Tag: #BIP

20 Security Rules for bitcoin

Questions & Answers Chapter

20 Rules for Security in bitcoin

Here’s a short list of common sense Rules, to use and implement for a better Security while using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In the hopes that they are quite self-explanatory Rules, please do try for your own good and your assets, to follow them…

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments.

  1. Keep your private keys safe and secure, and never share them with anyone.
  2. Use a hardware wallet to store your bitcoins offline and away from potential hackers.
  3. Use a strong and unique password for your wallet and any exchange account.
  4. Be wary of phishing attempts and never click on links from unknown sources.
  5. Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) whenever possible to secure your accounts.
  6. Use a different password for each account and change them frequently.
  7. Avoid using public Wi-Fi networks for sensitive transactions.
  8. Keep your computer and mobile devices secure with updated antivirus and anti-malware software.
  9. Use a separate address for each transaction, and avoid reusing addresses.
  10. Verify the authenticity of any website or service you use for Bitcoin transactions.
  11. Use a reputable and secure Bitcoin exchange or wallet service.
  12. Use a hardware token or other secure means of 2FA, avoid using SMS.
  13. Be mindful of social engineering and do not reveal personal information to unknown parties
  14. Use a unique email address and phone number for every exchange account.
  15. Keep a copy of your private key, Seed Phrase or wallet recovery phrase in a safe place.
  16. Be skeptical of unsolicited offers, promotions or services.
  17. Learn about the security features of your wallet and use them.
  18. Do not leave your funds on exchange for long time.
  19. Educate yourself about the risks of using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
  20. Regularly monitor your accounts and transactions for suspicious activity.
With 🧡

Running bitcoin – Hal Finney

Wonder In Peace Bright Mind

Join Honorary Chair Fran Finney and the Running Bitcoin Challenge Committee as we honor legendary cypher punk, Hal Finney.

This is THE EVENT that combines Hal Finney’s love of running and Bitcoin and is raising funds and awareness to help defeat ALS, which ultimately claimed his life in 2014.

You are challenged to run (or walk, roll, or hike) the equivalent of a half marathon — cumulatively or all at once — by the end of January 10, 2023.

From wherever you are, spread the word about Bitcoin, participate in a healthy activity, feel good about doing your part to defeat ALS, and start the year off right

Hal Finney, one of the earliest bitcoin contributors, died eight years ago from complications of nervous system disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

His spouse, Fran Finney, is now organizing a half marathon to raise funds for ALS research via bitcoin.

The “Running Bitcoin Challenge” is set to take place between Jan. 1 and Jan. 10. The timing of the occasion leads up to the anniversary of Hal Finney’s “Running bitcoin” tweet, in which Finney famously disclosed he was deploying a Bitcoin node.

There is no set location — participants can choose to join anywhere they wish. Players are encouraged to either run, walk, roll or hike the equivalent of a half marathon (Hal’s favorite distance) either in one go or over the entire 10-day period.

Donors contributing at least $100 will receive an official shirt with the half marathon’s logo, while the event’s top 25 fundraisers will get a Hal Finney collectible signed by his wife.

As of Wednesday morning, the event has already managed to secure nearly $10,000 in bitcoin donations.

An advocate of cryptography and digital privacy, Finney was the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transfer from the network’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The bitcoin community often suspected Finney was Nakamoto, a claim he consistently denied. He reportedly found out about his condition in 2009 and decided to move away from the project.

Hal’s name is high in the Bitcoin pantheon as one of the first people to voice support for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention and for being the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.

He was, for a time, considered one of the top contenders on the list of potential Satoshis himself (many in blockchain who reject Dr. Craig Wright’s statements still falsely believe Finney to be Bitcoin’s real creator).

Hal, who referred to himself as a “cypherpunk,” was a cryptographic activist who went from developing video games to working on the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) project in the 1990s. He described his PGP work as “dedicated to the goal of making Big Brother obsolete.”

PGP creator Phil Zimmerman hired Hal as his first employee when PGP became PGP Corporation in the early 2000s. He described Hal as a “gregarious man” who loved skiing and long-distance running.

Despite gradual paralysis that eventually forced him to stop working, Hal continued to code software and follow the Bitcoin project.

Almost as famous as his 2009 tweet is his “Bitcoin and me” post on BitcoinTalk.org in March 2013, the last he’d ever make.

