DMND, a new mining pool built around Stratum V2 which began taking applicants for a soft private launch earlier this year, is now open for all miners to create accounts. Miners can register here to begin onboarding. 

DMND’s full public launch comes after a successful SOC 2 Type 2 audit, proving compliance with security policies necessary for large scale miners. 

“With our SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and streamlined business verification practices, the DMND pool is built for operators who value security, transparency, and professional-grade standards,” said DMND Co-Founder & CEO, Alejandro De La Torre. “Combined with miner-controlled block construction, we’re enabling miners to reclaim meaningful control over the network.”

Stratum V2 support takes a significant step on the road to further decentralization of different functionality in the mining industry, namely block template construction, the process of selecting transactions to include in the block being mined. 

Stratum V2 provides a mechanism to defend Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, allowing individual miners to produce their own block templates while mining with supporting pools (as well as sourcing templates from any third party provider they choose who is operating Stratum V2). Additionally, Stratum V2’s end-to-end encryption protects miners from hashrate hijacking attacks which can silently siphon a miner’s revenue. 

DMND’s public launch provides miners with another step forward for Stratum V2 on the network, and for progress towards improving the mining ecosystem’s level of decentralization. 

This post DMND Pool Now Open To All Miners, With SOC 2 Compliance and Stratum V2 Support first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Brink, the Bitcoin development organization, recently funded the first ever independent security audit of Bitcoin Core conducted by a third party (the full report is available here). The audit was conducted by Quarkslab, a software security firm, with the help of the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) and collaboration with Bitcoin Core developers Niklas Gögge, from Brink, and Antoine Poinsot, from Chaincode Labs. 

This security audit marks a milestone in the development history of Bitcoin Core, the most widely adopted and reference client of the Bitcoin network and protocol. 

While Bitcoin Core security policies and practices have been steadily hardened and revised to be more thorough and comprehensive over the last few years, an external audit by a third party specialized in security review is a new bar to meet. It was met. 

The audit involved manual code review, static and dynamic analysis with automated tools, and advanced fuzz testing, which takes automatically generated input and runs it through different code paths attempting to reveal unexpected or detrimental behavior. 

No critical, high, or medium-severity bugs were discovered in the audit. Two low-severity issues were different, and thirteen other issues that are not classified as vulnerabilities under Bitcoin Core’s vulnerability classification criteria. 

The entire process also resulted in improvements in Bitcoin Core’s testing infrastructure, including new fuzz testing infrastructure for block connection and chain reorganization scenarios, a new area to be covered by testing, file system improvements speeding up and improving fuzz testing in general, new utilities for testing back sliding code performance, and suggestions for improving code readability for reviewers and new developers. 

Some of these improvements are already being worked on for eventual review and merging into the Bitcoin Core repository. 

The results of this independent security audit have reinforced that Bitcoin Core’s improvements over recent years in security policy, testing, and overall quality review have had a meaningful impact on the project. 

This post Brink Funds First Third Party Security Audit of Bitcoin Core By Quarkslab first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Today marks seventeen years since Satoshi Nakamoto’s publication of the Bitcoin Whitepaper on the cryptography mailing list in 2008. Back then Bitcoin was nothing more than a proposal for a new niche technology, the latest in a long lineage of niche technologies created by the cypherpunks of the 1990s. 

Bitcoin has gone through many massive transformations since that day 17 years ago. It went from a niche internet collectible, to a decentralized network powering illegal dark net markets, to a mainstream speculative investment for retail, to Wall Street and governments all over the world’s favorite new asset class. We have all had front row seats to the first explosive global technological revolution to the internet, and it’s been a wild ride. 

On this anniversary I think it’s important to touch on a concept that is very relevant, POSIWID, or the Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. The basic idea is that when you have a complex system, it is pointless to try to define it based on what you want it to do, what really matters is what the pieces of that complex system are actually doing. That is all that matters at the end of the day. 

We have once again found ourselves in a time period where people are calling back to the whitepaper as a placeholder for some kind of founding document, or definition, or blueprint. The whitepaper is none of those things. It is simply a high level abstract explanation of a Proof-of-Work blockchain being used to implement a digital currency. It is the idea of a cart with wheels, versus the actual blueprint of the cart (the source code). 

Bitcoiners seem to periodically fixate on the whitepaper in this manner, and inevitably use that as a justification for acting antagonistic towards some use case or idea of improving Bitcoin that they disagree with. Maybe we will eventually get past this, maybe we won’t, but it is an unhealthy attitude to have towards such a potentially impactful technology such as Bitcoin. 

People didn’t recite the writings and speeches of Alexander Graham Bell when digital modems were invented to allow the first tendrils of the early internet to reach out between devices and facilitate digital signals flowing between them. They embraced it as a valuable technological innovation, and in the world today that dynamic has completely inverted itself. Most telephonic signals are now actually conveyed by communication mediums specifically constructed for digital communications. 

