This whole month has seen a great deal of movement on Gavin Andresen’s proposal for increasing the Bitcoin blockchain block size. Currently, a split in opinion of Bitcoin Core developers has thrown a roadblock in the way of adopting a new standard, and most like a new codebase, to support larger block sizes. See below for a brief summary of the current news and some news sources to read about how it’s continuing to evolve.

Nasdaq is moving forward with its Bitcoin blockchain securities technology in partnership with Bitcoin API company Chain. This partnership should provide the first proof-of-concept for the securities market use of blockchain technology.

JoyStream is running a private alpha for a BitTorrent client that allows people to exchange bitcoins for bandwidth. Case Wallet has received $1.5 million in a seed-equity funding round. Cloud hash mining marketplace Scrypt.cc has been hacked and lost an undisclosed, but large, number of bitcoins.

More news for developers includes BlockTrail releasing a Bitcoin Developers Platform (for access to BlockTrail’s API) and a very through tutorial with C code about the Bitcoin blockchain from Davide De Rosa.

Welcome to this week’s Bitcoin Weekly!

Bitcoin block size scalability developer cooperation continues to be a bugbear

Not so long ago, Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen proposed a hard fork to the Bitcoin core development in order to provide for the support of larger block sizes in the future. He wrote a long, thoroughly thought out proposal on the subject.

The nature of the fork and the initial new size of blocks has fluctuated somewhat in the intervening time, but Andresen has a new proposal out now that has fixed some of critics issues, but continues to be a problem for others. Andresen wants to shift efforts to a fork of Bitcoin Core, specifically Mark Hearn’s Bitcoin XT.

Gavin Andresen, image via http://bitcoinaware.com/

Potentially expected Bitcoin Core’s lead developer Wladimir “wumpus” van der Laan disagrees with the idea of a unilateral hard fork and has not been on board with this. Blockstream co-founder Adam Black also spoke against the fork to Bitcoin XT. And, yet another strong critic of the fork, Peter Todd also disagrees with the current proposal.

At this point, this means that there is a significant divide in the consensus of the Bitcoin core developers and it may be difficult to proceed without further compromise or a superior proposal.

The current proposal would allow for an initial block size increase in increments towards 8 MB.

To make matters even more contentious, three of China’s biggest mining pools– F2Pool, BTCChina Pool and Huobi Pool—have spoken out against the Bitcoin Core to XT hard fork due to the lack of consensus amid core developers.

The Chinese mining pools all appear to agree that 8 MB is the go to size; however, they are not happy about the disagreement of how to proceed to it between Bitcoin Core developers. All three mining pools have noted that they will not support the hard fork (which would be disastrous for the Bitcoin network if it did happen) until a consensus has been reached.

Nasdaq partners with Chain for pilot of private market arm

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. named Bitcoin startup Chain as its partner for a pilot program testing Bitcoin blockchain technology developed for trading shares in private companies. This program, announced in May this year, intends to use the Open Assets Protocol and colored coins in order to track assets for private companies using the Bitcoin blockchain as the ledger.

Chain is a Bitcoin blockchain API provider developing with an eye towards financial institutions. Launched in 2014, Chain makes use of the blockchain to provide various services such as protocols for tracking assets, providing blockchain layer provisioning, and trading mechanisms.

Forbes contributor Laura Shin wrote an extensive article outlining the partnership.

Nasdaq and Chain will be testing the Nasdaq Private Market, the enterprise-grade pre-IPO shares trading program.

The two companies expect that the partnership will reveal exactly how powerful blockchain technology can be for providing a built-in ledger system for virtual assets. This may prove especially true for the Bitcoin blockchain, which is secured by the global hash power of the entire network and fueled by the trading value of bitcoins themselves.

JoyStream seeks to become the first BitTorrent client with BTC-paid seeding

JoyStream is accepting signups for a private alpha release of its JoyStream BitTorrent client, which will feature the capability to get paid in BTC for seeding torrents.

The founder and director of the project, Dr. Bedeho Mender, hopes to see JoyStream provide a proof-of-concept for exchanging BitTorrent bandwidth for bitcoin micropayments.

“Anyone with spare bandwith [sic] can use JoyStream and earn Bitcoin,” the website states as one of the features. “At what ever price they choose, in exchange for seeding to peers. If you have some rare content which no one else has, you are rewarded by being able to charge higher prices.”

The JoyStream client works as a standard BitTorrent client and hopes to use the bitcoin incentive as a means to provide faster torrents and a larger breadth of content. The client also will be capable of downloading and stream-viewing any large HD video file at any point within the file.

Check out the JoyStream.co web page for more information on the project.

Case Wallet receives $1.5 million in equity-seed funding

Bitcoin hardware wallet startup Case Wallet Inc. recently raised $1.5 million dollars to expand its products market options, reports Yuliya Chernova at the Wall Street Journal blog section.