It’s a long post, and Hal was “essentially paralyzed” at the time, using an eye tracker to type. Forum stats show the post has been read over 278,000 times.

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he wrote. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Hal himself always denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, adding later that he’d sold most of the Bitcoins he mined (at pre-2014 prices) to pay for his treatments. He also mentioned putting some in a safe deposit box for his children.

“And, of course, the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me.

I have skin in the game.

But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me.

I lived through the crash of 2011.

So I’ve seen it before.

Easy come, easy go.”

Hal Finney
www.runningbitcoin.us
Admiration and great Respect
With 🧡

Bitcoin WhitePaper Day

Bitcoin – A Peer-to-Peer
Electronic Cash System

It’s bitcoin White Paper Day.

The mailing list was hosted by Metzdow and run by a group of cypherpunks who shared ideas on creating a kind of digital currency and payment system. Satoshi shared the whitepaper in a message that read, “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,” which outlined the main properties of the system.

“Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Satoshi Nakamoto satoshi at vistomail.com
Fri Oct 31 14:10:00 EDT 2008
Previous message: Fw: SHA-3 lounge
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully
peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.

The paper is available at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The main properties:
Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.
No mint or other trusted parties.
Participants can be anonymous.
New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work.
The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the
network to prevent double-spending.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would
allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another
without the burdens of going through a financial institution.
Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted party is still required to prevent
double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending
problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps
transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based
proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without
redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as
proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came
from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as honest nodes control
the most CPU power on the network, they can generate the longest
chain and outpace any attackers. The network itself requires
minimal structure. Messages are broadcasted on a best effort basis,
and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the
longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they
were gone.

Full paper at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Satoshi Nakamoto

———————————————————————
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending “unsubscribe cryptography” to majordomo at metzdowd.com”

Source:
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html

The pseudonymous Bitcoin creator disclosed that they had been working on a new electronic cash system that uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm that required no trusted third party. Although the document met mixed reactions, it was the beginning of what is known today as blockchain technology.

A couple of months after the release, the Bitcoin network was launched, with the first block mined on January 3, 2009. About eight days later, Hal Finney received the first transaction of 10 BTC from Nakamoto, after which he posted a legendary tweet that read:

In the 14 years since that day, bitcoin’s value rose from zero to a peak of $68,990 last November and was hovering above $20,000 on Monday, according to CoinDesk data. The cryptocurrency currently has a market capitalization of over $390 billion. It also inspired the creation of more than 20,000 different cryptocurrencies currently in circulation, while bitcoin remains the largest by market cap.

Over the years, several people have been rumored to be Nakamoto, including early bitcoin contributor Hal Finney, cryptographer Nick Szabo, physicist Dorian Nakamoto and even Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk, who all denied the claims.

Satoshi’s identity is still a mystery, but Finney was well-known for his contribution to the creation of Bitcoin. He worked hand-in-hand with Nakamoto to find and fix bugs in Bitcoin’s underlying infrastructure. Before his death in 2014, Finney shared a detailed story about his journey with Bitcoin

About a year after the launch of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency went on to record its first real-world commercial use case when a Florida man spent 10,000 BTC to purchase two large Papa John’s pizzas on May 22, 2010.

Although the coins were worth $41 at prices back then, at today’s price, the transaction is worth more than $200 million. To commemorate the event, the Bitcoin community celebrates Bitcoin Pizza Day every year on May 22.

Bitcoin / bitcoin / blockchain

21M or Death

21 Million or Death
Arise…

The supply of Bitcoin is fixed at 21 million BTC, and as a hard coded monetary policy of the protocol, the fixed supply of the dominant cryptocurrency cannot be altered.

Former Google Product Director Steve Lee stated that only 1 percent of the world’s population can own more than 0.28 BTC, due to the fixed supply of Bitcoin.

In late 2017, Chainalysis, a blockchain forensics company that monitors and investigates cryptocurrency transactions, revealed in a research paper that up to four million BTC are permanently lost on the blockchain as a result of theft, loss of wallets and private keys, and the dormant wallet of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, which experts have said is no longer accessible.

Kim Grauer, Senior Economist at Chainalysis, said at the time, that the lost supply of BTC is not taken into consideration by the market cap.That means, the real price of BTC could be substantially higher, as 4 to 6 million BTC are estimated to be lost.

