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joniunlimitedteach · 1 year
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How To Withdraw Satoshi Core Token 2023 Bangla Tutorial
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serverparts · 3 years
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Bitcoin mining Rig
Bitcoin mining rigs are computers used to earn Bitcoin. This type of computer generally has a professional mining chip, and it usually works by installing a large number of graphics cards, which consumes a lot of power. The computer downloads the mining software and then runs a specific algorithm. After communicating with the remote server, the corresponding bitcoin can be obtained. This is one of the ways to obtain bitcoin.
Bitcoin mining rig features
Bitcoin mining machine is one of the ways to obtain Bitcoin. Bitcoin (Bitcoin) is a network virtual currency generated by open source P2P software. It does not rely on the issuance of a specific currency institution, and is generated through a large number of calculations of a specific algorithm. The Bitcoin economy uses a distributed database composed of many nodes in the entire P2P network to confirm and record all transaction behaviors. The decentralized nature of P2P and the algorithm itself can ensure that the value of the currency cannot be manipulated through the mass production of Bitcoin [1]. Any computer can become a mining rig, but the benefit will be relatively low, and it may not be possible to mine a bitcoin in ten years. Many companies have developed professional Bitcoin mining rigs. Such rigs equipped with special mining chips are dozens or hundreds of times faster than ordinary computers.
Bitcoin mining rig principle
The Bitcoin system consists of users (users control wallets through keys), transactions (transactions will be broadcast to the entire Bitcoin network) and miners (through competitive calculations to generate a consensus blockchain at each node. The blockchain is a distribution The public authoritative account book contains all the transactions that occur on the Bitcoin network). Bitcoin miners manage the Bitcoin network by solving the problem of a proof-of-work mechanism with a certain amount of work—confirming transactions and preventing double payments. Since the hashing operation is irreversible, it is very difficult to find the random adjustment number that matches the requirements, and it requires a constant trial and error process that can predict the total number of times. At this time, the workload proof mechanism comes into play. When a node finds a solution that matches the requirements, it can broadcast its results to the entire network. Other nodes can receive this newly solved data block and check whether it matches the rules. If other nodes find that the requirements are indeed met by calculating the hash value (the computational goal required by Bitcoin), then the data block is valid, and other nodes will accept the data block. Satoshi Nakamoto compares the production of Bitcoin by consuming CPU power and time to a gold mine consuming resources to inject gold into the economy. Bitcoin's mining and node software mainly uses peer-to-peer networks, digital signatures, and interactive proof systems to initiate zero-knowledge proof and verification transactions. Each network node broadcasts transactions to the network. After these broadcast transactions are verified by miners (computers on the network), miners can use their own work proof results to express confirmation, and the confirmed transactions will be packaged into data blocks. , The data blocks will be strung together to form a continuous chain of data blocks. Each Bitcoin node will collect all unconfirmed transactions and group them into a data block. The miner node will append a random adjustment number and calculate the SHA256 hash operation value of the previous data block. The mining node keeps trying repeatedly until the random adjustment number it finds makes the generated hash value lower than a certain target.
Mining process
Mining is a process of increasing Bitcoin's money supply. Mining also protects the security of the Bitcoin system, prevents fraudulent transactions, and avoids "double payment". "Double payment" refers to spending the same bitcoin multiple times. Miners provide algorithms for the Bitcoin network in exchange for the opportunity to obtain Bitcoin rewards. The miners verify each new transaction and record them in the general ledger. Every 10 minutes, a new block will be "mined". Each block contains all the transactions that occurred during the period from the creation of the previous block to the present, and these transactions are sequentially added to the blockchain middle. We refer to the transactions included in the block and added to the blockchain as "confirmed" transactions. After the transaction is "confirmed", the new owner can spend the bitcoins he got in the transaction. Miners receive two types of rewards during the mining process: new currency rewards for creating new blocks, and transaction fees for transactions contained in the blocks. In order to get these rewards, miners are vying to complete a mathematical puzzle based on cryptographic hashing algorithms, that is, using Bitcoin mining rigs to calculate hashing algorithms. This requires strong computing power, how many calculations are needed, and the results of the calculations are good. Bad as the proof of the calculation workload of the miners, it is called "proof of work". The competition mechanism of the algorithm and the mechanism by which the winner has the right to record transactions on the blockchain, both of which guarantee the security of Bitcoin. Miners also receive transaction fees. Each transaction may include a transaction fee, which is the difference between the input and output of each transaction record. Miners who successfully "dig out" a new block during the mining process can get all the transaction "tips" contained in the block. As mining rewards decrease and the number of transactions contained in each block increases, the proportion of transaction fees in miners' income will gradually increase. After 2140, all miners’ income will consist of transaction fees. Mining is a process of decentralization of settlement, and each settlement verifies and settles the transactions processed. Mining protects the security of the Bitcoin system and realizes that the entire Bitcoin network can reach a consensus without a central organization. The invention of mining makes Bitcoin very special. This decentralized security mechanism is the basis of peer-to-peer electronic money. Rewards and transaction fees for minting new coins are an incentive mechanism that can regulate the behavior of miners and network security, and at the same time complete the currency issuance of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin earnings
The issuance of Bitcoin and the completion of transactions are achieved through mining, which is minted at a definite but continuously slowing rate. Each new block is accompanied by a certain number of new bitcoins from scratch, which are rewarded as coinbase transactions to miners who find the block. The reward for each block is not fixed. For every 210,000 blocks mined, it takes about 4 years and the currency issuance rate is reduced by 50%. In the first four years of Bitcoin's operation, 50 new Bitcoins were created in each block. Each block creates 12.5 new bitcoins. In addition to block rewards, miners will also get the handling fees for all transactions in the block.
Risks of mining Rigs
Electricity bill problem
The "mining" of the graphics card requires a long time to fully load the graphics card, the power consumption will be quite high, and the electricity bill will be higher and higher. Many professional mines at home and abroad are located in areas where electricity costs are extremely low, such as hydropower stations, and more users can only mine at home or in ordinary mines, so electricity costs are naturally not cheap. There was even a case where someone in a community in Yunnan carried out crazy mining, which caused a large-scale trip of the community and the transformer was burned out.
Hardware expenditure
Mining is actually a competition of performance and equipment. Some mining Rigs are composed of more such graphics card arrays. When dozens or even hundreds of graphics cards come together, various costs such as hardware prices are inherently high. There are considerable expenditures. In addition to graphics card-burning machines, some ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) professional mining rigs are also on the battlefield. ASICs are specially designed for hash calculations and their computing power is also quite strong, and because their power consumption is much lower than that of graphics cards, Therefore, it is easier to scale up, and electricity costs are lower. It is difficult for a single sheet to compete with these mining rigs, but at the same time, the cost of such machines is also greater.
Currency security
Bitcoin withdrawal requires up to hundreds of keys, and most people will record this long string of numbers on the computer, but frequent problems such as damage to the hard disk will cause the key to be permanently lost, which also leads to The loss of Bitcoin.
System risk
System risk is very common in Bitcoin, and the most common one is fork. The fork will cause the price of the coin to fall, and the mining revenue will drop sharply. However, many situations have shown that the fork will benefit the miners. The forked altcoins also need the mining power of the miners to complete the process of minting and trading. In order to win more miners, the altcoins will provide more block rewards and rewards. Handling fees to attract miners. Instead, risk has made miners.
Types of Mining Rigs
ASIC miner
ASIC mining rig refers to the mining rig that uses ASIC chip as the core computing part. ASIC chip is a kind of chip specially designed for a certain purpose. It must be explained that it is not only used for mining, but also has a wider range of applications. The characteristics of this chip are simple and efficient. For example, Bitcoin uses the SHA256 algorithm, then the Bitcoin ASIC mining rig chip is designed to only calculate SHA256, so in terms of mining, the performance of the ASIC mining rig chip exceeds the current top-level Computer CPU. Because ASIC mining Rigs have an absolute advantage in computing power, computers and graphics card mining rigs have gradually been eliminated.
GPU miner
GPU mining rig, the simple explanation is the digital currency mining rig mining through the graphics card (GPU). After Bitcoin, some other digital assets have appeared one after another, such as Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, etc., some of which use algorithms that are different from Bitcoin. In order to achieve higher mining efficiency, miners After doing different tests, I finally found that the SHA256 algorithm uses ASIC to mine the most efficient digital currency. The GPU graphics card is the most efficient for mining digital currencies such as Scrypt and other algorithms, so a dedicated GPU mining rig was born.
IPFS miner
IPFS is similar to http and is a file transfer protocol. In order for IPFS to operate, there are many computers (storage devices) in the network as nodes. Broadly speaking, all participating computers can be called IPFS miners. In order to attract more users to become nodes and contribute to the network, the IPFS network has designed a cryptocurrency called filecoin, which is distributed to participants (nodes) as rewards based on the amount of storage space and bandwidth contributed. In a narrow sense, a computer designed specifically to obtain filecoin rewards is called an IPFS miner. Since the IPFS network requires storage space and network bandwidth, in order to obtain the highest profit ratio, IPFS mining Rigs usually strengthen storage space and reduce the power consumption of the whole machine. For example, equipped with more than 10 large-capacity hard drives, equipped with a gigabit or higher speed network card, using ultra-low-power architecture processors, and so on.
FPGA miner
FPGA mining rig is a mining rig that uses FPGA chips as the core of computing power. FPGA mining rig is one of the early mining Rigs. It first appeared at the end of 2011. It was once optimistic at the time, but the active period was not long, and it was gradually replaced by ASIC mining rigs and GPU mining rigs. FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), the Chinese name is Field-Programmable Gate Array. A more popular understanding is that FPGA is a large number of logic devices (such as AND gates, NOT gates, OR gates, selectors) encapsulated in a box, how to connect the logic components in the box, all by the user (programming) To decide. If the mining program is written in the FPGA, then the FPGA mining rig is built, and because the FPGA is highly flexible, it can not only support Bitcoin's SHA256 algorithm, but also support the Scrypt algorithm that GPU miners are good at. During the active period of FPGA mining rigs, compared to the CPU and GPU mining rigs of the same generation, although FPGA is not superior in computing power, its power consumption is much lower and the overall power consumption ratio is very high.
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dipteshblogger · 3 years
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Is it wise to invest time in learning about blockchain now?
Think Smart, Learn Blockchain Before Investing in it
By the end of this article, you will understand Blockchain Technology – Cryptocurrency and the other necessary factors that are connected to this ecosystem. You will also know topics that are very important for any beginner or pro who is interested in Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
In this contemporary and fast swelling world of the internet, gathering knowledge on the latest trending technologies is becoming imminent. And if the technology enables you to invest your funds, then having a deep knowledge is mandatory and primitive. We will have a detailed study of one such technology which has accumulated much traction in recent times.
2020 has been a year for the blockchain industry, New technological use cases, Smart contracts, Defi, and the aggressively growing Interest of millennials.
Is Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency on your mind? Are you struggling to understand how Blockchain operates? Are you looking for core information about this ecosystem that will help your investment ideas? You’ve been on the right Page and at the right time.
Blockchain! A Term that is surfacing on the Internet, Social media, News, and grabbing high volume of attention globally for more than a decade now.
Blockchain & It’s Working
Blockchain technology is referred to as ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’ or ‘DLT’ is a technology that allows digital information to be distributed but not copied. In this technology, the digital information is transferred in the form of ‘Blocks’ which is stored in the public database called ‘Chain’.
Blocks in the blockchain are specifically made up of digital information like transaction date, participant details, etc. Each block stores a unique code called ‘Hash’ which distinguishes each block from one another.
