A Blockchain, Robotics And AI Event In Vietnam

April 27, 2018 by Sean Boyce 7 Comments

Blockchain Education Network Vietnam recently held an event titled “Building a Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem with Blockchain”. The title alone has three of my favorite things in it, so when a client of mine asked me if I could put together a little hardware demonstration for the event, I jumped at the opportunity.

I also thought I’d take a moment to write about it, because I haven’t seen much coverage of emerging technology events in the developing world, and the fact is that there’s a consistently high level of interest. I’ve yet to go to an event that wasn’t filled to capacity, and I hope to share some of that enthusiasm with you.

Continue reading “A Blockchain, Robotics And AI Event In Vietnam” →

The 348,296th Article About Cryptocurrency

January 9, 2018 by Lauren Faris 42 Comments

The public has latched onto the recent market events with an intense curiosity brought about by a greed for instant riches. In the last year alone, the value of Bitcoin has risen by 1,731%. We’re talking gold rush V2.0, baby. Money talks, and with a resounding $615 billion held up in cryptocurrencies, it is clear why this is assuredly not the first cryptocurrency article you have read — maybe even today. An unfortunate side effect of mass interest in a subject is the wildfire-like spread of misinformation. So, what exactly is a blockchain, and what can you still do now that everyone has finally jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon?

Continue reading “The 348,296th Article About Cryptocurrency” →

Don’t Get Caught Up In Blockchain Hype

December 16, 2017 by Jenny List 95 Comments

It’s the story of the moment, isn’t it. As the price of Bitcoin continues on its wild and crazy rollercoaster ride, everyone’s talking about cryptocurrencies, and in almost mystical terms, about blockchains. Perhaps to be a little more accurate, we should report that they are talking about The Blockchain, a single entity which it seems is now the answer to all ills.

Of course, there is no single blockchain, instead blockchain technologies form the underpinnings of the cryptocurrency boom. Since little dollar signs seem to be buzzing around in front of everyone talking about that subject, it has attracted the attention of hordes of people with little understanding of it. APNIC have a good article aimed at those people: Don’t Get Caught Up In Blockchain Hype, which is worth a read even if you do understand blockchain technologies.

It makes the point that many large enterprises are considering investments in blockchain technologies, and lists some of the potential pitfalls that they may encounter. There may be a slight element of schadenfreude for some of the technically literate in seeing this in action, but given that such things can have consequences for those among us it’s too important to ignore.

As an analogy of a relatively clueless executive jumping on a tech-driven bandwagon, a software company of our acquaintance had a boss who decided in the heady days before the dotcom crash that the organisation would fully embrace open-source. Something to be welcomed, you might think, but given that the software in question was a commercially sensitive asset upon which all company salaries depended, it was fortunate that he listened to his developers when they explained to him exactly what open source entails.

Whether you are a blockchain savant or an uninterested bystander, it’s worth a read as you may sometime need its arguments to save someone from their own folly. If you fancy a simple example to help understand something of how blockchains work, we’ve got that covered for you.

Bitcoin coins image: Mike Cauldwell [Public domain].

Learn About Blockchains By Building One

November 23, 2017 by Jenny List 27 Comments

What do we curious Hackaday scribes do when we want to learn about something? First port of call: search the web.

When that something is blockchain technology and we’re looking for an explanation that expands our cursory overview into a more fundamental understanding of the basic principles, there is a problem. It seems that to most people blockchains equate to one thing: cryptocurrencies, and since cryptocurrencies mean MONEY, they then descend into a cultish frenzy surrounded by a little cloud of flying dollar signs. Finding [Daniel van Flymen]’s explanation of the fundamentals of a blockchain in terms of the creation of a simple example chain using Python was thus a breath of fresh air, and provided the required education. Even if he does start the piece by assuming that the reader is yet another cryptocurrency wonk.

We start by creating a simple class to hold all the Python functions, then we are shown a single block. In his example it’s a JSON object, and it contains the payload in the form of a transaction record along with the required proof-of-work and hash. We’re then taken through a very simple proof-of-work algorithm, before being shown how the whole can be implemented as very simple endpoints.