Based on the estimate that the supply of Bitcoin is around 17 million, only 0.8 percent of the world population can own more than 0.28 BTC and less than 0.2 of the world population can own more than 1 BTC.

The 0.28 BTC figure introduced by Lee assumes the supply of Bitcoin to be 21 million, as it divides 21 million by 0.28 and divides the outcome of that by the world population that is 7.442 billion. If the research of Chainalysis is accurate and that 4 to 6 million BTC are lost on the blockchain, the supply of Bitcoin should be closer to around 16 to 17 million

The fact that any investor in the global market can be within the 1 percent of the world population with a $1,830 investment demonstrates that the cryptocurrency market is still at its early phase, and in terms of adoption, market development, infrastructure, and regulation, the sector can still grow significantly in the mid to long-term.

Hal Finney
There is no “Whole Coin”

First Time/Small Miner

First time/Small miner reference
for getting started.

If you want to start mining here is what you need… and what you need to know.

This is written for home miners/small farms, but can be used as a guideline for most operations. Use this as a reference for what you need to research, or what questions you need to ask before jumping in.

What you need to mine can be broken down into the following categories:

  • Hardware
  • Electricity
  • Location
  • Internet connection
  • Information

Mining BITCOIN is done exclusively with dedicated BITCOIN mining hardware based on ASICs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit .

You CAN NOT meaningfully mine bitcoin today with CPU, GPU or even FPGAs. Bitcoin difficulty adapts to match the amount of mining done on the network and has reached levels trillions of times too high to mine meaningfully with PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, webpages, javascript, GPUs, and even generalised SHA hardware.

Even if you combined all the computers in the world, including all known supercomputer, you would not even approach 0.1% of the bitcoin hashrate today.

There isn’t any point attempting to mine bitcoin with CPU or GPU even in the interests of learning as it shares almost nothing with how bitcoin is mined with ASICs and will not teach you anything.

Hardware

Asic Miner:

Here is a list of the companies currently manufacturing Miners for public purchase.

Each one has their Pro’s and Con’s it is up to you to do your research and decide what is best for you.

A few points to consider while researching are :

  • efficiency
  • reliability
  • warranty period/policy
  • power draw

Each company has a different way of handling warranty repairs, depending on your situation and the policy repairs can become cost prohibitive. I will touch more on efficiency and power draw in the electricity section.

• Current list of competitive hardware

Power supply: You will need to purchase a power supply to run your miners. You will find ATX and Server grade PSU’s, the latter being preferred for mining BTC. 

When it comes to selecting a PSU purchase something with a capacity 25% higher than your miner is rated to draw. This will have you operating within the 80% rule.(explained further in the electricity section)

EX. Miner draws 1000 PSU should be able to provide 1250W.

** Many current generation miners are now being manufactured with Integrated PSU. Again do your research to see if your unit comes with or without. Generally you will still need to source a power cable.**

Auxilliaries – Avalon miners require an external controller, 1 per 20 miners. You may have to run additional fans for intake and exhaust depending on your location.

PSU’s can be purchased large enough to run 2 Miners; or the opposite 1 Miner fed by 2 PSU’s. Ensure the PSU you have selected will have the correct amount of PCI-E connectors required to operate your miner(s)

You can also find a large supply of used miners and PSU’s. Again it’s up to you to do your research as these often are a no return transaction.

Electricity

Follow all local codes and regulations

This is the number 1 factor in whether mining is right for you. As discussed with Miners being a 24/7 machine drawing power those costs will make it cost prohibitive for some people to mine. You need to be aware of what your costs/kWh are and run the numbers.

This will be done in a profitability calculator. This is just an example of 1 there are many out there.

( Miner usage in kW ) * ( Hours run per day ) 24 * ( Cost/kWh ) = Cost per Day to Operate

( Ideally less than the FIAT value of BTC mined )

The second part to the electrical requirements of mining is the available service; written for North America.

You will need to figure out the amperage you can spare, what circuits and receptacles you have in place, are you setting up on 220V or 110V. You will need to make sure that you have the right cord end for your PSU to match the receptacle, picking the wrong one can cost you a few days of mining if it has to be shipped.

If you can try and set up on a 220V circuit for 2 reasons :

– You will pull half the amps, and it is more efficient.

– Doing so requires 2 breaker spaces in your panel. Breaker sizing will depend on how many miners you plan to run. Here is the formula for calculating amps.