How does the blockchain Operate?
Consider a spreadsheet that can be easily shared with a network of computers where-in thousands of duplicates can be created. You update any data in your spreadsheet and it gets updated on all the computers within the network. Blockchain works similarly.
Whenever a new transaction is requested on the blockchain network, a new block is created with the details of the transaction. This block is given a unique Id called ‘Hash’. The block is sent to all nodes in the network for the confirmation of the transaction.
The nodes validate the transaction and share their Proof-of-Work. Nodes receive a reward for a successful proof of work. The transaction is completed by adding the block to the existing chain.
Why is Blockchain Untampered and Untraceable?
Every block contains three main information: – Data, Previous Hash value, and current Hash value.
When a person called A has to transfer $100 to a person B. A block is created with the details of the transaction and a unique hash value. Further, if person B transfers $50 to person C, a new block is created with the previous hash value and the new hash value is calculated and stored.
As we can see, every new block carries the Hash value of the previous block. And for this reason, the possibilities of any illegal activities would be nullified. If in any case the transaction is altered, the hash values are not replaced but the new block is created with a new hash value.
Find it Interesting -> Read more about the Blockchain technology features, applications, drawbacks, Recent updates, the future, and much more.
Blockchain technology revolutionized the banking and finance markets, cybersecurity space, supply chain management, artificial intelligence, etc. It has been seen that since after its launch it began disrupting many industries through its technological features.
Among all such Use cases of Blockchain Technology, Cryptocurrency (Finance) is the First and Majorly used domain.
Let’s Read about
The First Cryptocurrency – Bitcoin, Built on Blockchain Technology
Bitcoin is the first-ever invented Cryptocurrency built on Blockchain Technology. It operates in a decentralized, Peer-to-peer network system with no central authority or bank to manage funds or transactions. BTC is the Symbol of Bitcoin identification.
Bitcoin was created in 2008 by an anonymous person whose identity remains a mystery for over a decade. It is rumored that a Pseudonym named “Satoshi Nakamoto” ( A person or group of people) is believed to be the creator.
It was officially released in 2009 with a Whitepaper( A Document contains structural, functional, and organizational details) as an alternative to the existing fiat money banking system.
There are only 21 Million Bitcoins (21,000,000) ever created, so this is the Maximum supply of bitcoin. Bitcoin transactions are processed using a method called “Bitcoin Mining” wherein a global network of computers use complex mathematical algorithms to verify each BTC transaction to execute the blocks and are rewarded for successful mining.
Today, We have over 7.1 million active Bitcoin users globally who are able to easily store and exchange it easily in multiple forms over multiple platforms under the ecosystem. Just like and more than the normal Fiat currency does.
Bitcoin today is trading at $ 50,109.0000
Bitcoin is not a complex term to understand, it’s Simple and Worth. Read more about Bitcoin working, history, purpose, advantages / Disadvantages.
As of 2020, we record more than 6000 + active cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which may have different technical setups but all function the same way.
These different cryptocurrencies other bitcoin are called Altcoins ( alternate coins) and are built on Standard blockchain or a blockchain ledger system of their own.
Some of the Popular altcoins are Etheruem(ETH), Ripple(XRP), Litecoin(LTC)……. Altcoins built on Ethereum
The whole blockchain network is depending upon the block confirmations done by the miners(discussed below). And the miners use concepts like Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake to compete among themselves. Let's know more about these concepts.
Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake
Proof-of-Work(PoW) is an original consensus algorithm in a blockchain network. This algorithm is used to confirm transactions and add up new blocks to the blockchain. With PoW miners compete with each other to complete the transactions so that they receive the rewards.
Basically, miners solve a puzzle to form a new block on the blockchain. The complexity of the puzzle depends on the number of users, the current power, and the network load. The most famous application of PoW is Bitcoin. Here the puzzle is the Hashcash and the average time taken for PoW and to create a new block is 10 minutes. The other cryptocurrencies also follow a similar system.
Proof-of-Stake(PoS) concept gives more mining power to the person with more coins. In simple words, if a miner has more bitcoin or any altcoin, he/she can mine or validate more block transactions.
Crypto mining requires immense computing power to solve different puzzles which are nothing but cryptographic calculations. The computing power consumes huge amounts of electric resources. Sometimes, miners sell off their rewards in order to combat the electricity bills.
Therefore PoS attributes the miners according to their holding with an aim to address this issue. For an instance, if a miner possesses 3 percent of the Bitcoin available then he can mine only 3 percent of blocks.
Initial Exchange Offering(IEO)
In an IEO, the cryptocurrency exchange raises funds on behalf of the start-ups. Unlike ICO, the IEO audience is limited to the users of that particular exchange. IEO allows users of the platform to acquire shares in the form of tokens.
IEO is considered a more secure platform to invest as they are carried out with the help of a third party. All the projects that wish to launch an IEO have been examined thoroughly as the exchange reputation might get a pullback with scam projects being listed for raising funds.
Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Cryptocurrency exchanges are online platforms just like the stock market trading sites where buyers and sellers are connected to exchange Cryptocurrencies for other Cryptocurrencies or regular fiat currencies with the current market price.
Cryptocurrencies Are The Hot Topic Of This Century And Quite An Intimidating And Intrigued Topic That Everyone Wants To Learn About. Now If You Are A Beginner Then It Is Strictly Advised That Do Not Perform Any Kind Of Trading Or Exchanges Without Having Complete Knowledge About The Exchanges.
Cryptocurrency exchanges are online platforms just like the stock market trading sites where buyers and sellers are connected to exchange Cryptocurrencies for other Cryptocurrencies or regular fiat currencies with the current market price.
These exchanges are generally owned by a team or a person, but they also come from Decentralized exchanges that operate without any central authority in a decentralized peer-to-peer system.
The Exchange platform offers multiple methods of exchanging cryptocurrencies.
There are 2 main types of Exchanges
· Centralized exchanges(CEX)
Centralized usually means an authority keeping a close eye on the transactions and also securing the assets on behalf of the buyer and seller. Therefore,a Centralized exchange is a place where the trade of cryptocurrencies takes place within the monitored environment. The transactions are not recorded on the blockchain.
The customers are also required to submit and verify their identity details in order to trade on this platform. The more details the user provides to the exchange, the more benefits are provided including high withdrawal limits.
Eg of Centralized exchanges are Coinbase, Binance, LocalBitcoins, etc
· Decentralized Exchanges(DEX)
Decentralized exchange, on the contrary, works the same as the centralized exchange but without any interference from third parties. The trader is not required to verify himself, he can keep his identity anonymous and trade.
Unlike the CEX, DEX does not charge any fees for using the platform without having any possibility of a hack. However, DEX is considered more volatile as the control is in the hands of users rather than any platform. All the transactions are recorded on the blockchain.
Cryptocurrency Wallet
A cryptocurrency wallet is a virtual device or physical medium that is used to store and secure cryptocurrencies. The Wallets also allow you to Send and Receive coins to a similar address.
Crypto wallets function on Cryptographically encrypted Public and Private keys that Identify, store, and protect your assets. A wallet can support multiple currencies, each identified by its Unique address.
There are basically two types of crypto wallets
· Hot Wallets or Online Wallets
Hot wallets are virtual devices that are used to store cryptocurrencies. As it is connected to the internet, it is easy to set up and access. But at the same time, it has more chances to get infiltrated or hacked.
The hot wallets are provided by the centralized exchanges also. User can open their account on the exchanges and store the cryptos.
· Cold Wallets or Offline Wallets
Cold wallets as the name suggests are the external devices used to store cryptocurrencies. It works similarly to any USB device. But it is considered the most secure way to store your cryptocurrencies.
However, cold wallets cannot be accessed at your fingertips to carry out any immediate transactions. The most trusted offline wallets are Tresor Wallet.
Cryptocurrency Mining
Cryptocurrency mining is a process of verifying the transactions on the blockchain and adding it to the ledger. This is done by programmed computers(miners) by solving some complex equations.
Each transaction initiated on the blockchain must be verified by multiple computers in the mining network to complete the transaction and then add these records to the Blockchain ledger called Proof-of-Work ( POW).
The mining process is basically new coins in exponential value which is the reward for miners on each successful verification.
Bitcoin mining, altcoin mining, or Cryptocurrency mining has been a very popular term since the time of the invention of bitcoin, it involves interesting factors like halving, Pool, Schemes.
Follow our detailed guide in Cryptocurrency mining to understand more about mining and how to start your own mining setup
What is Defi – The Decentralized Finance
Defi – Decentralized finance is a financial application of the decentralized ecosystem, where-in one can get access to a wide range of Defi features like staking, lending of cryptos, etc. Generally built on Smart Contracts – Blockchain, Defi module can be used to develop a decentralized alternative to any existing financial services.
Defi has emerged to be the most prominent use case of blockchain technology, as all the financial services can now have easy access to decentralize themselves for an untampered, no-hackable, Wide, and high return generating revenue model.
As in decentralized exchange, Defi also has no room for a third party. The buying or selling or lending happens between the two parties and all the terms and conditions are mentioned in a ‘Smart Contract’. The smart contract would be considered as completed only when the conditions in the contract are completed.
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joshuajacksonlyblog · 4 years
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CoinJoin’s First Steps: How Dark Wallet Paved the Way for a More Private Bitcoin
CoinJoin. Trustless mixing. Anonymity. Bitcoin Magazine’s September 2013 cover — all black with hints of golden fingerprints — needed only four words to announce a powerful new privacy tool. At a time when industry representatives like the Bitcoin Foundation were downplaying Bitcoin’s anonymity features, regulators in New York were developing the BitLicense and Silk Road was about to be shut down, two hackers working from a former textile factory in Catalonia had begun to fight back. Amir Taaki and Pablo Martin realized the first ever CoinJoin application, and Bitcoin Magazine’s Vitalik Buterin was quick to cover the development.
Just weeks prior to the publication of this fourteenth Bitcoin Magazine print edition, Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell had posted what has perhaps come to be considered the unofficial CoinJoin announcement thread on the Bitcoin Forum. The developer had already published the idea in January 2013 in a more tongue-in-cheek stunt to trick blockchain analysis into thinking he was “taint rich,” asking forum users to mix their coins with his. But in his more serious August post, Maxwell introduced the name “CoinJoin,” while emphasizing the importance of tools like it.
“Traditional banking provides a fair amount of privacy by default. Your inlaws don’t see that you’re buying birth control that deprives them of grand children, your employer doesn’t learn about the non-profits you support with money from your paycheck, and thieves don’t see your latest purchases or how wealthy you are to help them target and scam you,” Maxwell wrote. “Poor privacy in Bitcoin can be a major practical disadvantage for both individuals and businesses.”
Bitcoin did have poor privacy. While Bitcoin addresses aren’t in themselves tied to real-world identities, blockchain analysis can often establish these links. A key tool for blockchain analysis is the multiple-input heuristic, a privacy leak even described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper. If a transaction sends coins from multiple addresses, Nakamoto wrote, these addresses must belong to the same owner. And if even one of these addresses can be tied to a real-world identity, for example because it was used to withdraw funds from an exchange, all of the other addresses can be as well.
Maxwell’s CoinJoin proposal helps fix this leak by combining multiple transactions into a single transaction. If Alice wants to pay for her birth control, and Bob wants to pay a nonprofit, they can merge this into a single transaction, sending both of their coins to both recipients at once. Ideally, this would make it unclear who bought the birth control and who paid the nonprofit. But at the very least, it breaks the multi-input heuristic. “Brain-dead automated analysis,” as Maxwell described it in his January post, would wrongly assume that all sending addresses belonged to the same person. If this assumption is broken often enough, the heuristic becomes useless altogether.
