Category Archives: Bitcoin

My Own Mining Pool

Posted by mysticstache on

Yes I’m frustrated again…

It seems like common sense to me that there should be a mining pool that you point your hash power to, magic happens and you get paid.

Magic? Well the pool could monitor the best mining conditions, taking into account the difficulty/block reward/exchange rates, and send work for the most profitable coin to the miner. The coins are mined and traded for a desired payout currency that’s sent to the miner. i.e. the Miner could mine the X11 protocol and the pool would send work for the most profitable x11 coin, exchange the mined coins and trade them then pay back the miner in Bitcoin or some other Altcoin…

This is the definition of a multi-pool, and they supposedly exist, so why am I frustrated?

  1. I had a terrible time finding any.
    1. There are some lists of multi-pools, but most of the sites are down/gone.
    2. Some you’ll find still working are so unpopular that the reward rate is very low.
    3. The websites/directions etc. aren’t in English. Shame on me for not being fluent in all the languages of the world.
  2. I found zpool.ca
    1. Does everything I want
    2. Popular enough to pay miners regularly
    3. The stratum server drops my connection like clock work every 2 hours 20 minutes and I have to restart all my miners to get reconnected again.

The next best offering is a service where you sell your hashing power to people who want to boost their own or don’t want to own/manage mining hardware. The multi-pool in this case points your hardware to the mining the buyer wants done and you are paid part of the fee they charge to the buyer.

Hands down the best site for selling your hashing power is NiceHash, reliable connections, active market place, profitable mining. A few months ago NiceHash was hacked someone stole 4700+ coins from the wallet they pay miners from. Seriously… the story is that an employee had their laptop stolen and this laptop had the keys to the NiceHash kingdom. How can you operate a business in this day and age without safe guards for this kind of thing? I work for a company with 30,000+ world wide employees and we can shut out an employees laptop and access to everything in seconds should they call into the help desk and report stolen hardware.

Let’s set the numbscullery aside, it is possible to implement a reliable, globally distributed, multi-pool. It is possible to place safeguards in your infrastructure and operating procedures to greatly reduce the risk exposure of hacking.

So I’m putting my time and money where my mouth is. I am going to create a globally distributed multi-mining pool that will pay miners in the more stable of the cryptocurrencies available. I plan to use a state of the art infrastructure that makes the different parts modular and not interdependent. The maintenance monitoring of health will be managed by a globally distributed team of experts. Initially the interface will be in English, but then internationalized shortly after.

Wish me luck.

Blockchain Rewards

Posted by mysticstache on

The most invasive misunderstanding related to Cryptocurrencies, is about mining rewards and the generation of coins. I sometimes wonder if seemingly intelligent and learned people willingly mislead the less informed to affect the trading price of a Cryptocurrency.

I am going to take this opportunity to explain, in the context of Bitcoin, how mining rewards work and how the network was designed to first have a stable increase in the supply of currency and second to cap the amount of currency that a would be created.

I have mentioned in earlier posts (Mining Cryptocurrencies, Mining Bitcoin with ASIC) that Bitcoin has a built in throttling system called “Difficulty” that increases or decreases the amount of computing power needed to perform the work required to find blocks on the Blockchain and earning the reward for doing so. The Difficulty is a number, a factor applied to the SHA-256 cryptographic calculation that makes it harder to do the math. Here is a chart showing the network Hash Rate and he changes in difficulty over time. The Hash Rate is the amount of work being done by miners all over the world, hunting for Blocks to earn the reward. Bitcoin was designed to issue a block reward (because a new block was found) every 10 minutes. Throttling the Difficulty is how this Block generation rate is maintained despite the rise or fall of the Network has rate. You might also notice, from the chart, that after each raise in difficulty there is a raise in Hash Rate. In addition to more users mining Bitcoin, existing miners will purchase more or upgrade their existing equipment to keep their reward rate constant.