Watts / Voltage = Amps

Here is where you will bring the 80% rule back into play by sizing the continuous miner load to 80% of the breaker rating. 12 Amps on a 15 Amp breaker, 16 Amps max on a 20 Amp breaker, 24 Amps on a 30 amp breaker.

If/when you increase the amount of miners you are running you may want to look into PDU’s, as opposed to more receptacles. 

Location

This is something that is often overlooked to the headache and frustration of many would be miners. These machines are loud and hot .
You essentially have an electric heater that also uses an industrial fan to keep it from melting itself. This space will need to have the electrical requirements as discussed previously.

So make sure you have a space that is well ventilated with a plan to exhaust heat, and bring in fresh dust free air. I say this as using AC to cool the room will eat into your profits and may even make mining unprofitable.

The noise issue is a consideration you can sort out depending on whats available. (garage, basement, remote building)

Both of these issues can be handled with hosting, which is further explained in the information section.

Internet connection

Some miner setups have the option to use wifi. It is advisable to use a wired connection where available. This will provide a more stable connection and ensure you are submitting the expected amount of shares which is directly related to your payouts.

Please note that mining uses a negligible amount of bandwidth, and will not affect your other internet usage.

Information

You can use this information in this post as a good baseline to get you going. In addition to this you will want to research network difficulty; this readjusts every 2016 blocks to maintain a 10 minute block time on average. While this can go down it generally increases.

Solo or Pool?

You can solo mine but this is essentially a lottery even as a large scale miner. Should you chose this you can check this out as a starting point.

solo.ckpool.org 1% fee solo mining USA/DE 250 blocks solved!

Odds are most of you will join a pool. I will only say that it is in your best interest to mine at a pool that pays transaction fees (miner rewards). Then you will want to consider the fees associated with the pool.

When it comes to these pools you want them to be large enough that they are getting at least 1 block every Difficulty adjustment period. Larger pools will offer smaller rewards paid out more frequently, and vice versa.

ASICs vs. SuperComputers

Asics
SuperComputers

ASICs vs Supercomputers

Assigning the most powerful supercomputer to mine bitcoin would be comparable to hiring a grandmaster chess player to move a pile of bricks by hand.

The job would get done eventually but the chess player is much better at thinking and playing chess than exerting energy to repetitively move bricks. 

Likewise, combining the computing power of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and using them to mine bitcoin would essentially be pointless when compared to the ASIC machines used today.

ASICs are designed to do one thing as quickly and efficiently as possible, whereas a supercomputer is designed to do complicated tasks or math problems.

Since Bitcoin mining is a lottery based on random trial and error rather than complex math, specialization (ASICs) beats general excellence (supercomputers) everytime.

End of Lesson !!!

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Welcome…

To the rabbit hole…

Why this crazyness with rabbits ?!? And their holes, you would ask ?!? Why is the rabbit hole so deep ?¿

And what does the rabbit hole has to do with that BitCorn thing  I keep hearing about all over the place ?¿

I like to start from the begining, as I think so I am 😋😂

Rabbit Hole is a play written by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play premiered on Broadway in 2006, and it has also been produced by regional theatres in cities such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The play had its Spanish language premiere in San Juan, Puerto Rico in Autumn of 2010.

The play deals with the ways family members survive a major loss, and includes comedy as well as tragedy. Cynthia Nixon won the 2006 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for her performance as Becca in the New York production, and the play was nominated for several other Tony awards.

Rabbit Hole

A situation, journey, or process that is particularly strange, problematic, difficult, complex, or chaotic, especially one that becomes increasingly so as it develops or unfolds.

An allusion to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll, it is used especially in the phrase “(go) down the rabbit hole.”

Overhauling the current tax legislation is a rabbit hole I don’t think this administration should go down at this point.I’ve stayed away from drugs and alcohol since coming to college. I have an addictive personality, so I decided to just avoid that rabbit hole altogether.

What does rabbit hole mean?

Used especially in the phrase going down the rabbit hole or falling down the rabbit hole, a rabbit hole is a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly) surreal state or situation.

On the internet, a rabbit hole frequently refers to an extremely engrossing and time-consuming topic.

Where does rabbit hole come from?

