Larry's Newsletter - Issue #21
Hi y'all! Welcome back after an extra, extra long summer hiatus! I Hope you enjoyed your summer (and fall!). I just got back from a month long ~13,500 km roadtrip across the USA 🇺🇸 and back again with a week long hiatus to help with Scaling Bitcoin in Milan 🇮🇹.
Besides enjoying many of the great natural wonders of North America's second biggest country, I had the opportunity to spend some much needed time with friends and family. You can check out some highlights from my trip on my Instagram.
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Happy Hard Fork 🍴Week!
🎃 Happy Hard Fork Week! Version 0.14 of Blockstack Core is coming out this week. We're hard forking the consensus rules just in time for Halloween at Bitcoin block #436650 (originally #436363). Learn what's new in 0.14 in Jude's announcement post.
Exploring Blockstack
🔭 As some of you know, I've been working more working more closely with the Blockstack team over the past few months. One of the things I've been working on is building a block explorer for Blockstack.
The Blockstack Explorer has yet to be officially announced while I work on additional features, mobile support and some scaling issues, but as a loyal newsletter reader, you get a sneak peak:
In Blockstack, Bitcoin addresses own names. Here you can see that the Bitcoin address 15kxt5aboFnBuJseR6cHNxMG7Tn6tfkrQZ owns my name larry.id. You can learn more about my name and its history here by looking up larry.id. From this, you can see that the zone information for larry.id was last updated in Bitcoin blockchain in block #428902.
Here you can see an example of someone who has bought multiple Blockstack names with the single Bitcoin address 1MH74mNXSustf2zpFiFvPdcUwnfFk4r2j8.
Links & More
😱 "Toasters are breaking the Internet" - Muneeb Ali weighs in on the recent IoT powered DDoS attack on a large DNS provider that brought down a large portion of the Internet and talks about what we can do to fix it.
🤑 TechCrunch: "Zcash, Blockstack, and appcoins, oh my!"
💡Video: Ryan Shea's "Decentralized, Server-less Applications with Blockstack" talk at AllThingsOpen
🔧Video: Muneeb at the Internet Archive on how trust on the Internet is broken: "Something is wrong with the picture when you are trusting people that don't exist" SHORT, MUST WATCH
Lessons from history
🇨🇳 "Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China" - Answer: Centralization prevents competition. Competition is good for progress. History makes strong arguments for decentralization of technology and power. GOOD READ
Final Photo
🌄 I leave you with one of the dozens of amazing sunsets from my past month. Until next time!
