cryptocurrency

46 Articles

The Pound ( Or Euro, Or Dollar ) Can Still Be In Your Pocket

October 27, 2024 by 85 Comments

A British journalistic trope involves the phrase “The pound in your pocket”, a derisory reference to the 1960s Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s use of it to try to persuade the public that a proposed currency devaluation wouldn’t affect them. Nearly six decades later not so many Brits carry physical pounds in their pockets as electronic transfers have become more prevalent, but the currency remains. So much so that the governor of the Bank of England has had to reassure the world that the pound won’t be replaced by a proposed “Britcoin” cryptocurrency should that be introduced.

Normally matters of monetary policy aren’t within Hackaday’s remit, but since the UK is not the only country to mull over the idea of a tightly regulated cryptocurrency tied to their existing one, there’s a privacy angle to be considered while still steering clear of the fog of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. The problem is that reading the justification for the new digital pound from the Bank of England, it’s very difficult to see much it offers which isn’t already offered by existing cashless payment systems. Meanwhile it offers to them a blank regulatory sheet upon which they can write any new rules they want, and since that inevitably means some of those rules will affect digital privacy in a negative manner, it should be a worry to anyone whose government has considered the idea. Being at pains to tell us that we’ll still be able to see a picture of the King (or a dead President, or a set of bridges) on a bit of paper thus feels like an irrelevance as increasingly few of us handle banknotes much anyway these days. Perhaps that act in itself will now become more of an act of protest. And just when we’d persuaded our hackerspaces to go cashless, too.

Header: Wikitropia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Books You Should Read: Red Team Blues

June 1, 2023 by 12 Comments

Martin Hench really likes playing on the Red Team — being on the attack. He’s a financial geek, understands cryptocurrency, understands how money is moved around to keep it hidden, and is really good at mining data from social media. He puts those skills together as a forensic accountant. Put simply, Martin finds money that people want hidden. Against his better judgment, Marty does the job of a lifetime, and makes an absolute mint. But that job had hair, and he’s got to live through the aftermath. It turns out, that might just be a challenge, as three separate groups want a piece of him.

Red Team Blues, a work of fiction by [Cory Doctorow] about cryptocurrency, trust, finance, and society as a whole. When [Doctorow] offered to send us a copy to review, we jumped at the chance, and can give it a hearty recommendation as a fun and thoughtful tale. The moral seems to be that while everyone plays the sordid finance game, the government should really work harder to disentangle the mess, but maybe we would do better if more people opted for integrity. There is also a real point to be made about the dark side of cryptocurrency, in that it enables crime, ransomware, and money laundering on a global scale. For all the pluses for privacy and anonymity, there’s some real downsides. The characters spend most of the book wrestling with that dichotomy in the background.

The book took something of a moralizing turn just over halfway through. Which, depending on your viewpoint, you’ll either really appreciate, or have to hold your nose a bit to get through. But the suspense pulls the reader through it, making for an overall enjoyable read. As an added bonus, you might end up with a better mental image of how the pieces of digital privacy, finance, and the real world all fit together.

The book has all the fun references to Tor, Signal, Bitcoin, and computer history you could want. And the central MacGuffin is an interesting one: a cryptocurrency that runs on proof-of-secure-enclave, eliminating the ridiculous power consumption of proof-of-work schemes. All of this with some rich Silicon Valley lore setting up the background. Our conclusion? Two wrenches up.

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Hackaday Links: April 9, 2023

April 9, 2023 by 17 Comments

When it comes to cryptocurrency security, what’s the best way to secure the private key? Obviously, the correct answer is to write it on a sticky note and put it on the bezel of your monitor; nobody’ll ever think of looking there. But, if you’re slightly more paranoid, and you have access to a Falcon 9, you might just choose to send it to the Moon. That’s what is supposed to happen in a few months’ time, as private firm Lunar Outpost’s MAPP, or Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, heads to the Moon. The goal is to etch the private key of a wallet, cheekily named “Nakamoto_1,” on the rover and fund it with 62 Bitcoins, worth about $1.5 million now. The wallet will be funded by an NFT sale of space-themed electronic art, because apparently the project didn’t have enough Web3.0 buzzwords yet. So whoever visits the lunar rover first gets to claim the contents of the wallet, whatever they happen to be worth at the time. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a human who visits.