Alice falling down a hole with a jar in hand
Alice’s Adventures in WonderLand

Literally, a rabbit hole is what the animal digs for its home. The earliest written record of the phrase dates back to the 17th century. But the figurative rabbit hole begins with Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In its opening chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” Alice follows the White Rabbit into his burrow, which transports her to the strange, surreal, and nonsensical world of Wonderland.

Since then, Carroll’s rabbit hole has proved a popular and useful reference. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first allusive rabbit hole in a 1938 edition of The Yale Law Journal: “It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange.”

Over much of the 20th century, rabbit hole has been used to characterize bizarre and irrational experiences. It’s especially used to reference magical, challenging, and even dangerous places or positions, similar to Carroll’s topsy-turvy Wonderland.

Rabbit hole has many metaphorical applications—from frustrating red tape to the mind-bending complexity of science to hallucinations during altered states—all united by a common sense of passing into some labyrinthine, logic-defying realm that, once entered, is hard to get out of.

One can fall down the rabbit hole of government bureaucracy, healthcare, obtaining a green card, tax law, the political economy of modern Japan, puberty, college admissions, or quantum mechanics.

If you’re Neo in the hit film The Matrix, you can take the red pill—a pill that shows you the truth, as opposed to the blue pill, which keeps you in ignorance—and “see how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

In a related note, some people literally take pills and go down the rabbit hole of a psychedelic drug trip.

But as Kathryn Schulz observed for The New Yorker in 2015, rabbit hole has further evolved in the information age: “These days…when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction—usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit.”

Thanks to the abundance, variety, and instant access of content online, many fall down internet rabbit holes which are often spectacularly, and addictively, niche: scary stories, obscure conspiracy theories, or famous last meals, for instance.

Other rabbit holes tend to be opened up by specific services or social media, which serve users item after item, link after link: Wikipedia, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.

These rabbit holes have become so common that people sometimes swap out rabbit for the name of the particular site, e.g. “I’ve fallen down an Instragram hole” or “I’m falling down a wikihole.”

Who uses rabbit hole?

From formal documents to internet status updates, rabbit hole is a very popular and widespread expression. Unlike earlier iterations of the metaphor, internet rabbit holes convey less a sense of weirdness, disorientation, or difficulty than they do of an intensely captivating diversion.

Rabbit hole is also showing increasing use as a modifier, e.g. a rabbit-hole question or phenomenon.

Now… that we have a basic and broader understanding about this Hole and it’s rabbit that digged it 😋😂

Let me show you a journey that I took to get to know, understand, admire, be amazed and support the BitCorn everybody is so crazy about …

Bitcoin Glossary

Block

Blocks are found in the Bitcoin blockchain. Blocks connect all transactions together. Transactions are combined into single blocks and are verified every ten minutes through mining. Each subsequent block strengthens the verification of the previous blocks, making it impossible to double spend bitcoin transactions (see double spend below).

BIP

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal or BIP, is a technical design document providing information to the bitcoin community, or describing a new feature for bitcoin or its processes or environment which affect the Bitcoin protocol. New features, suggestions, and design changes to the protocol should be submitted as a BIP. The BIP author is responsible for building consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions.

Blockchain

The Bitcoin blockchain is a public record of all Bitcoin transactions. You might also hear the term used as a “public ledger.” The blockchain shows every single record of bitcoin transactions in order, dating back to the very first one. The entire blockchain can be downloaded and openly reviewed by anyone, or you can use a block explorer to review the blockchain online.

Block Height

The block height is just the number of blocks connected together in the block chain. Height 0 for example refers to the very first block, called the “genesis block.”

Block Reward

When a block is successfully mined on the bitcoin network, there is a block reward that helps incentivize miners to secure the network. The block reward is part of a “coinbase” transaction which may also include transaction fees. The block rewards halves roughly every four years; see also “halving.”

Change

Let’s say you are spending $1.90 in your local supermarket, and you give the cashier $2.00. You will get back .10 cents in change. The same logic applies to bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin transactions are made up of inputs and outputs. When you send bitcoins, you can only send them in a whole “output.” The change is then sent back to the sender.

Cold Storage

The term cold storage is a general term for different ways of securing your bitcoins offline (disconnected from the internet). This would be the opposite of a hot wallet or hosted wallet, which is connected to the web for day-to-day transactions. The purpose of using cold storage is to minimize the chances of your bitcoins being stolen from a malicious hacker and is commonly used for larger sums of bitcoins.