This equity-seed round for Case Wallet was joined by FuturePerfect Ventures as lead, as well as RRE Ventures, High Line Venture Partners and the Rochester Institute of Technology Fund.

Case Wallet founder and Chief Executive Melanie Shapiro — Stephen S. Reardon Photography

Melanie Shapiro, Case Wallet founder and Chief Executive, said that the company intended to use the money to explore other uses for the wallet technology, especially for the case of identity verification for financial-information access.

The Case device embeds a fingerprint scanner, a camera, and a GSM chip. The camera and GSM chip allow the hardware wallet to scan QR codes and interact with the Internet in order to confirm and network Bitcoin transactions. Case Wallet hopes to distinguish its hardware wallet form the rest of the current market with the fingerprint scanner, as this adds a biometric security element to what to-date has largely been password (or PIN) based security.

In May, Case began selling pre-orders for Case wallets with a batch total of 1,000 “individually numbered” wallets. Shapiro said that the current batch is almost sold out.

Scypt.cc hacked, undisclosed but ‘large’ number of bitcoins stolen from cloud mining marketplace

Two days ago, NewsBTC reported that Scypt.cc had announced it was hacked. The warning on the front page of Scypt.cc’s website, written by administrator Marcelo Santos, warns users not to make any deposits to the Scypt.cc wallet while repairs are underway.

Scypt.cc is an altcoin cloud mining hash power online marketplace that provides forums, a referral system, and payout system for cloud mining. Unlike many other similar hack events, Scypt.cc is not an exchange or a wallet in the traditional sense, bitcoin stored in the system is the result of uncollected payments from mining efforts.

The hack apparently led to a large, undisclosed amount of bitcoins stolen by the attackers.

“Around 14 hours ago our database was breached, the hacker credited himself BTC and KHS and withdrew BTC until our withdraw wallet was empty,” writes Santos. “He then proceeded to make suspicious orders in the market in which the market automatically turned itself off. This sent a [sic] alert to myself and other support staff, one of them seeing what was happening but not being able to do much as he does not have back-end access, he enabled our ‘Panic’ mode in which put the whole site on lock down. But the hackers still managed to gain access and steal the coins from the hot wallet and the backup withdraw wallet.”

Santos added that most of the bitcoin stolen belonged to the website and not customers. Also, he believes that very little information stored on the website was lost as a backup had occurred mere minutes before the initial attack.

An update today, June 24, also mentions that hackers have continued to play havoc with the website and took out the chat room.

Santos posts that a new database and clean server should launch by tomorrow; however, a full restoration of the site is not expected until June 30.

Bitcoin platform BlockTrail launches developer platform

BlockTrail B.V., an advanced Bitcoin infrastructure company that provides an API for developers and enterprise clients, announced the release of a developer platform on their blog. BlockTrail’s Blockchain Data API, Wallet API, Webhooks and Web Wallet have been released as an infrastructure toolbox for developers to link the BlockTrail platform to applications.

Features listed in the blog post about the release of BlockTrail’s developer platform:

• Blockchain Data API – Core connection into the Bitcoin Blockchain Network that provides full access to raw data;
• Wallet API – Easily send and receive bitcoin, manage unlimited wallets, and maintain control of your private keys. Our multi-signature security includes fine-grained controls to prevent theft and loss;
• Webhooks – Real time notifications on new blocks, transactions and network events;
• Explorer – Online Data analytics platform for gaining insights into the Bitcoin blockchain;
• Web Wallet – Web interface to create and manage all your wallets;
• Testnet Support – All the BlockTrail Platform tools and features are also available to use with the Bitcoin testnet.

The blog post also stresses that the company, and its platforms, focus on security using systems including Multi-Signature and HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) Wallets. So, while BlockTrail seeks to simplify adoption by developers and the enterprise by providing a simpler toolbox, it intends not to provide simplicity at the expense of security.

The API released by BlockTrail also emphasizes simple and clean code, smarter API calls, and a just-get-it-done methodology.

Basic blockchain programming: A developer-oriented series about Bitcoin

Davide De Rosa, a self-described “nonsense hero,” as well as “software enthusiast,” has put together a series about programming for the Bitcoin blockchain on his eponymous website. De Rosa’s tutorial on blockchain programming includes a short segment about how the community appears to lack strong programming resources and he hopes to correct this.

The tutorial contains a vast amount of resources for programmers beginning to look at the Bitcoin blockchain. Preferably any developer coming to this space should understand basic concepts such as hex and endian, know C code (his tutorial is in C), and actually know a thing or two about Bitcoin. Beyond that and De Rosa’s tutorial does a great job of providing groundwork.

Amid the sections of the tutorial include what are and how to use Elliptic-curve keys and even a resource on the Bitcoin scripting language.

If you’re a developer interested in Bitcoin, giving this resource a cursory peek might give you the grounding you need to better understand the technology that underlies this Weeklys favorite cryptocurrency.

photo credits: Peter Kurdulija via photopin cc; and Dom W via photopin cc