What Is an ETN?

Exchange-traded notes (ETNs) are a type of unsecured, unsubordinated debt security. Their price is tied to the price of a specific asset, for example, cryptocurrency.

ETNs are structured products that are issued as senior debt notes, while ETFs represent a stake in an underlying commodity. ETNs are more like bonds in that they are unsecured. ETFs provide investments into a fund that holds the assets it tracks, such as stocks, bonds, or gold.

In 2015, financial company XBT Provider launched a Bitcoin ETN on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange. In October 2017, they launched an ETN tied to the rate of Ether (ETH). In the U.S., crypto ETNs were available for just a week until the SEC suspended them.

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What Is RPCA?

RPCA stands for Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm. It is Ripple’s own hack-proof consensus algorithm. RPCA is functioning similarly to SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The protocol connects equal nodes and allows for the exchange of fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies with the use of the XRP token. The smallest unit is one-millionth of an XRP (0.000001) and is called a “drop.”

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What Is FPGA?

FPGA stands for Field-Programmable Gate Array. What differs it from ASIC is that the latter is a custom chip that cannot be reconfigured after it is manufactured. Once it is shipped and “in the field,” an ASIC’s function is fixed. FPGA gets its name because it can be “reprogrammed in the field,” after it has been shipped or seen use in the real world.

Miners actively used FPGA from 2010 (when regular CPUs became outdated) to 2012 (when the ASIC era began). In comparison with ASIC, FPGA is much less efficient and way slower due to its architecture.

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Is Quantum Computing a Threat to Cryptocurrency?

Watch video below to find out what Andreas Antonopoulos thinks.

https://youtu.be/wlzJyp3Qm7s

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What Is Tangle?

The Tangle is the moniker used to describe IOTA’s directed acyclic graph (DAG) based transaction settlement and data integrity layer focused on the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The Tangle is essentially a string of individual transactions that are interlinked to each other and stored through a decentralized network of node participants.

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What Is a SAFT?

SAFT stands for Simple Agreement for Future Tokens and represents a concept of running a token sale. In its essence, a SAFT is an investment contract providing investors with the right to receive tokens after the project is launched. Tokens are deemed securities, and the project that is using a SAFT should register with the SEC or file documents confirming it may be exempt from registration in accordance with law. Developers do not conceal the fact that they will use raised funds for improving the platform over the course of many months or even years.

SAFT was introduced in October 2017 by attorney Marco Santori and the Protocol Labs team. The latter also developed the FileCoin crypto project that managed to raise then-record $257 million. After FileCoin, a SAFT was used by Kin, Telegram, 0x, Origin, Dehedge, and Basecoin.

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What Is an EIP?

EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal. EIP is a project document describing a new function of the Ethereum’s ecosystem. An EIP should provide a short tech specification of a function and grounds for its acceptance. An EIP author is responsible for reaching a consensus inside the community and documenting special opinions.

Any member of the Ethereum community may submit an EIP. All proposals are stored in a separate repository on GitHub (there are currently over 1,000 of them). EIP-1, the first EIP, was suggested in 2015 by a group of Ethereum developers that included Hudson Jameson and Martin Becze.

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Orphaned Blocks and Stuck Transactions

What happens to transactions in an orphaned block? How can one fix stuck transactions? How do replace-by-fee (RBF) and child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) work?

https://youtu.be/MsdW0CTYwyY

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Multi-Signature and Distributed Storage

What happens when wallets (personal or at an exchange) are hacked? What is "sweeping" with regards to private keys? After a hack, is it possible to track the stolen Bitcoin and identify the hacker? How do you keep Bitcoin safe in a group / corporate environment? Is it possible to create a multi-signature setup with Trezor and Electrum? Could passphrases be brute-forced? What is happening with browser extension deprecation?

https://youtu.be/cAP2u6w_1-k

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Ethereum Smart Contract Bugs

What happens if there are bugs in Ethereum smart contracts? Are smart contract developers the new middlemen? What happened during the Bancor hack? Are Ethereum smart contracts and tokens secure? Could someone make centralized contracts still based on the ERC-20 standard?

https://youtu.be/VxEzZP3zx9o

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MimbleWimble and Dandelion

What is the story behind MimbleWimble? What is Grin? What is a Dandelion transaction relay, as described in BIP156, and how does it improve the anonymity of the Bitcoin network?

https://youtu.be/LjDJGTpK_lE

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What Is ewasm?

ewasm stands for Ethereum flavored WebAssembly. It is a restricted subset of the WebAssembly (WASM) programming language to be used for contracts in Ethereum and updating the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

ewasm also implies the initiative to upgrade the EVM version to improve the latter’s performance.

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Decentralized Exchanges and Counterparty Risk

How will markets transition from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges (LocalBitcoins, cash ATMs, Bisq, cross-chain atomic swaps)? Could fiat-pegged cryptocurrencies ease the process of fiat-to-crypto exchanges? How could the counterparty risk introduced by custodial parties like Tether affect the security of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency ecosystem at large?

https://youtu.be/hi_jaw0dT9M

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What Is Segregated Witness (SegWit)?

How do you know you’re using SegWit? SegWit fixes transaction malleability and enables further upgrades towards Bitcoin smart contracts. Can transaction malleability lead to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks? Does SegWit put witness data in a different block? Did SegWit change transaction validation? versus? Are there any security risks of invalid blocks?

https://youtu.be/dtOjjB4mD8k

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Paper Wallets

What are the risks and benefits of paper wallets? How do you spend from them? Why are they hard to create and use securely? Why is a hardware wallet preferable?

https://youtu.be/cKehFazo8Pw

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CVE-2018-17144 Vulnerability

What is the CVE-2018-17144 vulnerability in the Bitcoin Core client? How did such a critical bug happen? What should we do about it? Andreas Antonopoulos explains.

https://youtu.be/5GD0kGT0SU0

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Bitcoin’s Origins & The Genesis Blockade

In this talk, Andreas Antonopoulos recounts the origins of Bitcoin and the meaning of the message embedded forever in its genesis block. He also speaks about what happens when money stops working and why censorship resistance was one of Bitcoin’s most valuable characteristics from the start.

https://youtu.be/cagoyF3WePo

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Public Keys vs. Addresses

What is the difference between public keys and addresses? How are new addresses generated? How are change addresses generated? Why have two outputs? Do you still pay fees if you are sending Bitcoin to new addresses in your own wallet?

https://youtu.be/8es3qQWkEiU

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Sidechains and Federated Consensus

What are sidechains? What is Liquid and what are the use cases of sidechains? What are the differences to the Lightning Network? What is Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance? What are issues with these federated models? Find out below.

https://youtu.be/mHLgpX4VYBQ

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Mixing Services

How do mixing services work? What are CoinJoin transactions? How much could they improve privacy or anonymity in Bitcoin?

https://youtu.be/rKoMvOH4zoY

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