Telephone networks were used to bootstrap the digital medium of the modern internet in a way that Alexander Graham Bell might have had only the barest inklings of, reshaping the entire world in ways that would have been impossible to conceive for people of his generation. 

Satoshi did not give us a founding document to be shackled and constrained by when he released the whitepaper, he gave us a high level description of the software that followed. 

That is the actual gift he gave us, the software. And he gave it to us completely freely, open-source, to do with what we decide to do. 

“BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it’s easy for lots of users and small devices.” -Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010

This quote is always brought up in the context of the blocksize limit, or Bitcoin enabling multiple functionalities, but the thing that has always stood out the most to me is “users might get.” In the end before his disappearance, Satoshi is clearly being explicitly deferential to the wishes of users, and in the context of a critical and foundational decision like the blocksize limit. 

Bitcoin isn’t Satoshi’s anymore, it’s ours, and collectively with how we actually use our bitcoin, we decide what the purpose of the system is. It’s important to remember that. 

This post What Has Bitcoin Become 17 Years After Satoshi Nakamoto Published The Whitepaper? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack; UK: /dɒs/ doss US: /dɑːs/ daas^[1]) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. -The Wikipedia definition of denial-of-service attack. 

This is a very basic concept. Someone makes use of their own resources to disrupt the functioning of other machines on a network. 

DoS attacks have been an issue for as long as the internet existed. One of the commonly argued “first Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks” was against the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Panix in the mid-90s. There were of course many prior technical examples on older internet services, but this was one of, if not the, first major examples of such an attack on the modern World Wide Web. 

This attack had numerous computers start to initiate a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection with the ISPs servers, but never finishing the handshake protocol that finalized the connection. This consumes the server’s resources for managing network connections and prevents honest users from accessing the internet through the ISP’s servers. 

Ever since this “initial” DDoS attack, they have been as common on the internet as storms are in nature, a regular occurrence that massive pieces of internet infrastructure have been built to defend against. 

The Blockchain

The blockchain is one of the core components of Bitcoin, and a required dependency for Bitcoin’s functionality as a distributed ledger. I am sure many people in this space would call so-called “spam” transactions a DoS attack on the Bitcoin blockchain. In order to call it that, you would have to define the “service” that the blockchain is offering as a system, and explain how spam transactions are denying that service to others in a way not intended by the design of the system. 

I’d wager a bet that most people who believe spam is a DoS attack would say something like “the service the blockchain offers is processing financial transactions, and spam takes space away from people trying to do that.” The problem is, that is not specifically the service the blockchain offers. 

The service it actually offers is the confirmation of any consensus valid transaction through a real-time auction that periodically settles whenever a miner finds a block. If your transaction is consensus valid, and you have bid a high enough fee for a miner to include your transaction in a block, you are using the service the blockchain provides exactly as designed. 

This was a conscious design decision made over years during the “Block Size Wars” and finalized in the activation of Segregated Witness and the rejection of the Segwit2x blocksize increase through a hard fork pushed by major companies at the time.  The blockchain would function by prioritizing the highest bidding fee transactions, and users would be free to compete in that auction. This is how blockspace would be allocated, with a global restriction to protect verifiability and a free market pricing mechanism. 

Nothing about a transaction some arbitrarily define as “spam” winning in this open auction is a DoS of the blockchain. It is a user making use of that resource in the way they are supposed to, participating in the auction with everyone else. 

The Relay Network

Many, if not most, Bitcoin nodes offer transaction relay as a service to the rest of the network. If you broadcast your transactions to your peers on the network, they will forward them on to their peers, and so on. Because the peering logic deciding which nodes to peer with maintains wide connectivity, this service allows transactions to propagate across the network very quickly, and specifically allows them to propagate to all mining nodes. 

Another service is block relay, propagating valid blocks as they are found in the same manner. This has been highly optimized over the years, to the point where most of the time an entire block is never actually relayed, just a shorthand “sketch” of the blockheader and the transactions included in it so you can reconstruct them from your own mempool. In other words, optimizations in block relay depend on a transaction relay functioning properly and propagating all valid and likely to be mined transactions. 

When nodes do not have transactions in a block already in their mempool, they must request them from neighboring nodes, taking more time to validate the block in the process. They also explicitly forward those transactions along with the block sketch to other peers in case they are missing them, wasting bandwidth. The more nodes filtering transactions they classify as spam, the longer it takes blocks including those filtered transactions to propagate across the network. 

Transaction filtering actively seeks to disrupt both of these services, in the case of transaction relay failing miserably to prevent them from propagating to miners, and in the case of block propagation having a marginal but noticeable performance degradation the more nodes on the network are filtering transactions. 