But by August, well over half a year after Maxwell first suggested the solution, the assumption wasn’t being broken often enough. This was in large part because it just wasn’t very easy to make CoinJoin transactions; it required command-line skills and deep technical knowledge of the Bitcoin protocol. What was needed, Maxwell reasoned, was a tool that would make such transactions easy.
“I know that making such a tool doesn’t fit into the get-rich-quick mold of many Bitcoin businesses, but the importance is self-apparent and the simplest versions of this don’t require very deep technical wizardry,” Maxwell concluded his post. “I think the ‘political’ risk of improving people’s privacy is a real one that you should carefully consider, but around these parts I see people sticking their names on some rather outrageously risky stuff. I’d hoped the ‘taint rich’ thread would be enough to inspire some community action, but perhaps this will be.”
To further incentivize development of a CoinJoin tool, Maxwell launched a multisignature escrow bounty fund. Shared between Bitcoin Core contributor Pieter Wuille, Bitcoin Forum administrator Theymos and himself, with at least two of their signatures needed, coins sent to the fund would be paid out to projects making CoinJoin a practical reality. Within a couple of days, the fund collected about 12 bitcoin, worth around $1,300 at the time.
Taaki, a regular on the Bitcoin Forum, found out about the bounty. If the British-Iranian Bitcoin developer was aware of the political risks mentioned by Maxwell, it certainly wasn’t going to stop him; he’d been living in anarchist squats throughout Europe for years and wasn’t exactly the type to shy away from authority. He asked fellow programmer Martin to take a look, and the two agreed that with the tools they had been developing — like the Bitcoin software library Libbitcoin — it shouldn’t be particularly difficult to build a CoinJoin application.
Indeed, hardly one day after the bounty was funded, the duo completed an early version of a CoinJoin mixing tool. Several users could contribute a fixed amount of bitcoin — 0.01 BTC — and create a transaction returning the same amount of funds back to each of them. As the CoinJoin would break the trail of ownership of any particular 0.01 BTC, all participants in the mix would gain privacy.
Martin, speaking with Bitcoin Magazine at the time:
“Making the tool was pretty easy for our skills. We could release after working for about eight hours together, next day we made a more stable and practical release. We leveraged a few great technologies: Python, Libbitcoin, SX, QT, Flask, Greenlets, Tor.”
But the simple CoinJoin tool was only the beginning. By late October, the duo teamed up with a small group of like-minded bitcoiners, including Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd and Cody Wilson, the guy who created the world’s first 3D-printable gun. United under the unSystem flag, a crypto-anarchist collective led by Taaki, the small group of developers started a crowdfunding project to realize a privacy-focused wallet with a CoinJoin mixer built in.
It would be called the Dark Wallet.
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The project quickly raised over $50,000 from more than 1,000 donors around the world, enough for the team to get to work. In November, Taaki, Martin, Todd, Wilson and others (including Bitcoin Magazine’s founder and then-editor-in-chief Mihai Alisie) met in a cultural center in Milan to discuss the design of the new wallet. Joined by a group of programmers working under pseudonyms like tilthz, sem, veox and d3, the project got underway.
But it wasn’t without controversy. As Bitcoin was reaching new highs — trading over $1,000 per coin by the end of 2013 — the project was attracting attention from mainstream media and regulators alike. While startups were trying to rid Bitcoin of its “drug money” image, Taaki and Wilson were actively promoting their wallet as a money laundering tool. The name itself — Dark Wallet — was a reference to a warning by the FBI that strong encryption could make the internet “go dark,” making it impossible for the agency to track even the worst criminals.
This level of privacy is exactly what Taaki, Wilson and others were hoping to achieve, and they weren’t going to pretend otherwise.
“I would just be dishonest with myself if I try to play with words or cover up my intent,” Taaki told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview. “I want people to know what I think, and as many people as possible, because it’s not just about the technology we’re building. In fact, the technology by itself is worth nothing. What is important is the narrative, or the ideal that is being constructed through that narrative. Bitcoin is a decentralized and uncensored money with privacy features. As such, it has opened up a new front in the ongoing struggle for freedom.”
About six months after the crowdfund was started, on 2014’s May Day (May 1), unSystem released Dark Wallet’s first alpha software. The wallet was built as a user-friendly Chrome extension, offering several privacy tools. This included stealth addresses, a type of encrypted address that can be shared freely, where every payment to it is unlinkable through blockchain analysis. The wallet also used hierarchical deterministic wallets, preventing address reuse; such tricks weren’t as standard then as they are now.
And of course, Dark Wallet included a CoinJoin tool. A user could make a payment and have this payment CoinJoined with a transaction from another user, who was matching the amount but really just paying himself. As such, the paying user would gain privacy from having his transaction matched, while the other user would have his coins mixed. Future wallet upgrades would include the option to make CoinJoins with several users at the same time, and Tor would be integrated so users could hide their IP addresses from each other.
The Dark Wallet alpha release made a media splash. Not only Bitcoin news sites (like Bitcoin Magazine) covered the groundbreaking wallet software, but more mainstream publications like Forbes, Wired and BBC Click took notice as well. Taaki and Wilson even caught the attention of film makers: The duo was followed for the documentary “The New Radical,” while Taaki was also featured in “Deep Web.”
But it wasn’t just the media that took notice. The Islamic State (IS) seemed to show interest in the wallet as well: Although unverified, a document circulated over the internet encouraging IS fighters to take funding in bitcoin, and use Dark Wallet to hide their tracks. “This allows our brothers stuck outside of the [Islamic State territory] to avoid government taxes along with secretly fund the mujahideen with no legal danger upon them,” the document read.
It didn’t faze the unSystem crew.
“I think obviously terrorists will use [Dark Wallet],” Todd told BBC Click, “and the benefits certainly outweigh the risks. Equally, obviously, terrorists use the internet. Obviously terrorists use freedom of speech. We’ve accepted that is a trade-off we must make.”
Development of the wallet continued throughout 2014, until Dark Wallet alpha 8 was released in the first weeks of 2015. But funds had been drying up, as a second crowdfunding round wasn’t nearly as successful as the first one. Moreover, Taaki — now the face of the more radical edges of the Bitcoin space — had by then learned about a collectivist-anarchist political revolution based on libertarian ideals and local direct democracy in Rojava, the Kurdish part of Syria. A revolutionary at heart, he knew he had to go help. A couple of months later the open-source activist found himself strapped with an AK-47 in the north of the war-ridden country, fighting IS jihadis.
Out of money and with the project’s public face fighting a war in the Middle East, Martin — who had acted as the wallet’s lead developer — disappeared as well; even other unSystem coders didn’t know where he was for months on end. Dark Wallet stalled. But the project had by then served as a big inspiration for other privacy-focused developers. In a time when Bitcoin seemed to be going mainstream, the unSystem group had re-emphasized Bitcoin’s anti-establishment roots and realized a first-generation set of Bitcoin privacy tools.
Playing around with the Dark Wallet alpha release, Chris Belcher, a Bitcoin developer from London, found that very few users were offering their coins to be mixed. To solve this, he designed JoinMarket, a CoinJoin application much like the one in Dark Wallet, but with the added feature for users to financially incentivize one another to join in the mix. Around the same time, two pseudonymous developers launched the privacy-focused Samourai Wallet, which included stealth addresses and several other privacy tools. Just as bitcoiners were starting to realize that the Dark Wallet project had been abandoned, two new privacy projects were ready to carry on the baton. 
Going full circle a few years later, Samourai Wallet and a newer wallet project by privacy researcher Adam Ficsór in mid-2017 announced they were working on a mixing tool inspired by Maxwell’s original CoinJoin post. Where both Dark Wallet and JoinMarket are geared toward making private payments, this new solution would let dozens of users mix their coins at the same time.
Today, about five years since Dark Wallet’s last release, Samourai Wallet’s CoinJoin tool “Whirlpool” and Ficsór’s Wasabi Wallet are mixing coins consistently throughout the day, while JoinMarket is offering privacy in payments. Moving forward, tricks like PayJoin, SNICKER and Knapsack mixing could further increase the potential of CoinJoin, while Schnorr signatures may even offer an economic incentive to use the privacy technique.
Meanwhile, Taaki has reunited with Martin. Having returned from Syria in 2016, and after having been under investigation by British police for a year, he is setting up an academy for activist programmers in Barcelona to realize projects furthering privacy and autonomy, inspired by the revolutionary movement in Rojava. A revival of Dark Wallet, Taaki hinted when speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, could be one of these projects.
The post CoinJoin’s First Steps: How Dark Wallet Paved the Way for a More Private Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.
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jacobhinkley · 6 years
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Coinbase Now Offers Crypto currency Gift Cards in Europe and Australia
Coinbase now offers crypto currency-backed electronic gift cards in a number of selected markets in Europe as well as in Australia. The company sees this move as giving its clients “greater flexibility and control over how they use their crypto.”
Also Read: The Daily: Exchange Operator Pleads Guilty, Scammer Fined Over $1.9 Million
Coinbase Gift Cards
Coinbase, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange supporting BTC, BCH, ETH and LTC, has announced this morning that, starting today the trading platform offers direct withdrawals into e-gift cards for its customers in Europe and Australia. This means that users in the applicable markets are now able to instantly spend their cryptocurrency balances from the exchange service with e-gift cards.
This development has been achieved by partnering with the London-based startup Wegift. It allows customers to spend their crypto with many known retailers, like Nike, Tesco, Uber, Google Play, Ticketmaster, Zalando, and more. This new service is currently available in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Australia. Additionally, Coinbase promises to keep expanding the number of retailers and markets over the next three months, as well as to seek and to expand into other countries soon after this period.
Making Crypto Easier to Use
“Customers purchasing an e-gift card will enjoy zero Coinbase withdrawal fees and bonuses on select e-gifts. From converting bitcoin into Uber credits or ether into a Nike shopping spree, customers will have greater flexibility and control over how they use their crypto,” stated Zeeshan Feroz, Coinbase UK CEO. And he added that: “Making crypto easier to use, trade and spend is a core part of our efforts to improve the customer experience. With the launch of e-gift cards, customers now have the option to spend their crypto balances, realizing its value to buy tangible things or experiences.”
Coinbase, already valued as high as $8 billion, had a couple of very positive developments recently. The company reportedly landed a $20 billion hedge fund as a prime client and got its ads reinstated on Facebook, Instagram and Google.
Are exchange-backed cryptocurrency gift cards a proper alternative to online merchants accepting bitcoin directly? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Verify and track bitcoin cash transactions on our BCH Block Explorer, the best of its kind anywhere in the world. Also, keep up with your holdings, BCH and other coins, on our market charts at Satoshi’s Pulse, another original and free service from Bitcoin.com.
The post Coinbase Now Offers Crypto currency Gift Cards in Europe and Australia appeared first on Bitcoin News.
Coinbase Now Offers Crypto currency Gift Cards in Europe and Australia published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions
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bowsetter · 6 years
Text
Coinbase Now Offers Crypto currency Gift Cards in Europe and Australia
Coinbase now offers crypto currency-backed electronic gift cards in a number of selected markets in Europe as well as in Australia. The company sees this move as giving its clients “greater flexibility and control over how they use their crypto.”