You’re saying, “Ok so the network has built in throttling to keep the block generation time around ten minutes. But will it ever stop? How long will miners earn coins? How many coins will be minted?” One of the problems Bitcoin wanted to address, that fiat currency does not, is inflation. The controllers of any given fiat currency, while limited by laws, are left to their own to decide how much of their fiat is in circulation. Before the rise of Nazi Germany, the German government had printed so much money to pay debts, that people would need a wheel barrel to carry enough currency to purchase a loaf of bread. That’s inflation, when goods require more and more currency for their purchase. If the Bitcoin miners were awarded an unlimited number of coins forever, their value would decrease, inflation. Another attribute of the Bitcoin network is the gradual reduction of Block rewards. At the start, the Blockchain block reward was 50 bitcoins, then it was halved to 25, again to 12.5, and then finally 6.25 until Block rewards stop altogether, sometime in 2024. A total of around 21 million coins will be generated when the rewards cease. Equate that to $USD. Warren Buffet keeps that much $USD in his wallet.

I have read panicked blog posts around each halving time worded to either drive up or drive down the fiat trading price of Bitcoin. These posts usually imply a halving of the supply, not the reward. If you have any understanding of the topics discussed on the blog is should be obvious that the supply of Bitcoin CANNOT be split or reverse split like corporate stocks. It is impossible. Every transaction in the Blockchain would have to be adjusted and every block’s GUID would have to be changed and every node on the network would have to be ready to accept these changes…

Only miners are affected by the halving of the reward, not users of the supply. Miners will need to double their hash power to retain their reward rate after each halving. And then should every miner double their Has Rate, the difficulty would raise to regulate the average Block generation time to 10 minutes…. Thus, lessening the effects of the increased Hash Rate.

You might be wondering why would anyone invest heavily in mining when the reward stops in 2024. Well, right now all miners are in a race to find blocks and earn the reward. Miners who make a high level of investment in hardware and electricity earn coins as a high rate with the anticipation the investment will be profitable. But after the cessation of rewards in 2024 miners will still be able to reap the rewards of mining through transaction fees.

Network nodes validate and pass on transactions in the Blockchain. But miners are responsible for generating the blocks that contain those new transactions, so they are a vital part of the Network, or Cryptocurrency ecosystem. Rather than generating new coins, miners will acquire coins from the transaction fees attracted to the movement of currency. For instance, A transfer from address A to address B for 1.5 BTC would have an additional 0.05 BTC attached that goes to the miner that generated the block containing the transfer. Address A sends 1.55 BTC and Address B shows 1.5 BTC credited and 0.05 goes to the miner. The total supply does not raise above 21 Million, the distribution of the 21 Million coins just flows between the wallet addresses.

One of the differentiators between Bitcoin and its various Altcoin competitors is the supply to be generated. Most Altcoins have adjusted the amount of their currency to be generated and the duration of said generation of coins. Additionally, different networks have varied on the frequency of block rewards. Through altering the Cryptographic calculation and difficulty, some Blockchains generate a new block every few seconds and some much longer than 10 minutes. Generation a limit of the Altcoin’s supply is one of the factors you should research when I say “Research the Product” in, Trading Bitcoin.

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/

 

 

 

 

 

A Personal Rant on Trading Bitcoin

Posted by mysticstache on

I would say the summary of my trading practices thus far can be summed up into, “I’m an idiot.”

It’s up. it’s down. Oh, my gosh I could have made $10k. Oh, no I’ve lost $300. Ack! What does everyone else think?… Just an average day in a Cryptocurrency trader’s life. But not for the above average trader’s life. Much of the same advice you’d get from a financial planner is applies to Bitcoin and other currencies.

Research the Company

Who are the developers of the Currency you’re thinking about buying? Who are their investors? Have they successfully launched a currency before? Have previous projects they worked on failed in a spectacular fashion?

There are a lot of motivations for attempting to create a new Altcoin. Notoriety, solving social or economic problems, or greed are some of the most popular themes of Cryptocurrency. Following the successes or failures of a development team will guide you in figuring out what motivates them. Don’t get stuck into thinking greed is bad motive. Several self-interested projects made a lot of money for the development team and early investors who knew when to sell.

Research the Product

The development teams are going to market their Cryptocurrency to garner investment interest, adoption, and higher trading prices. That makes it easy to find information like what problems are they trying to solve or new Blockchain technology are they trying to introduce? Are they trying to bring a solution to Apple products or Mobile devices where others aren’t?