These node policies have the explicit purpose of degrading the network service of propagating transactions to miners and the rest of the network, and view the degradation of block propagation as a penalty to miners who choose to include valid transactions they are filtering. They seek to create a degradation of service as a goal, and view the degradation of another service resulting from that attempt as a positive. 

This actually is a DoS attack, in that it actually is degrading a network service contrary to the design of the system. 

Where From Here?

The entire saga of Knotz vs. Core, or “Spammers” vs. “Filterers”, has been nothing more than a miserably ineffective and failed DoS attack on the Bitcoin network. Filters do absolutely nothing to prevent filtered transactions from being included in blocks. The goal of disrupting transaction propagation to miners has had no success whatsoever, and the degradation of block relay has been marginal enough to not be a disincentive to miners. 

I see this as a huge demonstration of Bitcoin’s robustness and resilience against attempted censorship and disruption on the level of the Bitcoin Network itself. 

So now what?

A BIP by an anonymous author has been put forward to enact a temporary softfork that would expire after roughly a year making numerous ways to include “spam” in Bitcoin transactions consensus invalid through that time period. After realizing the DoS attack on the peer-to-peer network has been a total failure, filter supporters have moved to consensus changes, as many of them were told would be necessary over two years ago. 

Will this actually solve the problem? No, it won’t. It will simply force people who wish to submit “spam” to this forked network, if they actually follow through on implementing it, to use fake ScriptPubKeys to encode their data in unspendable outputs that will bloat the UTXO set. 

So even if this fork was met with resounding support, activated successfully, and did not result in a chainsplit, it would still not achieve the stated goal and leave “spammers” no option but to “spam” in the most damaging way to the network possible.

This post Bitcoin Knots Has Been Nothing More Than A Denial-of-Service Attack On Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Recent threats against the rights of bitcoiners to transact in the manner they deem fit led to the creation of Save Our Wallets. Done in collaboration with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, CoinCenter, the Bitcoin Design Foundation, and many regional Bitcoin hubs around the United States, the organization recently launched the “Satoshi Needs You!” campaign.

Satoshi needs all of you to rally together to ensure that the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) provisions are included in the coming version of the CLARITY Act, to ensure that self-custodial software tools in the Bitcoin ecosystem remain a protected thing, unencumbered by financial regulations designed to restrict businesses actually taking control of users’ funds.

The trials this summer prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against the developers of Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash have set dangerous precedents by prosecuting developers of open-source and self-custodial software, which at no time gave developers control over user funds in any way, and flies directly against standing guidance from both the DOJ as well as FinCEN, the regulator in charge of the application of the relevant regulations from both cases.

The “Satoshi Needs You!” campaign aims to raise awareness of the current threats to bitcoiners’ rights and rally people to get involved in the push to cement these rights in explicit regulation.

“This is a moment of both great danger and great opportunity for the bitcoin network” said Kyle Olney, co-founder of SaveOurWallets.org. “We can’t take anything for granted until our fundamental rights to economic liberty in the digital realm have been codified into law. We need EVERY bitcoiner to get involved, contact their representatives in Washington DC, and ensure this congress continues to execute on pro-Bitcoin policy. We have a responsibility to fight for our freedoms like the right to transact, and to pass those rights on for future generations.”

Visit SaveOurWallets.org to learn more about the CLARITY Act and how you can get involved in the fight to include the BRCA provisions.

This post Save Our Wallets: Bitcoiners Must Act To Defend Their Right To Transact first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Wall Street has unequivocally arrived. The long awaited phase shift is here. We have discussed for years what this time period and shift will be like, many cheering it on in anticipation of the economic implications and shockwave it would cause in terms of liquidity and price movement. 

In the last few years it has undeniably come to dominate the narrative, shaping dialogue and focus across the entire ecosystem. Where before large communities of people would spring up around technological innovations, or philosophical schools of thought on how Bitcoin can positively shape the direction of the world in a time of tumultuous change and metaphorical ground shifting out from under us, now the cultural zeitgeist is driven by the phenomenon of treasury companies. 

There is an entire wave of recent entrants into the space who have never held their own keys, never directly interacted with the protocol themselves at all, they have simply acquired proxies such as treasury company equity or ETFs. This is a massive cultural, and philosophical/logistical shift, for the entire ecosystem. It is not going to wind itself back. This is a new presence and a new attitude that we are going to have to confront. It’s here to stay. 

So what are the implications of that? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system, its very essence and nature is defined by the people who choose to participate directly in that system itself. By those who do interface with the protocol directly, who do not resort to TradFi wrappers such as ETF products and equity in holding companies. 