Also Read: The Daily: Exchange Operator Pleads Guilty, Scammer Fined Over $1.9 Million
Coinbase Gift Cards
Coinbase, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange supporting BTC, BCH, ETH and LTC, has announced this morning that, starting today the trading platform offers direct withdrawals into e-gift cards for its customers in Europe and Australia. This means that users in the applicable markets are now able to instantly spend their cryptocurrency balances from the exchange service with e-gift cards.
This development has been achieved by partnering with the London-based startup Wegift. It allows customers to spend their crypto with many known retailers, like Nike, Tesco, Uber, Google Play, Ticketmaster, Zalando, and more. This new service is currently available in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Australia. Additionally, Coinbase promises to keep expanding the number of retailers and markets over the next three months, as well as to seek and to expand into other countries soon after this period.
Making Crypto Easier to Use
“Customers purchasing an e-gift card will enjoy zero Coinbase withdrawal fees and bonuses on select e-gifts. From converting bitcoin into Uber credits or ether into a Nike shopping spree, customers will have greater flexibility and control over how they use their crypto,” stated Zeeshan Feroz, Coinbase UK CEO. And he added that: “Making crypto easier to use, trade and spend is a core part of our efforts to improve the customer experience. With the launch of e-gift cards, customers now have the option to spend their crypto balances, realizing its value to buy tangible things or experiences.”
Coinbase, already valued as high as $8 billion, had a couple of very positive developments recently. The company reportedly landed a $20 billion hedge fund as a prime client and got its ads reinstated on Facebook, Instagram and Google.
Are exchange-backed cryptocurrency gift cards a proper alternative to online merchants accepting bitcoin directly? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Verify and track bitcoin cash transactions on our BCH Block Explorer, the best of its kind anywhere in the world. Also, keep up with your holdings, BCH and other coins, on our market charts at Satoshi’s Pulse, another original and free service from Bitcoin.com.
The post Coinbase Now Offers Crypto currency Gift Cards in Europe and Australia appeared first on Bitcoin News.
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Bitcoin Atom Wants to Make Cryptocurrency Transfers Truly Peer-to-Peer
Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper envisioned the use of an electronic money that would be “purely peer-to-peer.” This means no third parties would be involved in any way–online payments would go directly from one party to another without any interference. Though this is how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were designed, for the most part, this isn’t how they’re exchanged.
This is because a large number of cryptocurrency transactions go through exchanges like Bitfinix, Bithumb, and Bittrex. Alone, these three exchanges account for over $12 billion in 24-hour trading volume. The rise in the value of many cryptocurrencies has seen a surge in trading volumes over the past couple of months, with one major drawback–exchanges are becoming increasingly more centralized and increasingly more powerful. The cryptocurrency community, of all people, should be wary of the dangers of centralization.
One project, Bitcoin Atom (BCA), is working on a network that will allow users to exchange digital assets in a truly decentralized manner.
The platform will use atomic swaps (AS) and integrated hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs) to give users freedom from any intermediaries or centralized bodies like exchanges. The BCA network allows parties to interact and transact directly–the original purpose of cryptocurrencies and decentralized blockchains.
Exchanges like OKEx, and Coinomi already agreed to verify and make BCA tradable when the fork occurs in January.
How Do Atomic Swaps and HTLCs Work?
Atomic swaps permit two users operating on different blockchains to directly exchange cryptocurrencies through a completely trustless process. Both parties agree to the terms before the transactions–for example, fifty Litecoins for one Bitcoin–and use their private keys to sign a copy of the transaction. Once the signatures are in place, the exchange happens immediately.
Atomic swaps use hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs) that require the two entities to fulfill the trade’s requirements. HTLCs mandate that the parties independently generate cryptographic proofs of payment to confirm reception of the exchanged funds in a given amount of time. If either party can’t confirm the transaction in the stated time frame, the coins are returned to the original sender. Thus, atomic swaps and HTLCs allow users to transact directly without the need of any middlemen.
The Bitcoin Atom Network and the Benefit of Direct Peer-to-Peer Transactions
At its core, Bitcoin Atom is a SegWit enabled Bitcoin fork. Their goal is to use HTLCs to enable users to exchange cryptocurrencies via on-chain atomic swaps. The team plans to integrate cross-chain trading utilities and an atomic swap API into Bitcoin’s core software and fork it into the BCA blockchain.
The result is that BCA blockchain users can transact directly with one another without the need for a standard cryptocurrency exchange. All users have to do to initiate a transaction is open their Bitcoin Atom node and place a buy or sell order. Once an agreement with another party is made, the HTLCs will ensure that the transaction goes through quickly and securely.
By eliminating the need for third-party cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitcoin Atom will greatly lower transaction costs for both parties. Many cryptocurrency exchanges charge fees for every transaction, in addition to fees for bank deposits and withdrawals. This means more money is the pockets of exchanges and less money for individuals. The widespread use of cryptocurrency exchanges has replaced one centralized authority–banks–with another centralized authority–cryptocurrency exchanges. The end result is exactly the same.
Additionally, users don’t have to be dependent on the operational status of cryptocurrency exchanges to make exchanges. It is not uncommon for third party exchanges to have problems, especially during times of high volumes. The result is that users end up trusting these centralized parties with their money, only to have them fail in their time of need. This is the exact problem cryptocurrencies are supposed to solve.
Thankfully, with the advent of the Bitcoin Atom network, these issues can be done away with. The development team is working on integrating instant off-chain swaps, with the goal of implementing their HTLC API by January 2018. The full atomic swap network could be up and running by the end of 2018.
The post Bitcoin Atom Wants to Make Cryptocurrency Transfers Truly Peer-to-Peer appeared first on NewsBTC.
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brettzjacksonblog · 6 years
Text
Bitcoin Atom Wants to Make Cryptocurrency Transfers Truly Peer-to-Peer
Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper envisioned the use of an electronic money that would be “purely peer-to-peer.” This means no third parties would be involved in any way–online payments would go directly from one party to another without any interference. Though this is how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were designed, for the most part, this isn’t how they’re exchanged.
This is because a large number of cryptocurrency transactions go through exchanges like Bitfinix, Bithumb, and Bittrex. Alone, these three exchanges account for over $12 billion in 24-hour trading volume. The rise in the value of many cryptocurrencies has seen a surge in trading volumes over the past couple of months, with one major drawback–exchanges are becoming increasingly more centralized and increasingly more powerful. The cryptocurrency community, of all people, should be wary of the dangers of centralization.
One project, Bitcoin Atom (BCA), is working on a network that will allow users to exchange digital assets in a truly decentralized manner.
The platform will use atomic swaps (AS) and integrated hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs) to give users freedom from any intermediaries or centralized bodies like exchanges. The BCA network allows parties to interact and transact directly–the original purpose of cryptocurrencies and decentralized blockchains.
Exchanges like OKEx, and Coinomi already agreed to verify and make BCA tradable when the fork occurs in January.
How Do Atomic Swaps and HTLCs Work?
Atomic swaps permit two users operating on different blockchains to directly exchange cryptocurrencies through a completely trustless process. Both parties agree to the terms before the transactions–for example, fifty Litecoins for one Bitcoin–and use their private keys to sign a copy of the transaction. Once the signatures are in place, the exchange happens immediately.
Atomic swaps use hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs) that require the two entities to fulfill the trade’s requirements. HTLCs mandate that the parties independently generate cryptographic proofs of payment to confirm reception of the exchanged funds in a given amount of time. If either party can’t confirm the transaction in the stated time frame, the coins are returned to the original sender. Thus, atomic swaps and HTLCs allow users to transact directly without the need of any middlemen.
The Bitcoin Atom Network and the Benefit of Direct Peer-to-Peer Transactions
At its core, Bitcoin Atom is a SegWit enabled Bitcoin fork. Their goal is to use HTLCs to enable users to exchange cryptocurrencies via on-chain atomic swaps. The team plans to integrate cross-chain trading utilities and an atomic swap API into Bitcoin’s core software and fork it into the BCA blockchain.
The result is that BCA blockchain users can transact directly with one another without the need for a standard cryptocurrency exchange. All users have to do to initiate a transaction is open their Bitcoin Atom node and place a buy or sell order. Once an agreement with another party is made, the HTLCs will ensure that the transaction goes through quickly and securely.
By eliminating the need for third-party cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitcoin Atom will greatly lower transaction costs for both parties. Many cryptocurrency exchanges charge fees for every transaction, in addition to fees for bank deposits and withdrawals. This means more money is the pockets of exchanges and less money for individuals. The widespread use of cryptocurrency exchanges has replaced one centralized authority–banks–with another centralized authority–cryptocurrency exchanges. The end result is exactly the same.
Additionally, users don’t have to be dependent on the operational status of cryptocurrency exchanges to make exchanges. It is not uncommon for third party exchanges to have problems, especially during times of high volumes. The result is that users end up trusting these centralized parties with their money, only to have them fail in their time of need. This is the exact problem cryptocurrencies are supposed to solve.
Thankfully, with the advent of the Bitcoin Atom network, these issues can be done away with. The development team is working on integrating instant off-chain swaps, with the goal of implementing their HTLC API by January 2018. The full atomic swap network could be up and running by the end of 2018.
The post Bitcoin Atom Wants to Make Cryptocurrency Transfers Truly Peer-to-Peer appeared first on NewsBTC.
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coin-news-blog · 4 years
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Here’s What Happens When You Use Lightning Network for the First Time
New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/news/here-s-what-happens-when-you-use-lightning-network-for-the-first-time
Here’s What Happens When You Use Lightning Network for the First Time
Here’s What Happens When You Use Lightning Network for the First Time
Do you remember receiving your first bitcoin? Seeing those satoshis arrive in your wallet is a magical, almost spiritual, experience. In that moment, the most beautiful thing about bitcoin is not its censorship resistance or pseudonymity: it’s that it works at the first time of asking. No pending account verification, no weekend processing delays, and no questions. What about Lightning bitcoin? Could it too work at the first time of asking? As Lightning Network approaches its second anniversary, I decided to find out.
Bitcoin Core Needs Lightning – But Is Lightning Ready?
Multicoin Capital caused a stir last week when it predicted onchain BTC fees to hit $100 in 2020. This will be “a positive development” according to the firm’s Spencer Bogart as it will force “scaling up the stack” to Lightning Network (LN). Even if that prophecy doesn’t come to pass, and fees “only” reach $10, Lightning will be sorely needed, not least to the 3.4 billion people who earn less than $5.50 a day. The question is, two years into its lifespan, is Lightning ready to pick up the slack? To find out, I downloaded two bitcoin maximalist-recommended LN wallets and got to work.
First though, a preface: news.Bitcoin.com is known for its support of Bitcoin Cash and its onchain approach to scaling. We nevertheless cover BTC extensively, albeit with less focus on Lightning Network, since it is experimental technology that has scarcely been used in the wild up until now. That said, with Bitfinex announcing support for LN deposits and withdrawals earlier this month, there are signs that the tide is turning. The next few months will be critical for Lightning: either it starts working, all the time for all the people, or there’s a risk of LN being written off as a failed experiment.
If Lightning isn’t ready for mass adoption the next time onchain fees pass $50, either the public will go elsewhere – be it to BCH, EOS, or any other network that can pick up the strain – or they’ll give up on crypto for good. If that happens, bitcoin will effectively exist as a custodial asset only, suitable for investing but never transacting. And if that happens, it won’t just be Lightning that’s deemed a failed experiment – it will be Bitcoin itself. There’s a lot riding on Lightning Network’s performance over the next few months then. Can LN step up and prove that it’s production ready?
