This week in Bitcoin is still overshadowed by last weeks Bitcoin sidechains AMA by the authors of a vastly popular whitepaper on this technology that might fundamentally change how the Bitcoin protocol can be used.

Scams can be fairly prevalent in the wild, wild west of BTCeven as it slowly gains mainstream adoption (or perhaps because of that approach to the mainstream) so its important to know how to tell who is good and who is bad so we take a look at BadBitcoin.org.

The G+ Bitcoin Community surpassed 100,000 members andSiliconAngle briefly interviewed Avatar X, the community host, as to its future.

The Bitcoin market has been seeing a continued downward trend since the lastBitcoin Weeklyfalling to around $340 from almost $385. Last week around Oct 22 the market value of BTC had reached $385, but then quickly dropped to a band around $355; however today, the value fell even further to around $340.

This and more in this Bitcoin Weekly.

Bitcoin sidechains: What they are and what they arent, with Blockstream

Last week, two Bitcoin core devs and other extremely smart people made a splash in the Bitcoin community with the release of a white paper on Bitcoin sidechains: a concept that allows the construction of blockchains that provide external functionality to Bitcoin but remain entangled with Bitcoin itself.

The whitepaper announcement came along with the revelation of Blockstream, a business co-founded by several of the authors of the whitepaper dedicated to innovating around the idea of sidechains.

The sidechain whitepaper and Blockstream both have a very strong lineup of people involved including Bitcoin core developers Gregory Maxwell and Pieter Wuille. While the authors of the whitepaper and Blockstreams founders are not entirely the same people, there is some overlap.

The whitepaper announcement opened with a Reddit AMA and this led to a sweep of the news media and community with articles from SiliconAngle, CryptoCoinsNews, TechCrunch, and CoinDesk. As well as blogs working to demystify the entire meaning of and concepts behind sidechains such as this excellent article by Gendal.

Read more here:

Bitcoin Weekly 2014 October 29: Bitcoin sidechains, the Bits debate, identify scams and frauds, G+ Bitcoin community