It is one giant inter-subjective hallucination manifested through and verified with software. So what does it mean that a massive section of the population who chooses to interact with it financially avoid ever participating in that hallucination themselves? What does that mean for its nature, its functioning? 

That is very much an existential question, and one that we are all going to have to grapple with over the coming years. Bitcoin is for anyone, and there is nothing we can do to stop people from using it in whatever fashion they so choose, no matter what the wider implications of those people’s choices might be. 

Economic Consensus And Wall Street

The nature of Bitcoin, i.e. the consensus rules that nodes (and therefore its users) enforce, is defined by those who actually engage in economic activity on the network. In its most abstract sense Bitcoin is just a system composed of people “just doing things,” and the only reason that it is a singular coherent system, rather than a random collection of individuals doing very different and incompatible things, is because of the economic incentive to do the same thing. 

Think of it in some ways as similar to a black hole. That black hole forms in the first place after reaching a point of “critical mass”, after which it literally implodes on itself and the resulting gravitational force begins pulling in everything around it, increasing its mass, and expanding the radius in which things are sucked into its dark maw. 

The incentive to voluntarily choose to participate in one particular “set of rules” over another is the “black hole” of Bitcoin, and its gravitational pull is directly proportional to the economic mass of the system as it exists today. Unlike a black hole though, it is not truly a “singular” thing. Rather it is a number of different things (or entities), all holding themselves together to emulate being a singular thing. Unlike a blackhole, these entities can choose to defy the incentives to remain together, or follow counter-incentives against doing so, and enforce or follow different rules. 

The reason this does not frequently happen at scale (such as the fork of Bitcoin Cash in 2017), is the complexity of coordinating all of those individual entities switching to the same thing at the same time, so as to maintain the same collective “gravitational force” as they had under the previous rules. 

So what happens when the number of those entities starts shrinking? What happens when they condense and combine, and you wind up with fewer and fewer larger ones?

That complexity of coordination starts getting less complex. 

Centralization Is Efficient, But It is Poison to Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s entire promise is to be an apolitical and neutral platform for economic activity. It is to be an unshifting and solid foundation for you to stand surely on, devoid of concerns that it could shift out from under your feet and throw you into economic chaos. ‘

That entire promise of stability is purely a result of Bitcoin being sufficiently distributed, i.e. being composed of independent actors performing their own self-validation of the system in large enough numbers that their ability of coordinating amongst themselves to change fundamental properties of the system is either exceedingly difficult, or literally impossible. 

When the set of economic actors participating in self-validation collapses in size, when it turns into fewer and fewer entities operating on behalf of other stakeholders, that promise of stability and neutrality collapses in lockstep with it. Bitcoin must maintain some minimum degree of distribution of self-validating actors, that make up a substantial portion of economic activity, or else the core promise of stability and neutrality evaporate.

Wall Street isn’t going away, so this is something that we are going to have to confront. There is no shaming them away, or chasing them off. That is simply not possible in a system like Bitcoin, that at least for now, is robust in its distribution and decentralization. This is a war of incentives and counter-incentives. 

We must create positive incentives to encourage more direct self-validating use of Bitcoin rather than legacy financial wrappers like ETFs and treasury companies, or Bitcoin will be confronted with a fundamental crisis as to whether its core promise was ever really possible.

This post Wall Street Is Bitcoin’s Biggest Threat, Not Arbitrary Data first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

How did 115 orphaned children end up on their first bus ride to a zoo to celebrate a real-world Bitcoin transaction 15 years ago? It’s a question I found myself asking in disbelief as I coordinated their entrance at the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre — commonly known as the Entebbe Zoo — on Bitcoin Pizza Day, May 22. The morning sun was warm, and the air buzzed with excitement and laughter. Children who had rarely strayed beyond their rural village in Bugiri, Uganda, were now getting off buses, eyes wide at the expectation of giraffes and elephants. Many of these kids had never even heard of a zoo before, let alone seen one. Yet here they were, grinning ear to ear after breakfast, ready to celebrate a quirky Bitcoin holiday. How on Earth did we get here?

As I watched those 115 children — children from the Orphans of Uganda Children Center — marvel at animals and enjoy their very first pizza party later that afternoon, I felt a swell of emotions in my chest. I saw joy, wonder, and a sense of belonging wash over kids who have known too much hardship in their young lives. For me, this wasn’t just a fun day out. It was the culmination of an incredible journey of hope, community, and innovation. Bitcoin Pizza Day commemorates the first real-world Bitcoin transaction when, back in 2010, Lazlo famously bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. For most Bitcoiners, it’s a lighthearted celebration. But for us in Uganda this year, Pizza Day became something deeply personal — a day when an internet myth reached into our world and made a real difference. Bitcoin paid for those pizzas the children ate, yes. But it also paid for the buses, the zoo tickets, and the chance for these orphans to leave their district for the first time in their lives. It was, in every sense, the biggest Bitcoin Pizza Day celebration ever seen.

