 Welcome to the Daily Decrypt, your home for currency competition. I'm your host Amanda B. Johnson and today's episode is brought to you by BitShares. Andrew Stone is a member of the development team of Bitcoin Unlimited, a reference client which seeks to scale Bitcoin with bigger blocks and guide it with an alternative governance model. The Daily Decrypt reached out to Andrew after hearing about unlimited's newest development called Thin Blocks. Thin Blocks is a network optimization on the blocks. It allows them to be sent using a lot fewer bytes. And the basic idea is the Bitcoin client today essentially has two different protocols running within the PTP network and they don't really communicate to each other. One is the transaction protocol and one is the block protocol. So if a transaction comes in, it just forwards it to everyone. If a block comes in, it forwards it to everyone. These are completely separate. And then what miners do of course is they take the transactions from the transaction level and they mine a block and produce a block, right? But Peter Shipper, who's the author of this and I think Mike Hearn actually created an initial cut at it had the observation that most of the transactions in a block are already at all the nodes because the transactions have already been passed in this transaction layer in what's called the memory pool. And so rather than passing all the transactions inside a block, the observation was we should just pass like a hash of the transaction which is essentially an ID of the transaction. So that can be like 256 bits, right? Or in the extreme block case, we just crushed that down to 64 bits. And so you end up with huge savings in block sizes because you're essentially just passing a pointer to the transactions instead of the transactions themselves. We'd heard thin blocks mentioned in relation to the great hashing power which resides behind the Great Firewall of China or GFC which is geographically enforced internet censorship. We were appointed to this censorship as a potential problem in miners' abilities to relay increasingly large blocks. We asked Andrew if thin blocks could indeed provide a solution and if so, how? Presumably most of the transactions originate from outside of China just because there are more people outside of China than are inside, right? So all those transactions have to enter China, right? And then be put in blocks and turn around and come back out again, right? But there's absolutely no point for that to happen, right? We could just have the transactions come in and then send back out a reference to those transactions waiting just outside of the, you know, GFC, right? So actually what we're planning to do as one of our next steps is to extend our relay network into inside mainland China. This is a concert shout-out from ChangeTip, a team that's upgrading their popular social tipping service to give users control of their own Bitcoin private keys. In other words, ChangeTip is becoming a hot wallet for both web and mobile. You can open your own ChangeTip account or request an invite to test the private beta at changetip.com. Andrew reports that the Bitcoin Unlimited team will soon be setting up a donation address to help fund the placement and maintenance of their thin block relaying node in Beijing. And what about cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin? Could they also benefit from potential incorporation of thin blocks? Yeah, I mean, it could be pulled into any Satoshi client, right? Anything that's forked off of the fundamental client, including, you know, classic and core, right? Got it. Yeah. Or any cryptocurrency. You can learn more about the developments coming from Andrew and his team by visiting bitcoinunlimited.info. Today's episode is brought to you by BitShares, a delegated proof-of-stay currency with three-second block times. The BitShares wallet is also home to a decentralized exchange where profit-sharing tokens from exchanges like CCEDK and MetaExchange are traded without requiring traders to give up their private keys. You can learn more at bitShares.org and have a censorship-resistant day.