Putting Phoenix Wallet to the Test
Billed as “the bitcoin wallet from the future,” Phoenix’s architects aren’t afraid to sing the praises of their new LN wallet. After seeing well-known bitcoiner Matt Odell tweeting his support for Phoenix, I decided it would be an ideal jumping off point for my debut Lightning experience.
Last month, I helped a friend buy his first BTC, showing him how to install the Exodus wallet and transfer his newly acquired coins to it. It worked at the first time of asking, the same way it has with everyone I’ve introduced to bitcoin over the years. Could I, with seven years of bitcoin experience, get a Lightning wallet to work at the first attempt?
After installing and opening the Phoenix Android app, I’m prompted to backup my wallet and set a PIN, as is standard with any noncustodial crypto wallet. I’m then presented with the following screen:
What I’m aiming to do is send onchain BTC to Lightning, in whatever way the app will allow me to. After pressing “Receive,” I tap the QR code to copy the address and then paste it into the “Send” field of one of my BTC wallets. Upon pasting the QR code, however, it turns out that it contains the following:
lnbc1pwlva5epp5z77fkphh….scq6zw5hu
That’s not a BTC address – it’s a Lightning one, which only works for transactions on the Lightning Network. But all is not lost, for below the QR code in Phoenix is a button that reads “Show a bitcoin address,” which displays the following prompt:
I’d prefer not to pay a 0.5% fee: if I was sending 1 BTC, that means I’d be charged £35. Still, this is Lightning, which isn’t yet ready for receiving transactions of that size, so the 0.5% fee can be forgiven for now. What can’t be forgiven is what happens next: the infinite spinning wheel of death, as I’m instructed to “Please hold.”
Two days later, and I’m still no further along.
Goodbye Phoenix, it was nice knowing you.
Putting Nayuta Wallet to the Test
The next LN wallet I try is Nayuta, a hybrid full-node/SPV Lightning mobile wallet that was brought to my attention by Nomics. The wallet is still in beta, and comes liberally coated in disclaimers to that effect:
That being the case, I’m prepared to cut Nayuta some slack. It’s not like I’m trying to open dozens of Lightning channels, add a watchtower, or run a local node: I just want to get some onchain BTC to LN. That shouldn’t be too hard, right?
There’s a button marked ‘Lightning’ across the bottom of the Nayuta app and another marked ‘Onchain.’ I press the latter, select ‘Receive’ and am shown a BTC address. Despite being in beta, Nayuta’s already gotten me further than Phoenix. I paste the BTC address into the bitcoin wallet I intend to send funds from and run into my first problem: the address format is bech32, and the wallet I’m sending funds from, like most custodial and noncustodial BTC wallets, isn’t compatible. This isn’t a Lightning problem – it’s a bitcoin one – but it’s nevertheless another hurdle in my quest to get funds onto LN.
I log into an exchange account instead and try withdrawing funds from there which, to my pleasant surprise, work with bech32 addresses. Two hours later, however, and there’s still nothing shown up in the Nayuta app. I’d only sent $70 of BTC, but am nevertheless miffed by its failure to appear. After three hours have elapsed, I log into Nayuta again, and this time my funds have magically appeared, but I can’t access them: they’re now being sent from my Nayuta BTC address to my Nayuta Lightning address, minus the 0.5% fee, and the transaction is showing up as unconfirmed. It will require six confirmations before the funds will clear, which means I need to wait another hour.
My understanding of LN is limited (this is my first time after all), but here’s what I’d like to see: a wallet service that will instantly send funds to my LN wallet after a 1-confirmation onchain transaction. In other words, I send BTC onchain from my wallet to theirs, whereupon they immediately send a corresponding amount from their already funded LN channel to me. That’s a service I’d happily pay a 0.5% fee for. But having to wait four hours and counting to get going isn’t going to impress the nocoiners.
Two Years on and Lightning Network Still Isn’t Ready for Mass Adoption
My first experience with Lightning has been interesting, to put it charitably, and maddening to put it more accurately. It feels like there’s a whole world of instant confirmations and low sat transactions waiting for me, if only I could get some damn funds onto the Lightning Network. Then it occurs to me: why am I killing myself trying to break into the promised land of fast, cheap transactions when they’re already at my fingertips with bitcoin cash, litecoin, and doge?
It’s possible that I’ve made some noob mistake in trying to get connected to Lightning Network, but since there’s zero guidance in either of the LN wallets I tried, I’ve no way of knowing. And that’s the whole point: if LN can befuddle a bitcoiner of seven years, we’re still years away from it being ready for mainstream adoption.
I check my Nayuta wallet one last time. The transaction from my onchain wallet to my LN wallet was initiated two hours ago. Current status: unconfirmed.
Source: news.bitcoin
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bitcoingape · 5 years
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This is How Scammers Double Spent $200k Worth of Bitcoins in Seven Canadian Cities
New Post has been published on http://bitcoingape.com/this-is-how-scammers-double-spent-200k-worth-of-bitcoins-in-seven-canadian-cities/
This is How Scammers Double Spent $200k Worth of Bitcoins in Seven Canadian Cities
The sole purpose of crypto is to bring back the power to the masses. Bitcoin led the way and as a revolutionary coin, it is a product of adversity and a leader of a transformation. This means, with every induction, the coin is edging closer to mainstream adoption and that is precisely what every enthusiasts and observer wants. Considering its global nature and how it can be shaping, making these coins accessible to everyone is of top priority.
For this reason, the team behind this novel drive saw it fit to introduce Bitcoin kiosks or crypto teller machines. Although there is no connection with those dispensing government issued fiat, these ATMs embodies decentralization. These ATMs can be two-way, meaning you can buy supported cryptocurrencies and some allows conversion of crypto assets for fiat. Obviously, they are convenient points where users can sell supported coins for a fee while receiving an equivalent amount in fiat.
 In North America, the US leads in the number of installed ATMs but it is Canada that is grabbing all the attention thanks to recent and an unfortunate heist that saw $200k in cash double spent by four scammers across seven towns including Calgary—with 45 Bitcoin ATMs and Montreal with 102 ATMs.
Back to Basics: double spending and Zero-confirm Transactions
But the question in everyone mind is how did they pull it? How did they double spend what is supposedly an immutable transaction? Well, to understand how they did it and how rampant it can be, we must verse ourselves with two terms. Firstly, the meaning of a double spending and secondly, why merchants prefer zero-confirm transactions. In bare minimum definition, a double spend is simply the risk that any cryptocurrency can be spent twice.
It is a problem specific to digital assets and cryptocurrencies in particular in that digital information can be replicated. The good thing is that Satoshi successfully demonstrated that by employing a decentralized system where mathematics and encryption verify transaction logs it was possible to stop double-counting.
On the other hand, zero-confirm transactions are transactions that have been successfully broadcasted in the network but are yet to be “confirmed” by a miner and after that etched into the blockchain and therefore becoming valid. Double spending is discouraged and has been made expensive for would be attackers.
Convenience Over Security?
Unfortunately, there is a new breed of users preferring speed over security of their digital assets. It is understandable. Thanks to the 10—20 minute wait time that a typical Bitcoin transaction takes, a merchants and users who accept zero-confirm transactions need not to wait and is a debatable subject. Not all ATMs accept zero-confirm transactions. Merchants using BitPay as an intermediary automatically accept zero-config transactions but these are adjusted. Casinos do accept zero-config transactions but need a 1 to 3 configuration for withdrawal.
All the same, these scammers took advantage of this lack of confirmation, reversing those transactions and thereafter converting the same Bitcoins for cash.
In the early days of Bitcoin, it was possible to send transactions if they were small enough or had an element of priority. However, with increasing use and miners in for profit, a user must pay for every transaction. And not just any fees. Miners are in business and the higher the fees, the faster the confirmation. There is a fee-rate measuring applicable fees at any time and is measured in satoshis per byte.
Now, since not all ATMs accept zero-config transactions, it is likely that they did their home work and after picking out these ATMs, they replaced older Bitcoin transactions with new ones with higher fees meaning miners paid attention and confirmed them in a procedure known as Replace by Fee (RBF). RBF was introduced in BIP-0125.
If that didn’t work out, they could as well send the original amount to their Bitcoin wallet(s) while including better fees. The only trick for this double spending is that the wallet of choice must support double spending in one way or another. Any of these options are legal and Satoshi Nakamoto introduced them but was disabled at some point—after Bitcoin Core 0.12+.
The post This is How Scammers Double Spent $200k Worth of Bitcoins in Seven Canadian Cities appeared first on Ethereum World News.
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coin-river-blog · 5 years
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Blockchain analysis is big business. The U.S. government alone has spent $6 million on transaction mapping tools, while cryptocurrency exchanges routinely partner with compliance companies that promise to track and trace the origin of customer funds. Hated by many bitcoiners, blockchain forensics is a controversial field with a plethora of players. The following analysis shines a spotlight on the companies who scrutinize you.
Also read: How to Outwit Blockchain Analysis and Conceal Your Coins
Over $80 Million Invested in Blockchain Forensics Companies
Not content with undertaking basic Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures such as requesting identity documents, many cryptocurrency companies have taken things a step further by partnering with blockchain forensics firms. In the case of Coinbase, they’ve gone one step further still and actually bought their own forensics company in the form of the highly controversial and much-maligned Neutrino. Having raised over $80 million to date, blockchain analysis companies have tapped into a rich source of capital. In turn, these companies have earned millions of dollars for profiling cryptocurrency users. Of the $6 million paid out by U.S. agencies, The Block calculates the IRS to have accounted for 40 percent, ICE almost 25 percent, and the FBI over 19 percent.
Aside from a handful of exchanges that remain defiantly KYC and blockchain forensics-free, the majority of mainstream platforms employ blockchain forensics of some kind. In addition to exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance, crypto-fiat companies such as Wirex are also on the blockchain forensics bandwagon. From a legal perspective, crypto companies are not obliged to utilize the services of blockchain analysts. As Kraken CEO Jesse Powell recently acknowledged, however, any exchange forgoing such tools would be liable to make regulators suspicious.
Get to Know Your Know Your Customer Companies
Ostensibly, blockchain forensics companies monitor customer deposits and withdrawals for signs of “tainted” coins that have been involved in money laundering, terrorism or drug dealing. In the majority of cases, however, blockchain forensics tools can only make probabilistic connections. As a consequence, innocent cryptocurrency users can have their funds frozen or seized by centralized platforms.
Whatever Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision for Bitcoin may have been, it’s safe to say it wasn’t a world in which individuals have to seek permission to send or receive coins, or where the onus is on the customer to prove their crypto is “clean.” Regardless, it’s the world we now inhabit, and while blockchain forensics can’t be repealed, the companies that push this technology can at least be analyzed, just as they analyze us. The following report profiles the Know Your Customer companies that would like to know everything about you. Through turning the tables and monitoring their every move and appointment, the crypto community can hold these companies to account.
Chainalysis
The best known of all blockchain forensics firms, Chainalysis produces a wealth of interesting data on lost coins, hodling patterns and much more. There’s also a more serious side to company, however: its services include “reporting on your customers’ cryptocurrency-related activities” and detecting “suspicious activity and emerging threats from the dark web.” Like all companies of their ilk, Chainalysis are in the pocket of law enforcement, who are their most valuable clients.
Chainalysis’ “Know Your Transaction,” software, while purportedly designed to thwart money laundering, has a wealth of applications, most of which have little to do with stopping serious crime. In libertarian cryptocurrency circles, Chainalysis is a very dirty word.
Founded: October 2014.