The Road to Bitcoin Pizza Day

Standing in that zoo, I couldn’t help but reflect on the road that led us here. Just months before this event, our team, led by Orphanage Director Isma, achieved something I once thought nearly impossible. Feeding over a hundred children has always been our largest expense here at the orphanage, and for the past years, we’ve been experimenting with a new idea: What if we could do it all with bitcoin? Sat by sat, we were building a small Bitcoin economy around the orphanage. In fact, by consistently honoring our commitments and showing the usefulness of this strange digital money, we even earned the trust of our most important supplier. I’m proud to say that our loyal food supplier, the woman who sells us bulk maize, beans, and other staples, now accepts bitcoin as payment. That was a big win for us. It meant we could buy food for the kids directly with the sats donated by generous Bitcoiners worldwide, without always having to convert to cash. It meant our bitcoin could stay bitcoin from donor to dinner, closing the loop in our little circular economy.

That achievement didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of months of education and relationship-building in our community. We knew that to really help these children long term, we needed more than one-off donations; we needed sustainability. So we set out ambitious goals for ourselves: make the orphanage self-sustaining and integrate bitcoin into daily life in Bugiri.

We brainstormed ideas like starting a poultry farm for eggs to improve the children’s nutrition and generate income, or acquiring sewing machines so the older kids could learn tailoring skills, thanks to Bitcoin Dada ladies in Uganda. Each initiative was aimed at empowering the orphans with tools and knowledge to eventually take care of themselves. And woven through all these plans was Bitcoin, the monetary network that allowed a global community of supporters to be part of our local solutions. We wanted the shopkeepers, market vendors, and school teachers in our town to see the same potential we saw. If more of our neighbors would trade in bitcoin — if they could save it, spend it, and trust it — then the orphanage’s lifeline wouldn’t depend solely on distant donors. It would be rooted in the community, powered by the people and businesses right here at home. Little by little, that’s exactly what is happening. Our Bitcoin Kampala project has doubled down on outreach in the village, showing anyone who listens how to download a Bitcoin wallet, how to make a Lightning payment, and why this technology isn’t just “internet money” but something that can change their lives. One by one, new allies are coming on board. Our food vendor was one; a local clinic that treats our kids became another; the local engineering company joined the freedom train, too. The circle of trust in Bitcoin is widening.

My own trust in Bitcoin had been cemented by one particularly urgent moment. I’ll never forget the day I truly saw the power of this technology again beyond my personal life. One morning not long ago, the orphanage’s food store was empty — we had no food left to cook for the children’s lunch. The usual funding we relied on was delayed, and local stores wouldn’t give us any more on credit. In desperation, Isma and I reached out to a friend in South America. I told him about our situation, and he didn’t hesitate. He sent a $60 bitcoin donation across the world to Isma immediately. Within seconds, the transaction popped up on Isma’s phone — confirmed. He walked into our now Bitcoin food vendor’s shop that very morning, showed the shopkeeper the bitcoin his wallet, and he worked out a quick exchange in order to pay for just enough maize and beans for lunch. By 1:00 p.m., the children were eating a hot meal. There were no banks involved, no remittance offices open (it was a Sunday, after all), no waiting until the next day for funds to clear. Just hungry kids at an orphanage in Uganda and a caring friend in South America connected by this borderless money. That day, bitcoin literally put food on empty plates in the nick of time. I often think back to how miraculous it felt. For the first time, I had a tool that could summon help from anywhere on the planet, just when we needed it the most.

In fact, the very first bitcoin donations I’d ever received personally had gotten me to the biggest Bitcoin conference in Europe within a month; still, this lunch meal paid instantly was way more amazing than anything I’d ever known about Bitcoin. From day one, Bitcoin proved its worth to me not in theory, but in person: Hungry children eat because of it?! After that, I was convinced that this technology was more than just an idea for rich investors or tech enthusiasts. It was a lifeline for the forgotten ones in society — like our kids out in Bugiri, many of whom had been orphaned by disease or tragedy and had nobody but us to care for them. Bitcoin was helping us keep them alive and healthy.

It still amazes me how an unlikely series of events brought us to this point. Truth be told, I never set out deliberately to be part of a “Bitcoin orphanage project” until a Machankura Ugandan representative named Satstacker connected me with the orphanage. A couple of years ago, I was just a Bitcoiner in Kampala, running a little educational meetup under the moniker Gorilla Sats. I was inspired by places like El Zonte in El Salvador (the famous “Bitcoin Beach”) and similar projects in South Africa and Brazil. My goal after attending BTC Prague in 2023 was to spark a Bitcoin circular economy somewhere in Uganda — anywhere. Who knew it would end up being in a rural orphanage? 