You are not going to launch a cryptocurrency using this code, and indeed that wasn’t our purpose in seeking it out. But if you are curious about the mechanics of a blockchain and are equally tired of evangelists of The Blockchain who claim it will cure all ills but can’t explain it in layman’s terms, then this relatively simple example is for you.

The wrong way to build a blockchain image: Jenny List. #FarmLife.

IoT With The Ethereum Blockchain

November 9, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Anyone keeping up with financial news today is surely inundated with stories about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. While most of the news is about the potentially inflated value of some of these coins, and how drastically they have changed in price in just a decade, there are other interesting things going on behind the scenes. For example, the currency Ethereum allows for a distributed programming platform of sorts to be implemented in the blockchain, which [GusGorman402] has taken advantage of in his latest project (YouTube link, embedded below).

The device that he built is based on an ESP8266 which connects to a router running an instance of a Go Ethereum node. Essentially, he uses the Ethereum blockchain to control an LED connected to the ESP8266 using a feature of Ethereum called a smart contract. While this might be a misleading name, a smart contract is basically an autonomous program that can do virtually anything a programmer writes into it. While this is a roundabout way to write a “Hello World” program, it does demonstrate the power of the Ethereum platform when compared to other cryptocurrencies.

If you’re interested in currency trading, blockchains, cryptography, or the future of computing, be sure to check out the detailed video after the break. It’s a curious new tool, and it will be interesting to see how developers and hackers alike use it to accomplish things we’ve never thought of yet.

Continue reading “IoT With The Ethereum Blockchain” →

Ethereum: GPU Mining Is Back But For How Long?

September 1, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 66 Comments

By now, everyone and their dog has at least heard of Bitcoin. While no government will accept tax payments in Bitcoin just yet, it’s ridiculously close to being real money. We’ve even paid for pizza delivery in Bitcoin. But it’s not the only cryptocurrency in town.

Ethereum initially launched in 2015 is an open source, it has been making headway among the 900 or so Bitcoin clones and is the number two cryptocurrency in the world, with only Bitcoin beating it in value. This year alone, the Ether has risen in value by around 4000%, and at time of writing is worth $375 per coin. And while the Bitcoin world is dominated by professional, purpose-built mining rigs, there is still room in the Ethereum ecosystem for the little guy or gal.

Ethereum is for Hackers

There may be many factors behind Ethereum’s popularity, however one reason is that the algorithm is designed to be resistant to ASIC mining. Unlike Bitcoin, anyone with a half decent graphics card or decent gaming rig can mine Ether, giving them the chance to make some digital currency. This is largely because mining Ethereum coins requires lots of high-speed memory, which ASICs lack. The algorithm also has built-in ASIC detection and will refuse to mine properly on them.

Small-scale Bitcoin miners were stung when the mining technology jumped from GPU to ASICs. ASIC-based miners simply outperformed the home gamer, and individuals suddenly discovered that their rigs were not worth much since there was a stampede of people trying to sell off their high-end GPU’s all at once. Some would go on to buy or build an ASIC but the vast majority just stopped mining. They were out of the game they couldn’t compete with ASICs and be profitable since mining in its self uses huge amounts of electricity.

Economies of scale like those in Bitcoin mining tend to favor a small number of very large players, which is in tension with the distributed nature of cryptocurrencies which relies on consensus to validate transactions. It’s much easier to imagine that a small number of large players would collude to manipulate the currency, for instance. Ethereum on the other hand hopes to keep their miners GPU-based to avoid huge mining farms and give the average Joe a chance at scoring big and discovering a coin on their own computer.

Ethereum Matters

Ethereum’s rise to popularity has basically undone Bitcoin’s move to ASICs, at least in the gamer and graphics card markets. Suddenly, used high-end graphics cards are worth something again. And there are effects in new equipment market. For instance, AMD cards seem to outperform other cards at the moment and they are taking advantage of this with their release of Mining specific GPU drivers for their new Vega architecture. Indeed, even though AMD bundled its hottest RX Vega 64 GPU with two games, a motherboard, and a CPU in an attempt to make the package more appealing to gamers than miners, AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 sold out in five minutes with Ethereum miners being blamed.

