Just do it!

Shia LaBeouf

In 2020 it is still hard to find quality instructions on how to run a bitcoin full node in the cloud. In this tutorial we want to share how it can be done in a somewhat time- and money-efficient way.

The tutorial steps you through the setup and some of our considerations how to achieve the initial sync in a reasonably fast way without depending pre-synced environments. We are offering recommendations, not guarantees. There is always potential to optimise - feel free to submit an improvement PR for the post 🤓

We can write peer to peer applications in Rust using rust-libp2p. We can anonymize TCP streams by running them through the Tor network. How about writing anonymous peer to peer applications in Rust that run over the Tor network?

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr

Are we on the verge of plummeting into the biggest recession since the big crash of 1929? And if so, are cryptocurrencies the answer, a safe haven to put your money in?

While we cannot look into the future and don't dare to predict it, we are inclined to believe that we are likely to see a high demand for crypto in the future, and an even higher one in the next few months. Time to get COMIT out there so you don't have to trust those central exchanges, but keep your private keys where they should be: in your wallet. Verify, don't trust!

Join us for a discussion around advances in crypto, trustless trading and - as usual - various tech related topics in next week Thursday's COMIT Community ☕️ - 7pm Sydney time!

The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.

— Jandy Nelson

Join us for today's COMIT Community ☕️ 7pm Sydney time, or listen in on youtube!

On today's community coffee we will reflect on the first quarter of this year with a focus on Lightning Network (layer 2) integration into COMIT. We will discuss technical challenges we encountered. Furthermore, we will discuss what we are planning to tackle in the second quarter, including decentralised order-book solutions.

Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.

— Santosh Kalvar

Join us for the next COMIT Community ☕️ on 02.04.2020, 7pm Sydney time, or listen in on youtube!

In this blogpost we first want to HALight - ahm, highlight - the recent effort to design and integrate the new protocol that adds Lightning to COMIT. COMIT consists of cryptographic protocols and communication protocols. Cryptographic protocols are currently defined as HAL, HErc20 and HALight - where HALight is a new protocol that defines atomic swaps using the concept of hold-invoiced in lnd. With the support of Lightning we come one step closer to supporting instant atomic swaps in COMIT.

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

— Stephen Covey

One could wonder at first how this quote applies to what we are doing at CoBloX.

While Stephen Covey's literature focuses on self-improvement with a justified emphasis on inter-personal relationships, I believe anyone who builds a product, platform or protocol for others, should also live by this quote.

We, at CoBloX, are building COMIT as an open-source protocol for anyone to leverage the power of atomic swaps in their own software. If we do not seek to understand first then how can we build something useful to you?

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

— Daniel Bell

December, the silent time of the year, was not that silent for us. By the end of November the CoBloX team was flying out to Singapore for Christmas at the TenX office. We had a wonderful time in Singapore meeting up with colleagues from all over the world.

Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.

— Steve Jobs

For quite some time I have been a personal advocate for using cryptocurrencies for e-commerce and peer-to-peer payments. I was a true believer that cryptocurrencies' true purpose was to become a global payment system: a payment system that is censorship-resistant, non-discriminatory and open for everyone.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Tomorrow the team takes off for Singapore (we are an Australian company and work out of Sydney but our parent company TenX is based in Singapore). We get together with everyone from TenX twice a year, its a lot of fun. There are late night hacking sessions and serious amounts of quality food.

Dance like no one's watching

— Clark & Leigh

In October we had two main focus areas:

1. Extending and improving the "getting started" projects we started in September,
2. Making cnd (comit network daemon) more robust by adding recovery after a shutdown.