Offices: Copenhagen, New York.
Investors: Benchmark, Techstars, Point Nine, Digital Currency Group, Funders Club, Converge.
Total funding: $47.6M
Senior team: Michael Gronager (CEO), Jan Moller (CTO), Jonathan Levin (COO).
Clients: Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration, Europol, Binance.
Elliptic
The oldest of the forensics firms profiled here, Elliptic identifies “illicit activity in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, providing actionable intelligence to cryptocurrency companies, financial institutions and government agencies.” Just another blockchain analysis company, in other words, that’s tight with LEA. According to David Carlisle, Elliptic’s head of community, “Like any technology, cryptocurrencies can be exploited by criminals. But a lot of the time the public’s characterisation of these risks are sensationalised and not very accurate.”
Some of the work that companies like Elliptic do, such as unmasking terrorist networks, is hard to fault. By its own admission, though, the most recent terrorism fundraiser Elliptic monitored “received only $1,037 dollars worth of Bitcoin in over a year and a half since it’s launch – hardly a large-scale sum.” Given the paltry sums that terrorists have raised in cryptocurrency to date, it’s safe to say that dozens of blockchain forensics firms aren’t required to pursue a few bitcoins’ worth of dirty money. The majority of the work performed by blockchain analysis companies has nothing to do with halting serious crimes such as terrorism.
Founded: November 2013.
Offices: London, New York, Washington.
Investors: Wayra UK, Digital Currency Group, KRW Schindler Private Ventures, Paladin Capital Group, Santander Innoventures.
Total funding: $12M
Senior team: James Smith (CEO), Simone Maini (COO), Lee Wilson (CFO), Adam Joyce (co-founder), Tom Robinson (co-founder).
Clients: FBI, DEA.
Blockseer
Blockeer is of the opinion that “there is a lack of clarity in bitcoin payments and transactions” which seems odd given that Bitcoin is the most transparent payment system the world has ever known. The company “aims to reduce the level of disorder and chaos and increase the level of knowledge and analysis of the publicly accessible blockchain network.” Some would say that disorder and chaos is all part of Bitcoin’s charm, but blockchain surveillance companies are apt to demur, as is their wont. Blockseer has now been acquired by DMG Blockchain Solutions.
Founded: December 2014
Offices: Palo Alto.
Investors: Plug and Play, Charlie Lee, Bobby Lee, Zhenfund, Ceyuan Ventures, Bill Tai.
Senior team: Danny Yang (founder), Patrick De La Garza (lead engineer).
Ciphertrace
Ciphertrace helps “businesses and government make cryptocurrencies safe and trusted.” It’s almost as if they’ve misconstrued Bitcoin’s trustless design as a problem in need of a solution. The company “powers law enforcement investigations,” traces “the movement of money through dark markets of the crypto economy,” and performs other tasks that cryptocurrency users wish they wouldn’t.
Founded: May 2015.
Offices: Menlo Park, California.
Investors: Westwave Capital, Neotribe Ventures, Aspect Ventures, Galaxy Digital.
Total funding: $18M.
Senior team: David Jevans (CEO), Shannon Holland (CTO), John Jefferies (CMO), Greg Gavitta (director).
Clients: Identity Minds, Maltego, Modulus.
Scorechain
Scorechain promises “meaningful data that describes and evaluates how users obtain and spend their bitcoins,” enabling companies to “adapt [their] sales and marketing strategy,” which all sounds very invasive and unnecessary.
Founded: April 2015.
Offices: Luxembourg.
Total funding: $570,000.
Senior team: Pierre Gerard (CEO), Laurent Kratz (co-founder).
Neutrino
Neutrino follows “the flow of coins and their interaction with exchanges, mixers and other services from an easy-to-use graphical interface.” Oh, and it was recently acquired by Coinbase. Oh, and its core team, while working for Hacking Team, used to sell software to despotic governments so they could spy on and potentially torture journalists and dissidents. Oh, and Hacking Team’s founder and CEO David Vincenzetti used to sign his emails with a fascist rallying cry.
Founded: April 2014.
Offices: Milan, Italy.
Senior team: Giancarlo Russo (CEO), Marco Valleri (CRO), Alberto Ornaghi (CTO).
Crystal Blockchain
The Bitfury-owned Crystal promises to “evaluate and compare the likelihood of blockchain participants’ association with known ‘bad actors’ (darknet marketplaces, mixing and gambling services, publicized ponzi schemes, etc.).” It’s unclear what’s “bad” about choosing to use DNMs, gambling, or wishing to preserve one’s privacy by using a mixer. Regardless, for all your law enforcement boot-licking and blockchain monitoring needs, Crystal are at your service.
Founded: November 2018.
Offices: Washington DC and Netherlands.
Senior team: Marina Khaustova (CEO), Michael Dubose (president), Kyrylo Chykhradze (head of product).
Blockchain Intel
Blockchain Intel “is your meteorologist for the global economic storm that is blockchain,” whatever that means. The company is fond of appending the trademark symbol to its name everywhere it appears, which is a sure sign that it’s run by boomers. Blockchain Intel looks even shadier than the crypto criminals it claims to monitor.
Founded: 2017
Offices: New York (supposedly)
Senior team: Chuck Lam (CTO).
Know Your Enemy
Blockchain analysis tools are neither intrinsically good nor bad. Rather, it is how their architects deploy these tools that determines their benevolence or malevolence. As the Neutrino-Coinbase scandal has shown, when the crypto community unites in condemnation of the most egregious practices of these companies, the people have the power to effect positive change. It therefore behoves all opponents of blockchain surveillance to surveil these companies and call them to account should they step out of line.
What are your thoughts on blockchain forensics companies? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
Kai Sedgwick
Kai's been playing with words for a living since 2009 and bought his first bitcoin at $19. It's long gone. He's previously written white papers for blockchain startups and is especially interested in P2P exchanges and DNMs.
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joshuajacksonlyblog · 4 years
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CoinJoin’s First Steps: How Dark Wallet Paved the Way for a More Private Bitcoin
CoinJoin. Trustless mixing. Anonymity. Bitcoin Magazine’s September 2013 cover — all black with hints of golden fingerprints — needed only four words to announce a powerful new privacy tool. At a time when industry representatives like the Bitcoin Foundation were downplaying Bitcoin’s anonymity features, regulators in New York were developing the BitLicense and Silk Road was about to be shut down, two hackers working from a former textile factory in Catalonia had begun to fight back. Amir Taaki and Pablo Martin realized the first ever CoinJoin application, and Bitcoin Magazine’s Vitalik Buterin was quick to cover the development.
Just weeks prior to the publication of this fourteenth Bitcoin Magazine print edition, Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell had posted what has perhaps come to be considered the unofficial CoinJoin announcement thread on the Bitcoin Forum. The developer had already published the idea in January 2013 in a more tongue-in-cheek stunt to trick blockchain analysis into thinking he was “taint rich,” asking forum users to mix their coins with his. But in his more serious August post, Maxwell introduced the name “CoinJoin,” while emphasizing the importance of tools like it.
“Traditional banking provides a fair amount of privacy by default. Your inlaws don’t see that you’re buying birth control that deprives them of grand children, your employer doesn’t learn about the non-profits you support with money from your paycheck, and thieves don’t see your latest purchases or how wealthy you are to help them target and scam you,” Maxwell wrote. “Poor privacy in Bitcoin can be a major practical disadvantage for both individuals and businesses.”
Bitcoin did have poor privacy. While Bitcoin addresses aren’t in themselves tied to real-world identities, blockchain analysis can often establish these links. A key tool for blockchain analysis is the multiple-input heuristic, a privacy leak even described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper. If a transaction sends coins from multiple addresses, Nakamoto wrote, these addresses must belong to the same owner. And if even one of these addresses can be tied to a real-world identity, for example because it was used to withdraw funds from an exchange, all of the other addresses can be as well.
Maxwell’s CoinJoin proposal helps fix this leak by combining multiple transactions into a single transaction. If Alice wants to pay for her birth control, and Bob wants to pay a nonprofit, they can merge this into a single transaction, sending both of their coins to both recipients at once. Ideally, this would make it unclear who bought the birth control and who paid the nonprofit. But at the very least, it breaks the multi-input heuristic. “Brain-dead automated analysis,” as Maxwell described it in his January post, would wrongly assume that all sending addresses belonged to the same person. If this assumption is broken often enough, the heuristic becomes useless altogether.
But by August, well over half a year after Maxwell first suggested the solution, the assumption wasn’t being broken often enough. This was in large part because it just wasn’t very easy to make CoinJoin transactions; it required command-line skills and deep technical knowledge of the Bitcoin protocol. What was needed, Maxwell reasoned, was a tool that would make such transactions easy.
“I know that making such a tool doesn’t fit into the get-rich-quick mold of many Bitcoin businesses, but the importance is self-apparent and the simplest versions of this don’t require very deep technical wizardry,” Maxwell concluded his post. “I think the ‘political’ risk of improving people’s privacy is a real one that you should carefully consider, but around these parts I see people sticking their names on some rather outrageously risky stuff. I’d hoped the ‘taint rich’ thread would be enough to inspire some community action, but perhaps this will be.”
To further incentivize development of a CoinJoin tool, Maxwell launched a multisignature escrow bounty fund. Shared between Bitcoin Core contributor Pieter Wuille, Bitcoin Forum administrator Theymos and himself, with at least two of their signatures needed, coins sent to the fund would be paid out to projects making CoinJoin a practical reality. Within a couple of days, the fund collected about 12 bitcoin, worth around $1,300 at the time.
Taaki, a regular on the Bitcoin Forum, found out about the bounty. If the British-Iranian Bitcoin developer was aware of the political risks mentioned by Maxwell, it certainly wasn’t going to stop him; he’d been living in anarchist squats throughout Europe for years and wasn’t exactly the type to shy away from authority. He asked fellow programmer Martin to take a look, and the two agreed that with the tools they had been developing — like the Bitcoin software library Libbitcoin — it shouldn’t be particularly difficult to build a CoinJoin application.
Indeed, hardly one day after the bounty was funded, the duo completed an early version of a CoinJoin mixing tool. Several users could contribute a fixed amount of bitcoin — 0.01 BTC — and create a transaction returning the same amount of funds back to each of them. As the CoinJoin would break the trail of ownership of any particular 0.01 BTC, all participants in the mix would gain privacy.
Martin, speaking with Bitcoin Magazine at the time:
“Making the tool was pretty easy for our skills. We could release after working for about eight hours together, next day we made a more stable and practical release. We leveraged a few great technologies: Python, Libbitcoin, SX, QT, Flask, Greenlets, Tor.”
But the simple CoinJoin tool was only the beginning. By late October, the duo teamed up with a small group of like-minded bitcoiners, including Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd and Cody Wilson, the guy who created the world’s first 3D-printable gun. United under the unSystem flag, a crypto-anarchist collective led by Taaki, the small group of developers started a crowdfunding project to realize a privacy-focused wallet with a CoinJoin mixer built in.
It would be called the Dark Wallet.
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The project quickly raised over $50,000 from more than 1,000 donors around the world, enough for the team to get to work. In November, Taaki, Martin, Todd, Wilson and others (including Bitcoin Magazine’s founder and then-editor-in-chief Mihai Alisie) met in a cultural center in Milan to discuss the design of the new wallet. Joined by a group of programmers working under pseudonyms like tilthz, sem, veox and d3, the project got underway.