Besides creating ripples in the market for high-end gaming computers, cryptocurrencies are probably going to be relevant in the broader economy, and Ethereum is number two for now. In a world where even banks are starting to take out patents on blockchain technology in an attempt to get in on the action, cryptocurrencies aren’t as much of a fringe pursuit as they were a few years ago. Ethereum’s ASIC resistance is perhaps its killer feature, preventing centralization of control and keeping the little hacker in the mining game. Only time will tell if it’s going to be a Bitcoin contender, but it’s certainly worth keeping your eye on.

BitCluster Brings A New Way To Snoop Through BitCoin Transactions

July 23, 2016 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Mining the wealth of information in the BitCoin blockchain is nothing new, but BitCluster goes a long way to make sense of the information you’ll find there. The tool was released by Mathieu Lavoie and David Decary-Hetu, PH.D. on Friday following their talk at HOPE XI.

I greatly enjoyed sitting in on the talk which began with some BitCoin basics. The cryptocurrency uses user generated “wallets” which are essentially addresses that identify transactions. Each is established using key pairs and there are roughly 146 million of these wallets in existence now

If you’re a thrifty person you might think you can get one wallet and use it for years. That might be true of the sweaty alligator-skin nightmare you’ve had in your back pocket for a decade now. It’s not true when it comes to digital bits — they’re cheap (some would say free). People who don’t generate a new wallet for every transaction weaken their BitCoin anonymity and this weakness is the core of BitCluster’s approach.

Every time you transfer BitCoin (BTC) you send the network the address of the transaction when you acquired the BTCs and sign it with your key to validate the data. If you reuse the same wallet address on subsequent transactions — maybe because you didn’t spend all of the wallet’s coins in one transaction or you overpaid and have the change routed back to your wallet. The uniqueness of that signed address can be tracked across those multiple transactions. This alone won’t dox you, but does allow a clever piece of software to build a database of nodes by associating transactions together.

Mathieu’s description of first attempts at mapping the blockchain were amusing. The demonstration showed a Python script called from the command line which started off analyzing a little more than a block a second but by the fourth or fifth blocks hit the process had slowed to a standstill that would never progress. This reminds me of some of the puzzles from Project Euler.

After a rabbit hole of optimizations the problem has been solved. All you need to recreate the work is a pair of machines (one for Python one for mondoDB) with the fastest processors you can afford, a 500 GB SSD, 32 GB of RAM (but would be 64 better), Python 64-bit, and at least a week of time. The good news is that you don’t have to recreate this. The 200GB database is available for download through a torrent and the code to navigate it is up on GitHub. Like I said, this type of blockchain sleuthing isn’t new but a powerful open source tool like this is.

Both Ransomware and illicit markets can be observed using this technique. Successful, yet not-so-cautious ransomers sometimes use the same BitCoin address for all payments. For example, research into a 2014 data sample turned up a ransomware instance that pulled in $611k (averaging $10k per day but actually pulling in most of the money during one three-week period). If you’re paying attention you know using the same wallet address is a bad move and this ransomware was eventually shut down.

Illicit markets like Silk Road are another application for BitCluster. Prior research methods relied on mining comments left by customers to estimate revenue. Imagine if you had to guess at how well Amazon was doing reading customer reviews and hoping they mentioned the price? The ability to observe BTC payment nodes is a much more powerful method.

A good illicit market won’t use just one wallet address. But to protect customers they use escrow address and these do get reused making cluster analysis possible. Silk Road was doing about $800k per month in revenue at its height. The bulk of purchases were for less than $500 with only a tiny percentage above $1000. But those large purchases were likely to be drug purchases of a kilo or more. That small sliver of total transactions actually added up to about a third of the total revenue.

It’s fascinating to peer into transactions in this manner. And the good news is that there’s plenty of interesting stuff just waiting to be discovered. After all, the blockchain is a historical record so the data isn’t going anywhere. BitCluster is intriguing and worth playing with. Currently you can search for a BTC address and see total BTC in and out, then sift through income and expense sorted by date, amount, etc. But the tool can be truly great with more development. On the top of the wishlist are automated database updates, labeling of nodes (so you can search “Silk Road” instead of a numerical address), visual graphs of flows, and a hosted version of the query tool (but computing power becomes prohibitive.)