Originally, I thought Makerere University students might lead the way — or entrepreneurs. I hosted talks, met fellow enthusiasts, and dreamed big. But fate complemented all the above efforts in the form of a Twitter contact: I learned about this orphanage out in the Bugiri district that was struggling, and Isma, the caretaker, was curious about Bitcoin. These were genuine, honest people doing good work with almost no resources. They had heard that Bitcoin might help them receive donations more easily. So we connected. I taught them what I knew, helped set up a Lightning wallet, taught them self-custody, and shared their story online. What happened next was beyond my expectations. Bitcoiners from around the world — people we’d never met — started sending support. What started as a trickle of sats soon grew into a stream of love and generosity from every corner of the globe. And the orphanage and now school staff, in turn, began to fully embrace this new tool. They learned to secure seed phrases, make payments, and keep records. They became proud members of the Bitcoin community. In the process, 113 children (now 115) inadvertently became some of the youngest participants in a global Bitcoin economy. Not because anyone forced them to, but because it simply worked for them. In a way, these kids accidentally demonstrated what voluntary Bitcoin adoption looks like at its purest. They had a need; Bitcoin filled it. It was as simple as that.

Africa Needs Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Needs Africa

Moments like the zoo trip put into perspective why all of this matters. We often say that Bitcoin solves real problems in Africa — things like costly remittances, lack of banking access, corruption, and currency instability. I have seen that truth with my own eyes. Here in Uganda, if you don’t have a national ID to get access to mobile money or if you live far from a bank branch, the traditional financial system shuts you out. But with nothing more than a feature phone (via Machankura) and an internet connection (if on a smartphone), Bitcoin lets anyone participate in the economy. Donations that would have taken days and hefty fees to arrive via wire transfer now reach us in minutes with pennies in fees. When we need construction works, medical supplies, school fees, or food, Bitcoin is often the fastest and most transparent way to get funds and pay for it. Africa needs Bitcoin because it can leapfrog a lot of the infrastructural challenges that have held us back. It puts power directly in the hands of the people who need it — whether it’s an orphanage in Uganda, refugees in a camp who can’t open bank accounts, or a women’s savings group looking for a way to store their hard-earned savings. It provides an alternative when local currencies collapse or when inflation eats away at savings. It creates the possibility for a more level financial playing field.

But the other side of this story is something I’ve come to believe just as strongly: Bitcoin needs Africa. It needs the energy, the stories, and the real-world use cases that our communities provide — in places like Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and beyond, Bitcoin isn’t just an investment toy or a speculative asset — it’s a tool of survival and empowerment. We are stress-testing Bitcoin in the most human ways. We’re finding out how it can feed children, fund education, and build businesses from the ground up. By doing so, we are giving Bitcoin a purpose far greater than price charts and inflation hedges. We’re imbuing it with our values of community and solidarity. A friend of mine, Fernando from the Praia Bitcoin project in Brazil, who has mentored me greatly, told me something that has stuck in my mind. Seeing our work with the orphanage since 2023, he said: 

“This is the most successful usage of Bitcoin so far. It’s starting the peaceful revolution with over 100 forgotten ones.” 

Coming from someone halfway across the world, who’s also fighting to spread Bitcoin for social good, that meant a lot. It reminded me that what we’re doing in this little corner of Uganda is part of a much larger story — a peaceful revolution uniting those whom the old financial system left behind.

Back at the zoo, I felt that revolution in my bones. I saw it in the way the Kampala Bitcoin community members showed up en masse to support these kids — many volunteers traveled hours to be there, paying their own way just to share in this joy. I saw it in how eagerly the children shared pizza slices with our guests, as if to say thank you for being there. At that moment, any barriers between “rich Bitcoiners,” if there were any in attendance, and “poor orphans” melted away; we were just people together, celebrating hope and possibility. By the end of the day, we had gathered over 160 people to celebrate and I knew this was a story worth telling far beyond our borders. On Twitter, we’ve been documenting our journey from the start, and I’m thrilled to share that a short documentary of this Bitcoin Pizza Day at the zoo is coming. It will capture the smiles, the songs the children sang, their experience on the bus, and the sheer amazement on their faces meeting wildlife for the first time. I invite you to follow Bitcoin Kampala on X (Twitter), on YouTube, and even on Nostr, so you can see when the short film is released and stay updated on our next chapters.

