It turns out that being on holiday while there isn’t really anything news worthy to report is a combination that led to a couple of weeks without my weekly notes. Now I’m back to writing though, so let’s get this year started with some Bitcoin and AWS Lambda.

Trouble in Bitcoin land

Last week an article by a core developer of the Bitcoin team made waves on the Internet. In the article (which I highly recommend you read) he goes into the details of what is going on with Bitcoin and why he feels very pessimistic about its future.

For me personally Bitcoin has always been an interesting subject. As many others I have my own stories of how I didn’t make lots of money from it, but more importantly I’ve always seen the protocol itself as interesting. In many ways it always felt like the future, or at least a beta version of it. For a long time I didn’t think Bitcoin would really make it far, but it surprised me by seemingly growing better all the time and once I saw a Bitcoin ATM in a Melbourne mall I pretty much figured it wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

It turns out that it could very well be nearing the end of the line though. Aside from the technical issues concerning block sizes (which might or might not be solvable depending on who you ask), apparently most of the control of the system itself (not the code, but the miners who control the execution of the hashing algorithms) is in the hands of a handful of people. In 2014 there was an outcry when a single party was in control of 51%, but now that 95% of the power has solidified into an oligarchy we don’t hear much about it. Possibly because of the communications blackout mentioned in the article.

Despite all of this, Bitcoin is still interesting. Even if the worst comes to pass and the community does implode, the work done by Satoshi Nakamoto in designing the protocol is still amazing. He seems to have accounted for most things and prevented it from breaking in the early stages. Unfortunately, even he couldn’t fix humanity’s ego and greed. Maybe Bitcoin will survive, and maybe not. Either way, it showed us a possible future where money isn’t controlled by a few people and I have no doubt that successors will show up in time.

Lambda integrations

While I haven’t done as much with AWS Lambda as I want to, there have been a couple of new and interesting releases. First, it seems that AWS likes Slack as much as everyone else as they released templates for integrating Lambda with it. I am really looking forward to playing with that and seeing what I can do with it. It also really helps promote the serverless architecture that Lambda promotes by showing you don’t need to run a server to build integrations for your chat service.

Speaking of integrations, while AWS is probably hard at work trying to support more languages projects crop up that already do so. Despite it not being officially supported, technically speaking it was always possible to call Go libraries by creating a node.js wrapper around it. The Apex project however has built this into their tool which can also do other things. Have a look at the article written about it, and see if it meets your needs for a serverless future.