Invest for the Long Term

If you’re full time job is staring at charts and day trading, you can still do that with cryptocurrencies. You just need to adjust to the increased volatility. By Volatility I mean 40% up or down in a day… 30 minutes even. But if your trading on the intraday bumps you might find a higher portion of your profits going to fees and splits. So, I say invest for the long term. If I had followed the advice in these sections, I’d have a lot more disposable income.

Personal Stories

I met a guy while working at Dell that told me a story of the $300,000 240 MB Hard drive he bought. Yes, MB. Well he cashed in some of his employee purchase plan stock for a new hard drive when the stock wasn’t worth all that much. At the time of telling me the story the Hard Drive was worthless and the amount of stock he sold for it was worth $300,000. Oh, how we laughed. And now I’ll relate for you the story of the guy who bought a pizza with Bitcoin when it was worth pennies and now that Bitcoin would be worth Millions. You’d think I’d learn from others, but I too have purchased a $700 tablet for $4,000 worth of Bitcoin at today’s prices.

But I think more disappointing are opportunities I missed due to fear.

Stratis is an Altcoin someone pointed out to me in December of 2016. The price was under $0.05. I thought well let’s wait and see what happens. The interesting thing about Stratis is the development team’s partnership with Microsoft and building their platform on the .NET framework. This means that the products a developer would write to interact with their Blockchain technology can run natively on Windows Operating Systems without a lot of additional translation code or “wrapper” code. The price went up to something over $0.07 and I said, “Ok I’ll buy some.” And invested $300. I woke up one morning a few weeks later and the price is over $0.30, and has been hovering between $0.40 and $0.50 the last two weeks. The currency had a lot of earmarks of something I thought was a good investment, and I kick myself for not putting in $1500 or more at the $0.07 price.

DASH, which was launched as Dark Coin, I used to mine. The name Dark Coin certainly sounded cool to the kids and it was marketed as the first truly anonymous currency because the network had the function called mixing where your bitcoin cold be split up and mixed with fractions from other Dark Coin on the network without additional entries in the blockchain thus removing the traceability of the transactions. When fintech investing in Blockchain technologies started becoming serious business they grew up and changed the name to DASH. I had mined 8 DARK when I had a hard drive failure and said well I won’t both with that currency any more. At that time, Dash was only worth around $1.00, so I was out maybe $10. At the same time Stratis had its big jump DASH goes to $100 and has stated above $50. Now why didn’t I keep mining when the difficulty was low and amass a vast fortune? I was able to restore my Dark Wallet from a backup and retrieve my 8+ DASH, but I could have had 100 over the course of that year.

Check out the stellar raise of PIVX. I looked at it when it was less than $0.03. It’s trading at $1.38 today… $1,500.00 would be worth over $100,000, and it happened extremely fast.

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/

 

 

 

 

 

​Surprise! Bitcoin is not the only Cryptocurrency.

Posted by mysticstache on

Surprise! Bitcoin is not the only Cryptocurrency available, and that’s a good thing.

Within two years of users joining the Bitcoin network and mining coins with their CPUs competing currencies appeared developed by other teams by augmenting the open source code provided by the Bitcoin developers. Namecoin was the first and used the same protocol, SHA-256. In fact the two networks are so closely related that miners can submit the same work for both currencies. Litecoin came next and introduced the Scypt protocol.

Since then the number of Altcoins has grown to over 700, and there are over 10 different protocols. Several Cryptocurrencies never gained any popularity and because users did not maintain nodes, mining, or trade these currencies their projects have been abandoned.

Bitcoin can be thought of as the base currency. That same sort of role the US dollar plays now as an internationally accepted currency that many other currencies are traded against. Bitcoin was first, most widely accepted and most widely traded. But there are some inherent issues with Bitcoins design. In “The Bitcoin Network and You” I mentioned how the size of the Blockchain is over 110 GB. This is limits the type of hardware one can maintain a Node on. Not everyone agrees with the number of Bitcoins that will be mined before finding blocks will cease to generate a reward, some argue for less and others think it should be unlimited. These arguments usually playout in the creation of a new Altcoin.

