Researching Bitcoin for a Presentation - coming here to fact check

[Volition]

Hi there!

I am doing research for a Bitcoin presentation. I was hoping I could tap the community here to double check the data I come across.

My first question is around data sources. I plan on reviewing Glassnode, Messari, Coinmetrics and theblock.co... are any of these particularly good or bad in your opinion?

Is there another data source you would recommend?

Thank you so much!


I have also been pointed in the direction of https://bitinfocharts.com/, https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning and https://cryptofees.info/.

If you know of any of these being particularly good or bad in terms of data quality I would appreciate the heads up. Thanks!

[BlackBoss_]

I am doing research for a Bitcoin presentation

My first question is around data sources. I plan on reviewing Glassnode, Messari, Coinmetrics and theblock.co... are any of these particularly good or bad in your opinion?

Is there another data source you would recommend?

Depends on your objectives for your presentation which I don't know now as you did not describe so far.

One of most comprehensive source you can use is The bullish case for Bitcoin and it has a book on Amazon too.

Those sites you listed are for on-chain data but I believe it is better if you focus on basics first. On-chain data is not fundamental and not for beginners. It is for an advanced level of course that does not match for newbies.

https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/ is a great site for on-chain charts.

[pooya87]

are any of these particularly good or bad in your opinion?

It depends on the data you want to fetch and then use in your presentation and how accurate you want your information to be.

For example something like "number of blocks per day" is very hard to miscalculate while "block size" even though it is a very simple "data" it is apparently something these online data sources (like bitinfocharts that was mentioned) easily miscalculate as I recently found out and pointed out here. Or glassnode that reports some of its so called "analysis" based on news not hard data acquired from research and blockchain analysis, such as their reports on "hashrate per country" which is very inaccurate.

Another problem is the bias some of these tools sometimes have. For example if you check out reports by a blockchain analysis company working to deanonymize bitcoin, you can see their reports are always biased towards convincing the reader that bitcoin is used for illegal activities and they can track everything.

Apart from bias we also have maliciousness. For example there are malicious websites reporting extremely high fee rates as an attack on bitcoin trying to inflate it. Or there are altcoin centered websites (like bcash sites including bitcoin.com) that are known for providing misinformation.

[NotATether]

What exactly are the points which you intend to cover in your presentation? The resources you linked point to different categories of data, so without an understanding of what you are trying to present, it's going to be difficult for us to give you any recommendations.

[Volition]

Thank you so much everyone.

I should have been clearer about the purpose of the presentation. It is aimed at a broader more general audience, first and foremost to give them factual information useful to them. I am not looking for perfect, but to do responsible due diligence and provide reasonably accurate information.

I have worked for chains ( and been in crypto since 2013 ) and know how reporting services can get things wrong and even how within one's own community it can be hard to come to an agreement on what the facts are.

I will be doing a comparison to roughly 10 years ago and primarily Bitcoin vs fiat. I will address a lot of the criticisms against Bitcoin, the environmental stuff. If anyone knows of data that tracks the environmental impact of the fiat banking infrastructure etc... that would be amazing.

Also gonna do a comparison to gold.

This is a long shot but if anyone knows of any credible studies on the environmental impact of the state monopoly on and manipulation of the marketplace that would be great.

I will probably dedicate a bit of the presentation to acquiring, securing and privatizing ones Bitcoin.

Definitely gonna bring up the current fiat crisis and regulatory environment.

Gonna share the salient historical events over the last 10 years, please add any I am overlooking:

* The hard fork
* Segwit
* Lightning
* Nation state adoption
* Taproot






I am also gonna touch on the current developmental state and possible paths for Bitcoin.

I have seen mention of the way taproot is being used opening up the door to things like sidechains, rollups etc... so I need to look into that more.

I may include current debates within the community and where one can go to follow and participate. This forum and nostr and twitter seem like obvious recommendations, any others?
 




What would you say defines Bitcoin?

What is the single element that if removed would cease for it to be Bitcoin.

I am personally leaning toward the overt dominance in hashing power. Regardless of algorithm, on the small chance that a flaw were found in sha-256, Bitcoin would move to another algorithm and the mining industry would adapt and follow.

Another secondary defining feature imo is the conservative development that solves for simplicity.




What would you say is the best concise ( yet factually accurate ) explanation for how Bitcoin works?

You are skeptical of Bitcoin, your intelligent but are not interested in becoming a dev or reading pages apon pages of text ( yet ) to understand how it works. You are bombarded with information from all sides, your attention is taken for granted and abused, everyone is claiming doom and gloom trying to convince you of their thing ...and it would be a part time job to try and qualify and validate all of it. you just want concise objective facts.

I like 3Blue1Brown's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 - but it is a bit technical and of course, not concise, lol.


