Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Bitcoin transactions can include a lock time, meaning they cannot be mined until that time or block. Bitcoin blocks are not required to have increasing time intervals, for some reason.

This creates bad incentives: miners want to make money, and the user doesn't want their transaction included yet. By creating a block with a timestamp way in the future, it's possible to get other clients to accept the transaction as valid! This is regardless of the wall time.

The BIP proposal suggests using the median time of the last 11 blocks to determine whether a transaction can be spent. Since it's the median, there's no averaging issue here to deal with. This is important for the CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY opcode. Overall, a good fix to a bizarre issue affecting Bitcoin.