Confirmation

A confirmation means that the bitcoin transaction has been verified by the network, through the process known as mining. Once a transaction is confirmed, it cannot be reversed or double spent. Transactions are included in blocks.

Cryptography

Cryptography is used in multiple places to provide security for the Bitcoin network. Cryptography, which is essentially mathematical and computer science algorithms used to encrypt and decrypt information, is used in bitcoin addresses, hash functions, and the blockchain.

Decentralized

Having a decentralized bitcoin network is a critical aspect. The network is “decentralized,” meaning that it’s void of a centralized company or entity that governs the network. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer protocol, where all users within the network work and communicate directly with each other, instead of having their funds handled by a middleman, such as a bank or credit card company.

Difficulty

Difficulty is directly related to Bitcoin mining (see mining below), and how hard it is to verify blocks in the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin adjusts the mining difficulty of verifying blocks every 2016 blocks. Difficulty is automatically adjusted to keep block verification times at ten minutes.

Double Spend

If someone tries to send a bitcoin transaction to two different recipients at the same time, this is double spending. Once a bitcoin transaction is confirmed, it makes it nearly impossible to double spend it. The more confirmations that a transaction has, the harder it is to double spend the bitcoins.

Full Node

A full node is when you download the entire blockchain using a bitcoin client, and you relay, validate, and secure the data within the blockchain. The data is bitcoin transactions and blocks, which is validated across the entire network of users.

Halving

Bitcoins have a finite supply, which makes them scarce. The total amount that will ever be issued is 21 million. The number of bitcoins generated per block is decreased 50% every four years. This is called “halving.” The final halving will take place in the year 2140.

Hash Rate

The hash rate is how the Bitcoin mining network processing power is measured. In order for miners to confirm transactions and secure the blockchain, the hardware they use must perform intensive computational operations which is output in hashes per second.

Hash (txid)

A transaction hash (sometimes referred to as a transaction ID or txid) is a unique identifier that can be used on any block explorer to look up all of the public details of a particular transaction. Every on-chain transaction has a unique hash made up of a long string of alphanumeric characters.

Mining

Bitcoin mining is the process of using computer hardware to do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network in order to confirm transactions. Miners collect transaction fees for the transactions they confirm and are awarded bitcoins for each block they verify.

Pool

As part of bitcoin mining, mining “pools” are a network of miners that work together to mine a block, then split the block reward among the pool miners. Mining pools are a good way for miners to combine their resources to increase the probability of mining a block, and also contribute to the overall health and decentralization of the bitcoin network.

Private Key

A private key is a string of data that shows you have access to bitcoins in a specific wallet. Think of a private key like a password; private keys must never be revealed to anyone but you, as they allow you to spend the bitcoins from your bitcoin wallet through a cryptographic signature.

Proof of Work

Proof of work refers to the hash of a block header (blocks of bitcoin transactions). A block is considered valid only if its hash is lower than the current target. Each block refers to a previous block adding to previous proofs of work, which forms a chain of blocks, known as a blockchain. Once a chain is formed, it confirms all previous Bitcoin transactions and secures the network.

Public Address

A public bitcoin address is cryptographic hash of a public key. A public address typically starts with the number “1.” Think of a public address like an email address. It can be published anywhere and bitcoins can be sent to it, just like an email can be sent to an email address.

RBF

RBF stands for Replace By Fee, and refers to a method that allows a sender to replace a “stuck” or unconfirmed transaction with a new one that uses a higher fee. This is done to make sure a transaction confirms as quickly as possible. The “replacement” transaction uses the same inputs as the original one. This is not considered a double spend, as the receiving address(es) typically remain the same.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin’s existence began with an academic paper written in 2008 by a developer under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi is the name used as the original inventor of Bitcoin.

Transaction

A transaction is when data is sent to and from one bitcoin address to another. Just like financial transactions where you send money from one person to another, in bitcoin you do the same thing by sending data (bitcoins) to each other. Bitcoins have value because it’s based on the properties of mathematics, rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities, like fiat currencies. 

Wallet

Just like with paper dollars you hold in your physical wallet, a bitcoin wallet is a digital wallet where you can store, send, and receive bitcoins securely. There are many varieties of wallets available, whether you’re looking for a web or mobile solution. Ideally, a bitcoin wallet will give you access to your public and private keys. This means that only you have rightful access to spend these bitcoins, whenever you choose to.