[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

[mrkfdr]

Research: Bitcoin Consumes Less Than Half The Energy Of The Banking Or Gold Industries

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%3A-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries

[pawel7777]

(...)
Gonna share the salient historical events over the last 10 years, please add any I am overlooking:

* The hard fork
(...)

What hard fork do you mean exactly?

What would you say defines Bitcoin?

There's no clear answer to this one. Hashing power dominance is very flawed definition, so is the majority of nodes. The lazy answer would be that Bitcoin is defined by wide community consensus, but then we'd have to define what's "community" exactly.

What would you say is the best concise ( yet factually accurate ) explanation for how Bitcoin works?

You are skeptical of Bitcoin, your intelligent but are not interested in becoming a dev or reading pages apon pages of text ( yet ) to understand how it works. You are bombarded with information from all sides, your attention is taken for granted and abused, everyone is claiming doom and gloom trying to convince you of their thing ...and it would be a part time job to try and qualify and validate all of it. you just want concise objective facts.

I like 3Blue1Brown's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 - but it is a bit technical and of course, not concise, lol.

I personally liked this old video by James D'Angelo explaining the concept of Bitcoin's private keys. Easy to grasp and easy to digest even by non tech-savvy people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHVKk7DHk

[nullama]

~snip~
Is there another data source you would recommend?

The best data source you can get is the blockchain itself.

Download Bitcoin Core and get all the history of valid transactions of Bitcoin since genesis to today: https://bitcoincore.org

Then, you can do any kind of analysis you want on that data through the Bitcoin RPC API Reference: https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/rpc/index.html

Also, you can check the source code here: https://github.com/bitcoin

You don't need to trust anyone.

[OpenCEX]

Here is more useful data with charts:
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts
You can use some for your presentation.

[BlackBoss_]

* Segwit
* Taproot

Generally adoption for Segwit is very sharp in the past 3 years.

Bitcoin Taproot (Bech32m - bc1p) adoption. Taproot is a type of Segwit Bech32.
Segwit Bech32: https://txstats.com/dashboard/db/bech32-statistics
Taproot Bech32m: https://txstats.com/dashboard/db/taproot-statistics?orgId=1

https://transactionfee.info/ has charts for Segwit and Taproot.

* Lightning

You can get good information and resources about Lightning Network from Lightning network obsever

[Darker45]

If you are looking for different statistics relating to Bitcoin, you might want to check this thread: List of interesting Bitcoin statistics. This was created by 1miau less than a year ago, so I guess the sites are still pretty much active until today.

What is the single element that if removed would cease for it to be Bitcoin.

This is interesting. I guess it will be the very fundamentals aspects of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin's block size is significantly increased, would it still be Bitcoin? I guess so. But what if Bitcoin shifts to PoS, would it still be Bitcoin? I don't think so. What if transactions carrying Ordinal inscriptions are rejected or censored, would it still be Bitcoin? That would be debatable. What if the 21 million supply is increased? That's certainly a deviation from Bitcoin's fundamental design.

So I guess there isn't only a single element that makes Bitcoin what it is.

[pooya87]

What would you say defines Bitcoin?

What defines bitcoin is not about the huge hashrate, it is not about the price nor that it was first and all that. It is all about offering a solution and providing an actual utility.

There is a problem in real world with the centralized financial system, banksters and centralized fiat and its related payment systems. The bitcoin paper summarizes that well in the first section. Bitcoin solves that problem and does it well. This is what defines bitcoin and is the reason why bitcoin is successful and still continues growing even after 14 years.

[Volition]

Thank you very much everyone for your responses. I'll reply as I get time today.

[panganib999]

You could've done better to describe what the aim of your presentation is going to be, so at least we can chip in valuable information based on what you are looking for. But as someone who did a bitcoin presentation in my economics class back then too, I think I'd let you in on how I did it.

The basic flow of how my bitcoin presentation went is --->history---->intended use------>how it is being used now------->extra details.

For History, you can take it from the main guy himself, his profile is here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts

for everything else, a quick google search will do.

Hope this helps!

[Volition]

What hard fork do you mean exactly?

Thanks for asking. I'm want to address the 2017 events as factually and sans conclusions as possible. I just want to give facts and let people come to their own conclusions.

Here is what I have so far...

'In 2016 there was a scaling conflict within the Bitcoin community addressing the need to accommodate more transactions. The community could increase the size of each block or defer smaller more frequent transactions to a second layer of the network.'

'Soon after August 1st of 2017 the segregated witness ( or SegWit ) update was activated. A hardfork followed eventually resulting in several more forks and projects with varying views. Ultimately, those that wanted a smaller blocksize won the conflict and this what the market has accepted as Bitcoin.'

What do you think?