But it wasn’t without controversy. As Bitcoin was reaching new highs — trading over $1,000 per coin by the end of 2013 — the project was attracting attention from mainstream media and regulators alike. While startups were trying to rid Bitcoin of its “drug money” image, Taaki and Wilson were actively promoting their wallet as a money laundering tool. The name itself — Dark Wallet — was a reference to a warning by the FBI that strong encryption could make the internet “go dark,” making it impossible for the agency to track even the worst criminals.
This level of privacy is exactly what Taaki, Wilson and others were hoping to achieve, and they weren’t going to pretend otherwise.
“I would just be dishonest with myself if I try to play with words or cover up my intent,” Taaki told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview. “I want people to know what I think, and as many people as possible, because it’s not just about the technology we’re building. In fact, the technology by itself is worth nothing. What is important is the narrative, or the ideal that is being constructed through that narrative. Bitcoin is a decentralized and uncensored money with privacy features. As such, it has opened up a new front in the ongoing struggle for freedom.”
About six months after the crowdfund was started, on 2014’s May Day (May 1), unSystem released Dark Wallet’s first alpha software. The wallet was built as a user-friendly Chrome extension, offering several privacy tools. This included stealth addresses, a type of encrypted address that can be shared freely, where every payment to it is unlinkable through blockchain analysis. The wallet also used hierarchical deterministic wallets, preventing address reuse; such tricks weren’t as standard then as they are now.
And of course, Dark Wallet included a CoinJoin tool. A user could make a payment and have this payment CoinJoined with a transaction from another user, who was matching the amount but really just paying himself. As such, the paying user would gain privacy from having his transaction matched, while the other user would have his coins mixed. Future wallet upgrades would include the option to make CoinJoins with several users at the same time, and Tor would be integrated so users could hide their IP addresses from each other.
The Dark Wallet alpha release made a media splash. Not only Bitcoin news sites (like Bitcoin Magazine) covered the groundbreaking wallet software, but more mainstream publications like Forbes, Wired and BBC Click took notice as well. Taaki and Wilson even caught the attention of film makers: The duo was followed for the documentary “The New Radical,” while Taaki was also featured in “Deep Web.”
But it wasn’t just the media that took notice. The Islamic State (IS) seemed to show interest in the wallet as well: Although unverified, a document circulated over the internet encouraging IS fighters to take funding in bitcoin, and use Dark Wallet to hide their tracks. “This allows our brothers stuck outside of the [Islamic State territory] to avoid government taxes along with secretly fund the mujahideen with no legal danger upon them,” the document read.
It didn’t faze the unSystem crew.
“I think obviously terrorists will use [Dark Wallet],” Todd told BBC Click, “and the benefits certainly outweigh the risks. Equally, obviously, terrorists use the internet. Obviously terrorists use freedom of speech. We’ve accepted that is a trade-off we must make.”
Development of the wallet continued throughout 2014, until Dark Wallet alpha 8 was released in the first weeks of 2015. But funds had been drying up, as a second crowdfunding round wasn’t nearly as successful as the first one. Moreover, Taaki — now the face of the more radical edges of the Bitcoin space — had by then learned about a collectivist-anarchist political revolution based on libertarian ideals and local direct democracy in Rojava, the Kurdish part of Syria. A revolutionary at heart, he knew he had to go help. A couple of months later the open-source activist found himself strapped with an AK-47 in the north of the war-ridden country, fighting IS jihadis.
Out of money and with the project’s public face fighting a war in the Middle East, Martin — who had acted as the wallet’s lead developer — disappeared as well; even other unSystem coders didn’t know where he was for months on end. Dark Wallet stalled. But the project had by then served as a big inspiration for other privacy-focused developers. In a time when Bitcoin seemed to be going mainstream, the unSystem group had re-emphasized Bitcoin’s anti-establishment roots and realized a first-generation set of Bitcoin privacy tools.
Playing around with the Dark Wallet alpha release, Chris Belcher, a Bitcoin developer from London, found that very few users were offering their coins to be mixed. To solve this, he designed JoinMarket, a CoinJoin application much like the one in Dark Wallet, but with the added feature for users to financially incentivize one another to join in the mix. Around the same time, two pseudonymous developers launched the privacy-focused Samourai Wallet, which included stealth addresses and several other privacy tools. Just as bitcoiners were starting to realize that the Dark Wallet project had been abandoned, two new privacy projects were ready to carry on the baton. 
Going full circle a few years later, Samourai Wallet and a newer wallet project by privacy researcher Adam Ficsór in mid-2017 announced they were working on a mixing tool inspired by Maxwell’s original CoinJoin post. Where both Dark Wallet and JoinMarket are geared toward making private payments, this new solution would let dozens of users mix their coins at the same time.
Today, about five years since Dark Wallet’s last release, Samourai Wallet’s CoinJoin tool “Whirlpool” and Ficsór’s Wasabi Wallet are mixing coins consistently throughout the day, while JoinMarket is offering privacy in payments. Moving forward, tricks like PayJoin, SNICKER and Knapsack mixing could further increase the potential of CoinJoin, while Schnorr signatures may even offer an economic incentive to use the privacy technique.
Meanwhile, Taaki has reunited with Martin. Having returned from Syria in 2016, and after having been under investigation by British police for a year, he is setting up an academy for activist programmers in Barcelona to realize projects furthering privacy and autonomy, inspired by the revolutionary movement in Rojava. A revival of Dark Wallet, Taaki hinted when speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, could be one of these projects.
The post CoinJoin’s First Steps: How Dark Wallet Paved the Way for a More Private Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.
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cryptnus-blog · 6 years
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Coinbase introduces new trading pairs to UK customers
New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/09/coinbase-introduces-new-trading-pairs-to-uk-customers/
Coinbase introduces new trading pairs to UK customers
As of today, cryptocurrency traders in the UK have more options. According to a blog post by Coinbase Pro General Manager David Farmer, Coinbase is introducing new order book trading pairs for the British pound, and will offer trading for the pound against Bitcoin BCH, along with other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin.
The new pairs will be rolled out slowly. Each will go through a post-only phase followed by a limit-only phase. After that, complete trading, including stop orders, limit and market, will be made available. Farmer pointed out that the post-only phase will only support the posting of limit orders, but matching the orders will have a delay of at least 10 minutes. Limit orders will start matching after that 10-minute delay, but that phase will also require another ten minutes, at the very least.
Farmer explained, “If at any point one of the new order books does not meet our assessment for a healthy and orderly market, we may keep the book in one stage (as identified below) for a longer period of time, or suspend trading as per our Trading Rules.”
Coinbase’s hold on the UK has increase over the past several months. Early in August, the company announced that it had begun to offer direct deposits and withdrawals with pounds using the Faster Payments Scheme. Previously, payments had to be converted from pounds to euros in order to fund accounts. Since the process relied on bank transfers, it would typically take several days for the funding to be complete.
This past March, Coinbase also received an e-money license from the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. That opened the doors for the U.S.-based company to expand into the UK, as well as across Europe.
Back in the U.S. domestic market, Coinbase is said to be considering trying to secure approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to offer a crypto-based exchange-traded fund (ETF). It has reportedly held a meeting with the blockchain group of BlackRock, a veteran ETF company in the U.S. It’s unclear how productive that meeting is, given comments previously made by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. He said that Bitcoin is nothing more than “an index of money laundering.”
Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.
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lewisgabriel84z31 · 6 years
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Honeyminer Lets You Mine Bitcoin with Your Laptop or PC
Honeyminer Lets You Mine Bitcoin with Your Laptop or PC
What Is Honeyminer?
Mining Bitcoin with your laptop or desktop computer has been obsolete for nearly 6 years now. However, with the help a new service called Honeyminer, people can do just that. Well, sort of.  Honeyminer is a new browser mining pool, that allows users to harness their spare computing power with their home desktops and laptops, to mine cryptocurrency. While the cryptocurrencies that are actually mined are Ethereum, Monero, Z-cash, DASH, Stellar and other alt coins, the amount of cryptocurrency you earn is automatically converted into Bitcoin for you and added to your balance. They do recommend that you mine using a GPU, but they do also say that you can earn a small amount with just a regular CPU, as well.
How to Get Started with Honeyminer
Getting started with Honeyminer is as simple as downloading their app to your computer or laptop and signing in. Once you are signed in, your mining operation will start automatically. Currently, there are no options for users to choose what coins to mine or even the amount of processing or graphical power to use. They do say that they will be adding these features in the near future. For now, you simply sign in and they do the rest, including converting all of your mining proceeds into Bitcoin for you.
Downloading and installing their web app is pretty easy and the interface is very user friendly. Once you have gotten the Honeyminer web app downloaded, you will be asked to create an account. To so, simply fill in your email address and they will automatically and instantly send you your password. Return to the app and login. Once logged in you will see your dashboard and links for help and your account.
Honeyminer Mining Dashboard
Your Honeyminer Dashboard looks very modern and neat. It is not cluttered at all and the information it displays is easily discernible. There is an image of a coin pot and a graphical meter that shows you your current level and lets you know how much more XP you need to level up to the next level. Leveling up and gaining XP is done by simply letting the mining software run on your computer. The levels move fairly quickly in the beginning and it is assumed that the higher the level, the more time it takes to gain the XP needed.
Next to your level, you will see your total account balance in Satoshis. Below this is the area where you can see the total amount earned for the current day and the day prior. At the very bottom of your dashboard, you will find a mining power switch that allows you to pause the miner and turn it back on. Next to this, they show you the number of referrals you have, if any and then the number of GPU and CPU cores that you have mining. There are also buttons there for you to see more detailed information on everything.
There is also a link for settings, but there is very little that you can control other than what to do when the window closes, whether or not to start the miner with Windows and if you want to use GPU, CPU or both. According to the website, they are working on implementing a more feature robust version of Honeyminer to be released in the near future.
Honeyminer Earning Potential
Honeyminer can be profitable for anyone who has a computer or laptop that they can utilize to mine for them. The amount that can be earned will depend on the type of processing power you have to use. GPU mining will net more than CPU mining every time, and using a newer GPU, you can realistically earn between $1-$3 per day. On the other end of the scale, using a lower end CPU, single core only, you can make about $0.05-$0.10 per day. (Amounts are in USD).
When considering power consumption into the mix, if you already are going to have the computer powered on anyways, there is negligible power usage difference from when you are running the miner and when you are not. However, if you do not have the computer running at the ties you will be mining normally, then the power consumption would make it not profitable to mine unless you are using a top-end GPU.
They do have a mining calculator of sorts that will tell you what your potential earnings could be, in total, after 5 or 10 years. They do allow you to adjust the Annual growth, in percentage, of Bitcoin. This helps to give you a realistic idea of what the potential total earnings over that period of time can be for you. Just remember that these calculations are assuming you are using high end equipment.
Honeyminer Business Model
Honeyminer is very upfront about everything they do. The way that they offer total transparency of their operation is reassuring that they are a company you can trust. They do not sugar coat anything here. They tell you up-front that if you want to make the $1-$3 per day, you need to use a top of the line GPU processing unit and run it 24 hours a day.
They offer customer support by email and their response time is within 12 hours. They also have a knowledge base which can answer most of your questions or address your concerns fairly quickly. The mining software is still in its infant stages, so there is not much to ask, do or have go wrong as of yet.
While the Honeyminer software is not packed full of features at this time, the company is working on adding additional features and creating a separate version, called Honeyminer pro. The date of this release is not yet determined but according to the company, they are working feverishly to get these new features rolled out ASAP.