The buses have long since left the zoo, carrying the children back to Bugiri, but the impact of that day still lingers in our hearts. I’m writing this back in Kampala, reflecting on how far we’ve come. It’s hard to believe that a simple idea — using bitcoin to help those in need — would snowball into a community and movement that’s changing lives. I think about the future a lot — about those kids and what opportunities we can create for them as they grow up. There’s so much more to do. We want to build them a Bitcoin school where they can feel safe and loved while acquiring multiple life skills and learning about Bitcoin. We want to expand our little Bitcoin economy so that by the time these children are young adults, they’ll have a thriving local market to participate in, one that understands and accepts the money of the future. We want to show more people across Africa what is possible when Bitcoin meets compassion.

As I wrap up my thoughts, I return to that opening question and realize it isn’t so impossible after all. How did 115 orphaned children end up on a bus to the zoo on Bitcoin Pizza Day? They did it because hundreds of people — from Uganda to South America to Europe and beyond — decided to care. They did it because a decentralized network allowed those caring people to coordinate and contribute instantaneously. They did it because when Bitcoin is guided by heart, it can achieve truly beautiful things. This experience has left me deeply hopeful. If a handful of Bitcoin enthusiasts and a struggling orphanage can join forces to accidentally spark a “peaceful revolution” for over a hundred forgotten children, then what else is possible? The mission we’re on is bigger than bitcoin’s price or any buzzwords; it’s about human dignity and connection.

Bitcoin has given all of us, but especially these children, a chance at a better life. It’s given me a renewed purpose. In turn, these children have given Bitcoin a story that cuts through the noise and gets to its true essence. I believe that story is only just beginning. After all, as we like to say in our Bitcoin in Africa Monthly Twitter Space: Africa needs Bitcoin, and Bitcoin needs Africa.

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This piece is an article featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Lightning Issue. We’re sharing it here to show the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The Biggest Bitcoin Pizza Day Celebration Ever first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi and Brindon Mwiine.

Let’s look at two things that Bitcoin Knots users claim to be proponents of and champions for in their crusade against Bitcoin Core: 

• Mining decentralization
• Bitcoin’s use as money

They claim to fight for mining decentralization, with OCEAN mining pool held out as a primary example of this. OCEAN’s DATUM protocol is ostensibly designed to further mining decentralization, specifically the actual template construction process that decides what transactions go into a block. 

They also claim to fight for Bitcoin’s use as a monetary network, i.e. a network that facilitates the transmission of bitcoin in economics transactions, ensuring security for those transactions. 

These are both incredibly important goals. Bitcoin’s mining network remaining decentralized is absolutely critical in order to maintain its censorship resistance. A clear majority of miners must exist and operate in a state free from the possibility of coercion from the state (or any other party) to engage in censorship. Without existing in this state, a simple majority of miners coerced in such a fashion would be capable of perpetually preventing any transaction from confirming in the blockchain, completely undermining Bitcoin’s core value proposition. 

Scaling Bitcoin’s use as money is also incredibly important. The only mechanisms to transact with bitcoin in a censorship resistant fashion are ones that are truly anchored to the blockchain itself in a manner where the end user can on their own enforce ownership of their current balance of bitcoin. 

Both of these things are absolutely necessary for Bitcoin to meaningfully contribute to any positive change in the world. 

So let’s look at what they claim to stand for versus what they are actually doing. 

Actions Versus Words

So firstly, developers have been working on a protocol called Stratum v2, a replacement for the current Stratum v1 protocol miners use to interact with mining pools. This has been a massive project, all completely open source, to allow individual miners to select transactions that are included in blocks themselves as opposed to the pool operator (the pool still controls payouts). 

Block’s new Proto mining rig supports Stratum v2, Braiins Pool and DMND Pool have integrated support. 

What did OCEAN (run by the largest Knots supporters) do to support Stratum v2? Nothing. They created their own proprietary alternative DATUM (they have pledged to open source everything in future but have not yet done so). In both solutions the pool operator is capable of rejecting proposed blocks from individual miners, which would leave the miner continuing to do work they are not getting paid for. Stratum v2 supports immediately switching to another pool in such a case to ensure the miner continues getting paid, OCEAN does not. It simply defaults to solomining. 

Given that it is not even open sourced yet, no other pool can adopt it. It is essentially a vendor lockin for OCEAN pool, who can still reject any template a miner proposes, with no way to trivially opt out if a miner’s block template is rejected and switch to another pool. 

To top it off, the practice of filtering transactions slows down the propagation of blocks across the network. When a miner finds a block, they don’t relay the whole block, they relay the header with a compressed “list” of all the transactions in it for a node to reconstruct and verify the block with the transactions in their mempool. When nodes do not have those transactions, it takes longer for them to fetch them from peers, validate the block, and relay it onward.

This disproportionately hurts smaller miners. If a large pool has a block orphaned because of this, i.e. another miner finds a block before the other one propagates across the network, that larger miner has a very high chance of finding the next block building on their orphan, thus “saving it” to be included in the blockchain. 

