Criptor

Last week, in a moment of uncharacteristically sneaky behavior, a small group of developers attempted to quietly change the default mempool policy of Bitcoin Core, the world’s dominant software for full nodes. After re-introducing a failed 2023 proposal to raise the data storage capability of OP_RETURN outputs, critics flagged down the 2025 copycat before it merged into production. Colloquially, some are referring to the surprising incident as a sort of bitcoin OP_RETURN war. Mononaut joked that...

Protos

1 day ago

Carlos Dada, the director of El Faro, a newspaper in El Salvador that has published investigations into the Nayib Bukele administration, has claimed that it has "received reliable information that the Salvadoran Attorney General's Office is preparing arrest warrants for El Faro journalists." El Faro had recently published a new series of videos reiterating and expanding reporting on Bukele's negotiations with Salvadoran gangs, something that Bukele has been denying for multiple years. The United...

Protos

1 day ago

Last week, alarm bells rang over a proposal to relax data storage limitations via an operation code of Bitcoin script. It was a deceptively minor change to the policy of full node software that shed light on the corporate interests encroaching on Bitcoin’s technical development. Instead of rubber-stamping the idea, technical Bitcoiners sprang into action, whipping up support for their side of the debate. Critics revealed the commercial interests of companies like Citrea and an assortment of zero...

Protos

1 day ago

Three protocols are vying for dominance of the Ethereum Layer 2 market and its $52 billion worth of so-called decentralized finance (DeFi): Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP), and Base. Bullish investors even see an opportunity for layer 2s to displace some of Ethereum’s $220 billion market cap or even the values of alternate blockchains like Solana or Avalanche. Something of a misnomer, a "layer 2" cheapens and speeds up the transactions of a layer 1 blockchain, yet layer 2s are essentially separate...

Protos

4 days ago

A legal notice on Craig Wright’s website warning visitors that he's not the inventor of Bitcoin is still up, despite a UK court order demanding its publication expiring almost five months ago. Wright was issued the order on July 16, 2024, after losing a high court case in which he tried to argue that he was Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. A judge ordered him to display the notice on his website for six months, and despite this order expiring on January 16, the notice remains. ...

Protos

4 days ago

More than half of World’s 26 million ID holders have yet to verify themselves using the company’s controversial eyeball scanning orbs. The X account for World Chain, the blockchain behind the “World Network,” claimed that the number of World IDs stood at over 26.1 million on April 28, closely matching the number of World App users that week. However, it didn’t match World’s 12.35 million “unique humans.” World’s parent company, Tools for Humanity, clarified that this figure represents the number...

Protos

5 days ago

World (formerly Worldcoin) has seemingly inflated the number of eyeballs it's scanned with its controversial dystopian orbs by 14 million people. The X account for World Chain, the blockchain behind the "World Network," claimed that the number of World IDs stands at over 26.1 million. However, World’s metrics displayed on its website state that the number of “unique humans” -- which it defines as the number of people with a World ID issued in return for scanning their eyeballs -- is actually 12....

Protos

5 days ago