Honeyminer Withdrawals
Withdrawing your Bitcoin from Honeyminer is fairly simple. You need to add a wallet address for your Bitcoin wallet that you wish to withdraw your Bitcoin to. After that, you just need to have enough to cover the 500 Satoshi minimum and 2000 Satoshi withdrawal fee charged by Honeyminer. Once you hit the withdraw button, your Bitcoin will be sent to your wallet within a few minutes.
Honeyminer Extra Features
Honeyminer is offering all new users a sign-up bonus of 1,000 Satoshi. This is credited to your account when you sign up and is available instantly, free and clear. To sign-up, you simply go to the Honeyminer website and download the app. Once it is downloaded and installed, it will ask for your email address. Type it in and they will instantly email you your password. Retrieve that and enter your login details and away you go. The miner will start mining instantly for you. Then you just continue doing what you were already doing. The miner is designed so that it does not hinder your computer’s performance at all. If you are using your GPU or CPU for something, the miner will cut back on what it uses to mine your Bitcoin, making it an unobtrusive app.
Honeyminer also has a referral program that allows you to invite friends, family or people from your social media circles. They will pay you 10% of the fees they earn from your referrals for life. On top of that, they will give you 5% of your referrals referred user’s fees as well. They make it very simple for you to maximize your earnings in an easy to understand and simple to set-up kind of way. You do not need to be a computer programmer to use their app. It is designed to be easy to use for users of all levels.
Honeyminer Summary
Browser mining has sprung up almost overnight. Although it is a great way to earn money, it has had its share of issues. Mainly, most of these browser mining services will harness your computers processing power without even telling you, let alone give you a full featured and downloadable app. Honeyminer has emerged as a real player in this evolving market of browser mining that can be trusted and be called reliable.
If you have some extra GPU or even CPU power available, give Honeyminer a try. It never hurts to add a few extra bucks to your pocket and with Honeyminer, you can be assured that you are not being scammed, ripped off or having anything else malicious happen to you.
Give Honeyminer a try and get your FREE 1,000 Satoshis sign-up bonus now.
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legit-scam-review · 6 years
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Bitcoin’s Cutting-Edge ‘Coin Selection’ Tech Gets First Major Integration
Crypto security startup BitGo’s latest technology – “predictive UTXO management” – sounds technical, but it’s got an end goal that everyone will understand: cutting crypto fees.
Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, BitGo is the first mainstream crypto company adopting a spin on “coin selection,” a scaling technology that’s been one of many touted as a way to ease the industry’s obsession with lowering fees since they spiked to over $20 a transaction in December.
Though fees have since fallen to less than $1, the incident had a huge psychological impact. As such, the industry jolted into action, looking into technologies that could help chip away at these fees.
As long-promised, coin selection more efficiently selects what coins go toward a particular transaction, and thus could have a big impact on users the next time fees go up (due to rising prices or increased use of the network). The idea has been around for a couple years but is just now starting to gain more widespread attention.
And with the news today, BitGo is opening up the technology to a large swath of the industry.
Indeed, all BitGo clients who have upgraded to their latest software version will have access to this new tool, seeing fee reductions of up to 30 percent, according to the company.
“What we’re doing here is addressing high-traffic wallets. Some of our clients get lots of lots of deposits into exchanges. And these enterprises need to sweep up these on-chain transactions,” BitGo engineer Mark Ehardt, the main brain behind the technology, told CoinDesk.
He added:
“If fees fluctuate again in the future, customers will save a lot on fees.”
While Ehardt couldn’t reveal which of its customers have upgraded to the newest version of its software – and as such, have access to the technology – he said, it’s most of them.
And with some of BitGo’s clients including the likes of Bitstamp, one of the oldest and largest bitcoin exchanges, and blockchain-based identity platform Civic, the technology is likely to reach a significant number of bitcoin enthusiasts.
A tweak on the tech
The proprietary technology Erhardt came up with, which includes coin selection, hasn’t been used anywhere else before.
It’s a bit complicated, but it takes on a very old problem in bitcoin.
Each transaction fee depends on how much data is put into a transaction, rather than its value, as in traditional payment systems. It sounds funny, but the reason it’s this way is that bitcoin’s transaction space is so limited. Charging extra for more data incentivizes users to take up as little space as possible.
Because of this, it’s conceivable a small transaction of $0.10 could cost more in fees than a $1,000 transaction.
So, what causes there to be more data in some transactions than others? This largely depends on the number of so-called “inputs,” which are the pieces of bitcoin that go into a transaction – the more inputs, the more data, the more expensive.
A couple years back for his master’s thesis, Erhardt invented a better algorithm for choosing which coins should go into a transaction (this is coin selection), trying to avoid creating, or unnecessarily using, so-called dust, or tiny amounts of bitcoin. It was such a useful improvement, the largest bitcoin software client, Bitcoin Core, moved to adopt it.
When adding the technology to BitGo’s services, though, Erhardt realized something else.
Spending transactions with a large number of inputs when fees are lower, like today, is not as expensive. And so this is a good time to look through a wallet’s coins and see if it’s possible to “consolidate” the coins – a process you can think of as like trading in a hundred pennies for $1.
“We really would like to partially automate this,” Erhardt thought.
And that prompting him to build something even more complex, the predictive UTXO management product, which reacts to the level of fees at the current time, using a threshold of 10 satoshis per byte. If fees are higher than this number, it uses as few inputs as possible. But, if fees are lower than this number, it automatically decides instead to consolidate the tiny transactions.
Low fees, still saving
As mentioned, Erhardt thinks this algorithm will be particularly useful for high-traffic wallets who are sucking in tons of UTXOs (or unspent transaction outputs).
Erhardt said his company is “operating under the assumption” bitcoin fees will continue to fluctuate over time, which is why the actively reacting algorithm is so necessary.
Yet, Erhardt admits it’s hard to say what will happen in the future.
Last time, fees spiked when the cryptocurrency world saw a flood of new users correlating with an increase in the price per bitcoin (it topped at over $20,000 per coin). The industry has definitely cooled since then, with the price per bitcoin now hovering around $8,000 per coin, and it’s unclear if and when that exuberance will happen again.
“It’s a little hard to predict right now. We’ve had small fees lately,” Erhardt said, adding:
Spending patterns are hard to predict and fees can go crazy overnight.”
Even with today’s lower fees, though, Erhardt expect the algorithm to have a big impact. “With small fees, we see huge savings,” he told CoinDesk.
And this will be especially true once the few lagging BitGo clients who haven’t yet transitioned to the new technology finally do.
Money pressure image via Shutterstock
The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.
This article is intended as a news item to inform our readers of various events and developments that affect, or that might in the future affect, the value of the cryptocurrency described above. The information contained herein is not intended to provide, and it does not provide, sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision, and you should not rely on this information for that purpose. The information presented herein is accurate only as of its date, and it was not prepared by a research analyst or other investment professional. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency before deciding to purchase or sell any such instruments.
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Crypto News - Roger Ver and Ryan X. Charles Reveal the Future of Cash
Roger Ver and Ryan X. Charles Reveal the Future of Cash The Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong (香港四季酒店) in the city’s financial center is this week’s spot for Roger Ver’s weekly video update, a project started just about a month ago. He’s joined at the five-star retreat for the episode by Ryan X. Cha... You May Likes reading: Also Read: Latest Crypto News
Roger Ver and Ryan X. Charles Reveal the Future of Cash
The Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong (香港四季酒店) in the city’s financial center is this week’s spot for Roger Ver’s weekly video update, a project started just about a month ago. He’s joined at the five-star retreat for the episode by Ryan X. Charles, CEO of Yours.org. The two men discussed their participation in an international conference and revealed an exciting future for decentralized, censorship resistant, cash.  
Also read: Alec Baldwin’s Lambo Movie Backed by Crypto Tech
Ver and Charles Make an Entertaining, Informative Pair
“Everybody’s been excited about ‘bcash’ for quite a while,” Roger Ver (CEO of Bitcoin.com) smiled and giggled with joy at the delicious irony. “So, it’s finally here everybody!” A very relaxed Mr. Ver has taken to making weekly videos, highlighting his work within the bitcoin cash community. He was prompted to laughter by Yours.org co-founder and CEO Ryan X. Charles, joining Mr. Ver for a one-off video recently. Both men were in the glow of Antiguan entrepreneur and Coin Geek owner Calvin Ayre’s latest Hong Kong conference. Overlooking Victoria Harbour, viewers soon notice there’s a third presence in the background. Turns out, the famous International Commerce Centre building in West Kowloon, all 1,587.9 feet of it, can be seen during its LED light show.
They were laughing at the name Purse.io chose for its latest product, bcash. When trolls wish to hector bitcoin cash supporters they often employ the name. Well, the two CEOs remarked gleefully, now the association has a real use case. It’s a fork of bcoin, a full node implementation, and both agreed they’d be employing the innovation. The Purse.io adventure parallels the ecosystem’s, as viewers come to find out. Mr. Charles prompts Mr. Ver into expanding on just why Mr. Ver was such a heavy proponent and user of the tech.
Mr. Ver explained how he used Purse.io for a great many business transactions, for nearly everything. When bitcoin core (BTC) fees became untenable for transactions, he left the service altogether, cashing out his remaining BTC for bitcoin cash (BCH). With Purse.io continuing to innovate and adapt, accepting BCH and offering a handy 15% discount on Amazon purchases, Mr. Ver happily encouraged viewers to return to the service. And indeed there does seem to be a resurgence in so-called micropayment tech, as more and more businesses transition to BCH.
Fast and Furious
Mr. Charles then raves about Openbazaar’s move into decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, a very big deal in the community. Traditional exchanges ask quite a lot of potential users, with frictions in onboarding and withdrawal, not to mention invasive personal questions. They’ve long gone against a basic aspect of crypto philosophy. Mr. Ver explained the store at Bitcoin.com will also sell its goods and services on Openbazzar.
Continuing on the micropayment innovations, both praised Mr. Charles’ latest project, the Money Button. The days-old tech is a spin on Yours.org’s BCH micropayment social media concept. Mr. Charles’ content providers asked for an API usable on their own proprietary websites; a money button, if you will, for the internet. The Yours.org CEO describes the Money Button as similar to pressing Like on Facebook. The prototype looks to be pretty amazing and transformative if the tech holds up: imagine every site surfed, readers and viewers had the ability to tip in fractions of BCH as a show of appreciation. Mr. Charles is careful to stress it is still not ready for large scale deployment, but he does want folks to give it a try over the next two months in the hopes of gaining feedback and working out bugs.
These are just some of the forward-looking subjects the two shared. Celebrating the ‘Pizza Anniversary,’ Marco Coino app, shout out to those protesting on behalf of a bitcoiner being charged for ridiculous crimes, more Lightning Network folly, decentralized crowdfunding through Lighthouse, Twitter censorship games, Memo.cash, Blockpress.com, and, of course, the 32MB Bitcoin Cash upgrade and OP codes. For those wishing to keep up with the ongoings of bitcoin cash, whose innovations are coming fast and furious, or are just curious about the digital currency. Roger Ver and Ryan X. Charles are arguably the best ambassadors around. No word if the two plan further collabs in the video sense, but Mr. Ver did stress future shows will include a displayed key which Bitcoin.com Wallet holders will be able to scan for free BCH!
Are you excited about BCH adoption and innovation? Let us know what you think of this subject in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay, Youtube.
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The post Roger Ver and Ryan X. Charles Reveal the Future of Cash appeared first on Bitcoin News.
  source: https://news.bitcoin.com/roger-ver-and-ryan-x-charles-reveal-the-future-of-cash/
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