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The Surprisingly Simple Way To Steal Cryptocurrency

January 6, 2023 by 77 Comments

In the news a few days ago, the revelation that Luke Dashjr, a core Bitcoin developer, had his wallet compromised, and lost 200 BTC. A small fortune, and something of a shock. I’m guessing that someone with that expertise would not have left his private key lying around, so as a cryptocurrency non-enthusiast I’m left curious as to how the attackers might have done it. So I phoned a few friends who do walk those paths for an explanation, and the result was a fascinating conversation or two. The most probable answer is still that someone broke into his computer and copied the keys — straight-up computer theft. But there’s another possible avenue that doesn’t involve stealing anything, and is surprisingly simple. Continue reading “The Surprisingly Simple Way To Steal Cryptocurrency” →

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Hackaday Links: December 5, 2021

December 5, 2021 by 15 Comments

Sad news from Germany, with the recent passing of a legend in the crypto community: Mr. Goxx, the crypto-trading hamster. The rodent rose to fame in the crypto community for his trades, which were generated at random during his daily exercise routines — his exercise wheel being used like a roulette wheel to choose a currency, and a pair of tunnels determined whether the transaction would be a buy or sell. His trading career was short, having only started this past June, but he was up 20% over that time — that’s nothing to sneeze at. Our condolences to Mr. Goxx’s owners, and to the community which sprung up around the animal’s antics.

It might seem a little early to start planning which conferences you’d like to hit in 2022, but some require a little more lead time than others. One that you might not have heard of is DINACON, the Digital Naturalism Conference, which explores the intersection of technology and the natural world. The con is set for the entire month of July 2022 and will be held in Sri Lanka. It has a different structure than most cons, in that participants attend for a week or so on a rotating basis, much like a biology field station summer session. It sounds like a lot of fun, and the setting couldn’t be more idyllic.

If you haven’t already killed your holiday gift budget buying NFTs, here’s something you might want to consider: the Arduino Uno Mini Limited Edition. What makes it a Limited Edition, you ask? Practically, it’s the small footprint compared to the original Uno and the castellated edges, but there are a bunch of other extras. Each elegant black PCB with gold silk screening is individually numbered and comes in presentation-quality packaging. But the pièce de résistance, or perhaps we should say the cavallo di battaglia, is that each one comes with a hand-signed letter from the Arduino founders. They honestly look pretty sharp, and at $45, it’s really not a bad collector’s piece.

And finally, the YouTube algorithm giveth again, when this infrastructure gem popped up in our feed. You wouldn’t think there’d be much of interest to see in a water main repair, but you’d be wrong, especially when that main is 50′ (15 m) below the surface, and the repair location is 600′ (183 m) from the access hatch. Oh yeah, and the pipe is only 42″ (1 m) in diameter, and runs underneath a river. There’s just so much nope in this one, especially since the diver has to swim into a special turning elbow just to get pointed in the right direction; how he turns around to swim out is not worth thinking about. Fascinating tidbits include being able to see the gravel used to protect the pipe in the riverbed through the crack in the pipe, and learning that big water mains are not completely filled, at least judging by the small air space visible at the top of the pipe. Those with claustrophobia are probably best advised to avoid this one, but it’s still amazing to see how stuff like this is done.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 5, 2021” →

Racks of ASIC mining hardware

Bitcoin In For Bumpy Ride As China Crackdown Shakes Things Up

August 20, 2021 by 105 Comments

Bitcoin. The magical internet money is often derided as “worthless” and “made up” by those who forget that all currencies only have value because we believe in them. Perhaps the world’s strongest currency not backed up by guns and ammo, Bitcoin nonetheless remains a controversial invention, as do the many cryptocurrencies that followed in its wake.

Recently, the Chinese government has cracked down on operations within the country. With China hosting the world’s largest fraction of Bitcoin mining capability, it’s sent shockwaves through the network and had a huge effect in a multitude of ways. Here’s what’s going down.

Continue reading “Bitcoin In For Bumpy Ride As China Crackdown Shakes Things Up” →

Hamster Trades Crypto Better Than You

July 7, 2021 by 19 Comments

The inner machinations of the mind of cryptocurrency markets are an enigma. Even traditional stock markets often seem to behave at random, to the point that several economists seriously suggest that various non-human animals might outperform one market or another just by random chance alone. The classic example is a monkey picking stocks at random, but in the modern world the hamster [Mr Goxx] actively trades crypto from inside his hamster cage.

[Mr Goxx]’s home comprises a normal apartment and a separate office where he can make his trades. The office contains an “intention wheel” where he can run in order to select a currency to trade, and two tunnels that [Mr Goxx] can use to declare his intention to buy or sell the currency he selected with the wheel. The wheel is connected to an Arduino Nano with an optical encoder, and the Nano also detects the hamster’s presence in the “buy” or “sell” tunnel and lights up status LEDs when he wants to execute a trade. The Nano also communicates with an intricate Java program which overlays information on the live video feed and also executes the trades in real life with real money.

Live updates are sent directly both on Twitter and Reddit, besides the live Twitch stream of [Mr Goxx] we linked above. The stream only shows his office and not his apartment, and he’s mostly active at night (Berlin time). But we can’t wait for his random walks to yield long-term results which can be analyzed for years to come. In the meantime we’ll see if others have been able to make any profits in crypto with any less-random methods.