dogecoin

3 Articles

Now That’s What I Call Crypto: 10 Years Of The Best Of Bitcoin

January 29, 2019 by 18 Comments

On January 3rd, 2009, the Genesis Block was created. This was the first entry on the Bitcoin blockchain. Because of the nature of Bitcoin, all transactions lead back to this block. This is where Bitcoin began, almost exactly ten years ago.

The Genesis Block was created by Satoshi, a person or persons we know nothing about. In the decade since, we’ve seen the astonishing rise and meteoric descent of Bitcoin, and then it happened again after the bubble was re-inflated.

Due to the nature of Bitcoins, blockchains, and ledgers, the entire history of Bitcoin has been recorded. Every coin spent and every satoshi scrupled has been recorded for all to see. It’s time for a retrospective, and not just because I wanted to see some art based on the covers of Now That’s What I Call Music albums. No, ten years is a lot of stories to tell.

Continue reading “Now That’s What I Call Crypto: 10 Years Of The Best Of Bitcoin” →

Using Bitcoin To Detect Malware

April 11, 2014 by 27 Comments

vigil

Now that you can actually buy things with bitcoins, it’s become a playground for modern malware authors. [Eric] recently lost about 5 BTC because of some malware he installed and decided to do something about it. He came up with BitcoinVigil, a web service that constantly looks at bitcoin honeypots and alerts you when bitcoins are surreptitiously removed.

The idea behind BitcoinVigil is to set up a Bitcoin wallet with a small amount of coins in it – only about $10 USD worth. When modern, Bitcoin-seeking malware is run on a computer, it looks for this ‘moneypot’ and sends an email out notifying the owner of the coins to stolen money.

[Eric] was at a LAN party a few weeks ago and ‘borrowed’ a friend’s copy of Starcraft 1. Just a few seconds after installing it, he received an alert notifying him about a few stolen bitcoins. This time [Eric] only lost a few microBTC, but better than the thousands of USD he lost before.

Wow. Such Mining Rig. So Amaze.

February 10, 2014 by 67 Comments

After hearing about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin, [Eric] decided he would have a go at designing his own mining rig. The goals of the project were to have a self-contained and stackable mining rig that had all the parts easily accessible. The result is this awesome computer enclosure, where GPU mining and traditional woodworking collide.

For mining all those coins, [Eric] is using five R9 280x GPUs. That’s an impressive amount of processing power that ended up being too much for the 1500W power supply he initially planned to use. With a few tweaks, though, he’s managing about 2.8 Mh/s out of his rig, earning him enough dogecoins to take him to the moon.

In the video below, you can see [Eric] building his rig out of 4×8 framing lumber. This isn’t a slipshod enclosure; [Eric] built this thing correctly by running the boards through a jointer, doing proper box joints with this screw and gear-based jig, and other proper woodworking techniques we don’t usually see.

Continue reading “Wow. Such Mining Rig. So Amaze.” →