.me
In this post, I revisit my plans and projects for 2022, and give an outlook for 2023. I plan to continue my current Bitcoin network monitoring efforts in 2023. I briefly touch on potentially tight open-source developer funding in 2023.| b10c.me
This report updates on what 0xB10C, Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient, has been working on over the first half of his year-long Bitcoin development grant. This specifically covers his work on Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support for Bitcoin Core. This report was published on the Coinbase blog too.| b10c.me
While working on taproot support for transactionfee.info, it became apparent that there already exist a few Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) outputs on mainnet. Anyone can spend these outputs, but they are non-standard and thus not relayed between nodes in the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. However, a mining pool can include non-standard transactions in their block. We cover the six P2TR outputs already present on mainnet and explain why the outputs can be spent by anyone before taproot activates. With t...| b10c.me
The Bitcoin Transaction Monitor provides deeper insights into the usage of the Bitcoin network by showing transactions by time and feerate. This post answers frequently asked questions about the Bitcoin Transaction Monitor itself.| b10c.me
My search for a list of public Bitcoin feerate estimation APIs ended without any real results. Jameson Lopp has a section on feerate estimators on his bitcoin.page and Antoine Le Calvez’s dashboard txstats.com provides a visualization of different estimation APIs. But that is not what I was looking for. That’s why I compiled this list.| b10c.me
How did the median Bitcoin feerate evolve from 2013 to 2015? When were the feerate spikes in 2017? Visualizing the Bitcoin feerate distribution per block was on my todo list since I’ve started working on the first version of my mempool.observer project in mid-2017. But acquiring the data wasn’t as easy as I first thought.| b10c.me
Unconfirmed transactions are quite a hassle for bitcoin users. I recently came across an interesting problem which is not the usual “my transaction is stuck” problem.| b10c.me
Digital signatures are an essential building block of the Bitcoin protocol and account for a large part of the data stored on the blockchain. We detail how the size of the encoded ECDSA signatures reduced multiple times over the last years and how the proposed Schnorr signature compares to the length of the currently used ECDSA signatures.| b10c.me