There's no clear answer to this one. Hashing power dominance is very flawed definition, so is the majority of nodes. The lazy answer would be that Bitcoin is defined by wide community consensus, but then we'd have to define what's "community" exactly.


I personally liked this old video by James D'Angelo explaining the concept of Bitcoin's private keys. Easy to grasp and easy to digest even by non tech-savvy people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHVKk7DHk

Thanks for the resource!

[pawel7777]

What hard fork do you mean exactly?

Thanks for asking. I'm want to address the 2017 events as factually and sans conclusions as possible. I just want to give facts and let people come to their own conclusions.

Here is what I have so far...

'In 2016 there was a scaling conflict within the Bitcoin community addressing the need to accommodate more transactions. The community could increase the size of each block or defer smaller more frequent transactions to a second layer of the network.'

'Soon after August 1st of 2017 the segregated witness ( or SegWit ) update was activated. A hardfork followed eventually resulting in several more forks and projects with varying views. Ultimately, those that wanted a smaller blocksize won the conflict and this what the market has accepted as Bitcoin.'

What do you think?  

I think that event was actually a "hard fork" not happening. Depends on how we define the term. If we assume that hard fork is a radical change to the protocol of Bitcoin's blockchain - then it wasn't really a hard fork, as the BCH and other forks have indeed introduced radical changes the blockchain, but those changes were made to their new brands of blockchain, not to the Bitcoin blockchain.
So it's not like the Big blockers tried to push their new fork as Bitcoin.

But yes, all that Big Vs Small blocks civil war was definitely a significant episode in Bitcoins history. It exposed some ugliness and some dirty plays, but also had some bright sides, and all seems to end up quite well.

[Volition]

Intentionally left it kind of vague saying "....( or SegWit ) update was activated. A hardfork followed eventually resulting in several more forks...." as to not imply one side or the other caused the split, letting people come to their own conclusions.

What if I changed it to: "....( or SegWit ) update was activated. Part of the community disagreed with SegWit and hard forked away, eventually resulting in several more forks...."



https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segregated_Witness

What was the 'flaw' in BIP 9 that allowed miners to block activation of SegWit?

"On a technical level, the consensus rules of bitcoin are controlled by the economic majority not the miners, so the deadlock was possible to solve by creating a user activated soft fork BIP 148 where the economic majority would bypass the blocking miners and activate segregated witness on their own."

How was SegWit activated despite the mining majority at the time ostensibly being against it?

[Volition]

You could've done better to describe what the aim of your presentation is going to be, so at least we can chip in valuable information based on what you are looking for. But as someone who did a bitcoin presentation in my economics class back then too, I think I'd let you in on how I did it.

The basic flow of how my bitcoin presentation went is --->history---->intended use------>how it is being used now------->extra details.

For History, you can take it from the main guy himself, his profile is here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts

for everything else, a quick google search will do.

Hope this helps!

Really helpful, thank you!

First and foremost I want to give people facts and give them a general broad education on Bitcoin. After watching the video I'll consider it a win if they are encouraged to learn more, acquire some and use it.

[franky1]

above is the image representation of the data of blocks involved in activating segwit

(flags= small reference in block data that shows desire/preference for something)

as you can see from november 2016 when segwit was first proposed and allowed flagging. until july 2017 only got under 50% wanting segwit activated naturally(genuine open choice)

however in May there was another proposal. called the NY Agreement by which from june, many economic nodes and some large mining pools agreed that if the rest of the mining pools and the NYA flag a month long 90% acceptance they would start rejecting(subliminal threat) blocks that disagreed with segwit to cause a statistical 100% acceptance even if not a 100% opinion acceptance... to help activate segwit.. but they wanted a 2mb block later in the year(in hindsight they never got the 2mb blockspace)

the NYA proposal then resulted in the segwit flags showing as an unnatural growth to an unnatural 100% acceptance of segwit in the july-august period which resulted in segwits activation

the group that strongly opposed it decided that they wanted to continue as is so they started accepting blocks that were normal blocks. (ones segwit rejected)
segwit was declared by the economic nodes(merchants/services) as bitcoin and the opposition as an altcoin where the altcoin had to change things in its minority chain to ensure the chains dont converge by the end of august. (so that the flag can be taken out/to not need to continue having 100% flagging which was used to prevent differing blocks on the bitcoin side)


this version of events is backed up by actual agreements. actual code and actual blockdata that is immutable and is strongly uneditable by 6 years of confirmations

[nullama]

~snip~
Really helpful, thank you!

First and foremost I want to give people facts and give them a general broad education on Bitcoin. After watching the video I'll consider it a win if they are encouraged to learn more, acquire some and use it.

The entire writings of Satoshi Nakamoto can be found at https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org

They show everything nicely organized and with links to the original material.

It will save you a lot of time compared to reading every post in here. Also it includes other things outside of this forum like the emails and source code.