Sources:

https://dictionary.com/

https://wikipedia.com/

https://blockchain.com/

Digital Art by Free Spirit

Made with 💚 by Free Spirit

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Bitcoin Mining – Where the Profitable Future Lies

The Times – January 3, 2009
Bitcoin Genesis Block
Mined 03 January 2009
Cypherpunks Write Code
CODE IS LAW
THE SOONER HUMANKIND ACCEPTS IT,
THE SOONER IT CAN BUILD AROUND IT
Yeah.. I wonder Why 😂
Bitcoin made easy
How a Bitcoin transaction works
A humble Miner
How Bitcoin Mining Works
Mining Difficulty
Bitcoin Halving
Bitcoin Previous Halvings
Pools
Bitcoin Wallets
Bitcoin Stakeholders
Bitcoin Facts
Power to the People
Totalitarian Governments can kiss my 256-bit key
Bitcoin – People’s Money
Bitcoin cannot be Shut Down
The power of the long tail…
Central Bank’s 3 Strategies
F**k them, Enough !!!
Upcoming Smart Contracts Networks
Bitcoin Yearly Candles
Bitcoin Price History – Log Scale
Bitcoin Mining Ecosystem Map
Defi Ecosystem in Ethereum
DeFi Stack: Product& Application View
Syscoin Ecosystem
Syscoin
BSC Ecosystem
Popular Cryptocurrency
Crpto Ecosystem
Public Companies that own Bitcoin
Top Banks investing in Crypto
Bitcoin Inflation vs. Time
When you’re Ready…
Choose Wisely
Make bitcoin thrive, let fiat become humus…
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Most people misunderstand what bitcoin miners actually do, and as a result they don’t fully grasp the level of security provided by bitcoin’s hashrate.

In this article, we’ll explain proof of work in a non-technical way so that you’ll be able to counter the misinformation about supercomputers and quantum computers attacking the Bitcoin network in the future. 

Simply put, mining is a lottery to create new blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain. There are two main purposes for mining:

  1. To permanently add transactions to the blockchain without the permission of any entity.
  2. To fairly distribute the 21 million bitcoin supply by rewarding new coins to miners who spend real world resources (i.e. electricity) to secure the network.

To understand what is actually happening in this lottery system, let’s look at a simple analogy where every Bitcoin hash is equivalent to a dice roll.

Luck, Gambling, and SHA-256

Imagine that miners in the Bitcoin Network are all individuals gambling at a casino. In this example, each of these gamblers have a 1000 sided dice. They roll their die as quickly as possible, trying to get a number less than 10. Statistically, this may take a very long time, but as more gamblers join the game, the time it takes to hit a number less than 10 gets reduced. In short, more gamblers equals quicker rounds.

Once somebody successfully rolls a number less than 10, all gamblers at the table can look down and verify the number. This lucky gambler takes the prize money and the next round begins.

Ultimately, the process of mining bitcoin is very similar. All miners on the network are using Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), which are specialized computers designed to compute hashes as quickly as possible.

To “compute a hash” simply means plugging any random input into a mathematical function and producing an output.

More hashes per second (i.e. higher hashrate) is equivalent to more dice rolls per second, and thus a greater probability of success.

Miners propose a potential Bitcoin block of transactions, and use this for an input. The block is plugged into the SHA256 hash function which yields a fixed-sized output, known as a hash. A single hash can be computed in less than a millisecond, as it involves no complex math.

If the hash value is lower than the Bitcoin Network difficulty, then the miner who proposed the block wins. If not, then the miner continues trying by computing more hashes.

The successful miner’s block is then added to the blockchain, the miner is rewarded with newly issued bitcoin for their work, and the “next round” begins.

Sources :

https://wikipedia.com/

https://braiins.com/

https://blockdata.com/

https://coin98analytics.com/

https://scoopwhoop.com/

https://stakingrewards.com/

https://syscoin.org/

https://galaxydigitalresearch.com/

https://surveycrest.com/

The Times

The Economist

"Internet of Money" - Andreas Antonopoulus

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Timothy C. May Quote

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Totalitarian Governments..

Totalitarianism is a form of government and political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control and regulation over public and private life.

It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.

In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as  dictators  and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry.

