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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....

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....

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?...

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....

As government scrutiny of cryptocurrencies has intensified over the last several months, concern has grown over the possibility of a two-tier market for cryptocurrencies that have a transparent ledger. On one side, there are “clean” coins that are held and disbursed by centralized exchanges that require identity documents to comply with government-mandated Know-Your-Customer (KYC) regulations. On the other side, there are “dirty” coins of a unknown provenance that may come from mixers, CoinJoin transactions, and peer-to-peer trading....