The concept and implementation of a “Blockchain” itself has a lot of applications beyond making coins. Within each transaction is the ability to create messages. Some developers have taken this to the complex level of creating contracts, like Ethereum. Contracts between two addresses are forever part of the Blockchain once verified by enough nodes. In my work, I’ve considered Blockchain technology the logical choice for IoT applications. The distributed network allows for sensor recordings and commands to become part of the system without relying on a central server to manage the communications. That way allowing for remote devices that only need to communicate with 3 or for devices near by and not have full internet access. As long at the remote devices eventually daisy chain to all other node on the network, some other server can explore the Blockchain for the various messages to facilitate reporting and management.

The Altcoin phenomenon has motivated the team of developers of Bitcoin to consider making various improvements to the Bitcoin network to address some of the issues. These proposed changes involve a large amount of discussion and campaigning and ironically usually fail to be implemented. Bitcoin was designed without a central controlling authority. Changes to the Blockchain or the network are approved or denied by miner votes. Conflicting proposals and the option to not change are voted on by placing a vote message in the work submitted by the miners. When a clear majority opt for a decision, that change will become part of the code that makes up the currency and its network. Implementation of new code in the Network is called a Fork, and all nodes need to implement the new visions of the Node code in order or operate on the Forked code (continue to mine and trade).

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/

 

 

 

The Bitcoin Network and You

Posted by mysticstache on

I have mentioned a few times previously the term “Network” while writing about Cryptocurrencies. All Cryptocurrencies require some sort of communication between many different participants/users/ the official term is “Nodes”, which process and verify transactions. The health of a Cryptocurrency depends on there being many Nodes connected Globally. Having more Nodes increases the the speed at which a transaction is accepted, and decreases the likelihood of bad transactions propagating either through an error or malicious act.

Participating in the Network

Participating in the network is easy! Just setup a Wallet. If you go with a local wallet they come with the Node software, leave it up and running on your computer with access to the internet! The Node clients let you create multiple Wallets. So you can have a Wallet for send/receive to a dedicated Exchange, or one Wallet for collecting your Mining rewards.

Simple,well sort of, in the case for Bitcoin specifically, because of the age and popular adoption, the size of the Blockchain is over 110 GB. The standard Bitcoin wallet needs a copy the Blockchain so you need to have enough hard disk space to handle that and future growth. Each Cryptocurrency has a unique network and therefore Wallet client software. There are several created for Bitcoin and Ethereum, for other currencies links to their Wallet software will be found on their webpages. It’s time for a little explanation of the Blockchain.

The Blockchain is a detailed ledger book of every transaction that’s happened on the network. So every movement (Mining reward, trade, etc.) of every fraction of a Cryptocurrency from one address to another is recorded on the Blockchain. A Wallet appears as an address, and so the balance of a wallet is the total of all transactions of sent or received fractions of Cryptocurrency. A wallet’s balance CANNOT be negative. When Cryptocurrency is sent from one address to another through the wallet software, the wallet adds that transaction to the chain. Network Nodes verify the transaction by hashing it. It usually takes one Block (for Bitcoin 10 minutes) for the transaction be be accepted by the network and the transaction to show in the recipient’s Wallet. The balance will show as unconfirmed until a certain number (for Bitcoin 6 is recommended) have hashed and verified the transaction. The number of verifications is configurable. Some institutions or Wallets require more than others.

To hash a transaction means to encrypt or de-crypt (do some complicated math on) the transaction using a network password and the wallet’s password. These two passwords usually called “keys” ensure that the transaction is valid for the network and the came from the address specified in the transaction. Wallet’s have a unique password assigned to their network addresses to sign transaction in the network.

There is lots of great advice on backing up your wallets and creating cold backups etc. The Wallet itself is an encrypted file on your hard drive (in the case of a local desktop Wallet). This file is not large and can be zipped up and saved to your favorite backup location. If your computer dies, you can install the wallet software to new hardware and copy over the old Wallet file. The Wallet client will rebuild your balance by scanning the entire 110 GB Blockchain for transactions to and from your Wallet address.

Quick admin note, my blog will continue to discuss Cryptocurrencies in a general sense and pointing out what items are specific to Bitcoin vs. an Altocoin. But for the sake of the search engines I must litter my articles with “Bitcoin” more.

Up next Altcoins.

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/