Empirical microeconomist and cryptocurrency protocol researcher
Monero's 18-block reorg: What happened, why it matters, and what does it have to do with the annoying 10-block lock?
On September 14, 2025, a malicious mining pool successfully performed an 18-block “blockchain reorganization” of the Monero blockchain. Qubic, the mining pool, used its mining hashpower to generate an alternative blockchain history and replaced about 70 minutes of the honest chain’s most recent history. The main effect of the reorganization (“reorg” for short) was the invalidation of 115 transactions that had been included in the original honest chain. The coins in the transactions that were invalidated did not disappear....
Monero Transaction Confirmations Are Now 60 Seconds Faster
On January 19th I released research showing mining pools were delaying the first confirmation of Monero transactions by a full minute, on average. I said the delay could be eliminated if pool operators changed their pool software configurations to update the block template more frequently. I have good news: Most major pools did exactly that! I continued to collect transaction confirmation data after the release of the initial analysis. The average time that a Monero transaction has to wait for its first confirmation has fallen from 3....
Centralized Mining Pools are Delaying Monero Transaction Confirmations by 60 Seconds
Summary Centralized mining pools are delaying the first confirmation of Monero transactions by a full minute, on average. This makes Monero confirmations slower than Litecoin even though Litecoin’s average block time is 2.5 minutes, compared to Monero’s 2 minutes flat. Mining pool operators could solve this issue by adding new transactions to their block templates more frequently, like P2Pool already does. The Isabellas are getting kicked off the bus txstreet.com is an animated visualization of the Monero transaction confirmation process....
New Data on Banking the Unbanked in the U.S. through Cryptocurrency
Earlier this week, the U.S. Federal Reserve released probably the best data yet available on the use of cryptocurrency among people in the United States. For the first time, the annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking included questions on cryptocurrency. Wisely, the designers of the survey distinguished between three different ways to use cryptocurrency. The survey asked: In the past year, have you done the following with cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum?...
65 Percent of Pre-Fork BCH Has Been Spent
On August 1, 2017, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork occurred, raising the permitted bitcoin block size above 1MB and creating a separate history of transactions from that point forward. At the moment of the hard fork, all self-custody owners of BTC were endowed with an equal amount of BCH that they could spend with their private cryptographic keys. Owners of BTC on exchanges were at the mercy of the exchanges' decisions to allow trading or withdraw of BCH....