Another Birthday Post

My blog is now two years old! How exciting.  The price of bitcoin today is about $378 on coinbase or Poloniex. Here is my post last year for comparison.  I recently was looking through some of my old edited blog posts. Sometimes my ideas and drafts never become full fledged posts. Here are some small posts I never released:

I sometimes in my spare time ( which is often a bit limited) stream games , so I have xsplit gamecaster basically always running in the background just in case I want to start streaming something.  A few days ago I opened up my bitcoin wallet and xsplit gamecaster thought my bitcoin wallet was a game. Maybe I will have to stream it and see what happens. It probably won’t make for a great video though.

Jeb Bush may make bitcoin illegal

Jeb Bush has recently come out against Cryptography. The implications of this are huge and frankly his efforts seem misguided. Cryptography is a huge part of essentially all financial dealing on the internet, whether it be credit cards, bank info or even our beloved bitcoins. Bitcoins very existence is defined by cryptography, and if Jeb Bush wants to make actions against cryptography  it will clearly have an impact on bitcoin.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/jeb-bush-crypto-makes-it-harder-for-the-american-government-to-do-its-job/

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/19/jeb-bush-comes-encryption/

Separatists, Central banks, and Strange New Currencies

I currently am enrolled in a microeconomics course on money. In this class, I can't help question if physical currency will exist in the future. I think it may very well not. A possible indicator of this comes from the REPUBLIC VENETA. This separatist group has indicated that they will issue their own digital currency. This currency has a major difference from other currencies like bitcoin because it will also have a central bank. This is such a major deviation from typical cryptocurrencies, I hesitate to even call this Venetian digital currency a cryptocurrency.

This declaration brings some questions to mind. One being, how can a decentralized currency have a central bank? In normal cryptocurrencies, blocks are solved and rewards are given to miners. This is how coins come to be. However, a central bank also has the ability to create and regulate currency. This makes the supply of money potentially less stable, at least from the perspective of people besides the central bank. One perk of most cryptocurrencies is that the supply of bitcoin at a future date is quite predictable. Whereas, the supply of US dollars, for example, is in a way, up to the whims of the Federal Reserve.

According to their website, the Venetian Central bank will also be able to  “... purchase public securities issued by the Venetian Government, always paying with the digital currency.” This practice is known as quantitative easing. This practice can increase the supply of money in an economy, as securities are traded for what is, in essence, cash.

A final note that that is interesting is the following statement: “Moreover, the Venetian citizens who will demonstrate their efforts as activists for the Venetian Republic, will be rewarded receiving a proportional amount of digital currency, in according to the service provided.” I wonder what exactly they mean by this and what services they want. Only time will tell.

Woes of Cryptsy

My money might be stuck in Cryptsy. Everyone says not to keep your money in an exchange. It’s a known fact you shouldn’t do it. Just like how everyone should know you need to backup your wallet. But have I used an unbacked up wallet? Yes, and I learned my lesson. Have I kept money in an exchange longer than I needed to? Well yes, that is true as well, and I might now be paying the price.

For a few months now people on Reddit have been warning of the dangers of Cryptsy, and encouraging people to not use the exchange. It seems that they were right. The exchange has just recently put up this message on their site.

In essence, it describes that one of the altcoin wallets they used had a trojan that stole roughly 13,000 BTC and  300,000 LTC. Depending on the exchange rate at the time, it is about $6 million dollars (using 400 for BTC and 3 for LTC). This event happened over a year ago.

Like a bank, Cryptsy didn’t actually need to have all its bitcoins on hand to in order to continue to operate. As long as it had enough for day-to-day operations, it could get by. However, as I mentioned before, many people raised questions about Cryptsy and its ability to continue to operate. This in essence caused a run on the bank. For the past few weeks bitcoin withdrawals have been restricted, and now the entire site seems to be stopped. Fortunately, I got most of my assets off the exchange. I just have a few fragments of a bitcoin that are stuck.

Another writer has provided a more in-depth analysis if you are interested, which can be viewed here.

The Return of the Bitcoin

I recently got a new desktop computer. With windows 10 now out, I thought I would upgrade my laptop to windows 10. But before this, I wanted to ensure that I could use my wallet backups correctly. I previously had encrypted my wallets in a 7 zip file, and had that 7 zip file saved to a few locations, a portable hard drive, a thumb drive, a Google drive, etc. I thought this would be a flawless system, as I used a strong password and the encryption should keep out any predators. The only issue that came was, I forgot the wallet encryption password. Oh dear.

I saved some of the wallets, I still had in still in use, but I was missing some.

In fact, enough time passed that I managed to forget the password to this set as well, despite my password hint.

At this point I decided to try my first brute force attack. I downloaded a program to crack my password. I soon realized that this method would take, more or less, forever. The program does very specific things very well. For example, if you lost a 3 digit all numbers pin, it would be ok for that. Fortunately, I realized I saved my password in my password vault. So after much worrying and quite a bit of effort, the great crisis was averted.

Free dogecoin offer to newcomers

If you have been following my blog for a while, but haven't yet got any dogecoin for yourself, now is a great time to do it! Follow this link for an article that gives step by step directions to get 400 dogecoin totally free, for a very short amount of time.

http://bitcoinnewschannel.com/2015/12/31/giving-dogecoin-to-spread-the-word-about-cryptocurrency/


Happy New Year and to the moon!