It remains a useful word but the old 1950s theory was considered to be outdated by the 1980s,and is defunct among scholars.

The proposed concept gained prominent influence in Western anti-communist and McCarthyist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-World War IIanti-fascism into post-war anti-communism.

Leaders who have been described as totalitarian rulers, from left to right and top to bottom in picture, include Joseph Stalin, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Adolf Hitler, former Führer of Nazi Germany; Augusto Pinochet, former President of Chile; Mao Zedong, former Chairman of the Communist Party of China; Benito Mussolini, former Duce of Fascist Italy; and Kim Il-sung, the Eternal President of the Republic of North Korea

As a political ideology in itself, totalitarianism is a distinctly modernist  phenomenon, and it has very complex historical roots. Philosopher Karl Popper traced its roots to Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s conception of the state, and the political philosophy of Karl Marx, although Popper’s conception of totalitarianism has been criticized in academia, and remains highly controversial.

Other philosophers and historians such as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer trace the origin of totalitarian doctrines to the Age of Enlightenment, especially to the anthropocentrist idea that:

“Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to nature, society, and history.”

In the 20th century, the idea of absolute state power was first developed by Italian Fascists, and concurrently in Germany by a jurist and Nazi academic named Carl Schmitt during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.

Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian Fascism, defined fascism as such: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Schmitt used the term Totalstaat (lit. ’Total state’) in his influential 1927 work titled The Concept of the Political, which described the legal basis of an all-powerful state.

Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian regimes, as the latter denotes a state in which the single power holder, usually an individual dictator, a committee, a military junta, or an otherwise small group of political elites, monopolizes political power.

A totalitarian regime may attempt to control virtually all aspects of social life, including the economy, the education system, arts, science, and the private lives and morals of citizens through the use of an elaborate ideology. It can also mobilize the whole population in pursuit of its goals.

Definition

Totalitarian regimes are often characterized by extreme political repression, to a greater extent than those of authoritarian regimes, under an undemocratic government, widespread personality cultism around the person or the group which is in power, absolute control over the economy, large-scale censorship and mass surveillance systems, limited or non-existent freedom of movement (the freedom to leave the country), and the widespread usage of state terrorism.

Other aspects of a totalitarian regime include the extensive use of internment camps, an omnipresent secret police, practices of religious persecution or racism, the imposition of theocratic rule or state atheism, the common use of death penalties and show trials, fraudulent elections (if they took place), the possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, a potential for state-sponsored mass murders and genocides, and the possibility of engaging in a war, or colonialism against other countries, which is often followed by annexation of their territories.

Historian Robert Conquest describes a totalitarian state as a state which recognizes no limit on its authority in any sphere of public or private life and extends that authority to whatever length it considers feasible.

Totalitarianism is contrasted with authoritarianism. According to Radu Cinpoes, an authoritarian state is “only concerned with political power, and as long as it is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty.”

Cinpoes writes that authoritarianism “does not attempt to change the world and human nature.”

In contrast, Richard Pipes stated that the officially proclaimed ideology “penetrating into the deepest reaches of societal structure, and the totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens.”

Carl Joachim Friedrich wrote that “[a] totalist ideology, a party reinforced by a secret police, and monopolistic control of industrial mass society are the three features of totalitarian regimes that distinguish them from other autocracies.”

Visualization of the AES round function

Advanced Encryption Standard

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɛindaːl]), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.

AES is a variant of the Rijndael block cipher developed by two  Belgian  cryptographers, Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen, who submitted a proposalto NIST during the AES selection process.

Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits.

AES has been adopted by the U.S. government. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was published in 1977.

The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data.

In the United States, AES was announced by the NIST as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001.

This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable.

AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3  standard. AES became effective as a U.S. federal government standard on May 26, 2002, after approval by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first (and only) publicly accessible cipher approved by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos (born 1972 in London) is a British-Greek Bitcoin advocate, tech entrepreneur, and author.

He is a host on the Speaking of Bitcoin podcast (formerly called Let’s Talk Bitcoin!) and a teaching fellow for the M.Sc. Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia.

Antonopoulos was born in 1972 in London, UK, and moved to Athens, Greece during the Greek Junta.

He spent his childhood there, and at the age of 17 returned to the UK.

Antonopoulos obtained his degrees in Computer science and Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London.

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All Credit goes to Andreas M. Antonopoulos

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