Smaller miners do not have those high odds of finding the next block in this situation. This disadvantages them, making the highest fee paying transactions something that could actually lose them money, as opposed to larger miners who will likely find the next block and not have their first one orphaned. 

In multiple ways OCEAN (and Knots supporters) are actively harming mining decentralization while proclaiming themselves defenders of it. 

Now let’s look at the use of Bitcoin as money. Ephemeral anchors are an optimization to make Lightning function more efficiently, for a deeper explanation of them you can read this, but the important point is they allow Lightning users to be much more efficient with fees they pay to close channels on-chain. 

The latest release of Knots by default filters these transactions, and will not relay them across the network. When a Lightning user has to non-cooperatively close, they are doing so in order to protect their funds. Lightning implementations are all in different phases of shifting over to using them. Knots actively attempts to prevent these transactions relaying to miners. 

How does that help advance the use of Bitcoin as money? Again, just like with mining decentralization, they act in a complete opposite manner than what they say. Citrea is yet another example, a Bitcoin Layer 2 designed to scale financial transactions. The Knots OP_RETURN filter will not relay the transactions needed to enforce correct operation of the Layer 2. 

What They Do Matters, Not What They Say

Knots supporters proclaim themselves defenders of Bitcoin, here to ensure it remains a decentralized censorship resistant money. But their actions push towards the exact opposite goal. 

The things they do to “champion” mining decentralization actually create dynamics that worsen its centralization. 

While proclaiming Bitcoin is money, and defending its use as such their chief goal, the software they release and run actively undermines multiple Layer 2s whose entire purpose is to scale Bitcoin’s use as money. 

They are literally fully engaged in a campaign with the end goal of preventing certain kinds of Bitcoin transactions from being made, while proclaiming themselves defenders of Bitcoin. 

At the end of the day, this is an open network, and people can run whatever software they want to interact with that open network. That is a critical and important aspect of Bitcoin. This is not about software, this is about people. 

This is about the stated goals, the stated values of people in this space, being the complete opposite of the actions they engage in. I hope that Bitcoiners are smart enough to eventually see the Orwellian newspeak that has been dominating the entire dispute around Bitcoin Core and Knots over the last few years. 

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

This post Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots: Actions Speak Louder Than Words first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

This is the third in a 10-episode video series focusing on Bitcoin privacy, filmed at bitcoin++ Privacy Edition in Riga and elsewhere. Each episode will touch on some aspect of Bitcoin privacy, tools to use Bitcoin privately or surveillance techniques.

Privacy is heads, censorship resistance is tails. They’re two sides of the same coin. 

Everything people do together is inherently interactive. When those interactions cannot be conducted privately, when they become common public knowledge, the participants can be subjected to external pressure. They can be shunned, shamed, jailed or penalized in many other ways. 

Without privacy, you have no censorship resistance. Without privacy, most people will censor themselves. 

In this first episode, I sit down with Yuval Kogman from Spiral to discuss Bitcoin privacy. We go all the way back to Section 10 (Privacy) of the Bitcoin Whitepaper, and trace the path from there to the modern day.

We discuss how privacy can be degraded based on how you use Bitcoin, the different specific ways you leak private information, as well as the lineage of tools that have been created over the years to help users prevent those leaks and protect their transactional privacy.

Click the image below to watch the talk: 

This post Bitcoin Privacy: What It Means To Keep Your Bitcoin Transactions Private first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

This is the second in a 10-episode video series focusing on Bitcoin privacy, filmed at bitcoin++ Privacy Edition in Riga and elsewhere. Each episode will touch on some aspect of Bitcoin privacy, tools to use Bitcoin privately or surveillance techniques.

Privacy is heads, censorship resistance is tails. They’re two sides of the same coin. 

Everything people do together is inherently interactive. When those interactions cannot be conducted privately, when they become common public knowledge, the participants can be subjected to external pressure. They can be shunned, shamed, jailed or penalized in many other ways. 

Without privacy, you have no censorship resistance. Without privacy, most people will censor themselves. 

In this second episode, I sit down with Calle, the creator the Cashu ecash protocol, to discuss the loss of privacy on the modern internet. In an era where large internet platforms are accessible for free, the real cost of these platform is paid for by sacrificing your privacy in the name of advertising revenue.

This economic model of the internet is a wild departure from the original vision of users paying for accessing to resources. The “402 Payment Required” error message was a part of the HTTP protocol from the very start.

We discuss how Cashu as a vehicle for bitcoin micropayments offers a chance to turn things around, and build the privacy respecting internet the early designs of the world wide web envisioned to begin with.

Watch the talk below:

This post Why Micropayments? The Internet Was Meant To Provide Value To Users, Not Spy On Them first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.