WY Select Committee on Blockchain

September 23, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

Today is the first day of the 2020 Wyoming Blockchain Stampede and it kicks off with two days of exploring interim and upcoming legislation by the Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology and Digital Innovation Technology. Wyoming’s Blockchain Task Force, through their diligence and genuine care, earned a transition to a select committee of the Wyoming Legislature.

Self-Sovereignty and Digital Identity: One of the two most interesting topics of the day was the report out of the Digital Identity Working Group. Sovereignty, as a word, is usually applied to countries or nations. When applied to an individual in the digital world “sovereign” carries some new-age weight. At its core, it means that I have an intangible digital representation through which I can act. It must be with purpose, attributable to my identity, and signed with my private keys. This isn’t a VeriSign transaction or scanning and sending back a signed PDF. This isn’t an avatar, handle, or moniker to use online. This is digital self. This is a huge leap forward and I applaud the committee members and their outside experts in working to create (again) cutting-edge legislation that understands where technology is taking us and anticipating tomorrow’s legal headaches.

Crowdfunding. ICOs, STOs, and beyond: The initial coin offering (ICO) craze provided some tough lessons for users in the crypto space. Some users thought they were buying a stake in the project like an IPO, but most of these coins proved to be utility tokens and simply gave users network access based upon their holdings. The emerging security token offerings (STO) seek to be compliant with securities laws and provide digital ownership of trade-able assets.

As a DIYer and this being a DIY site, the bill encompassing crowdfunding that the committee has voted to move on is extremely important. In securities there are two types of investors: accredited and non-accredited. Accredited investors are the “it takes money to make money” crowd and have at least $1M of net worth or two consecutive years of earnings over $200,000. Accredited investors can invest large sums in lucrative, non-registered investments. Non-accredited investors are most of the people I know, and non-accredited investors are capped at what they can invest. Why? No good reason.

No matter how much money an individual has, or doesn’t have, the government should not dictate how much of that money can be invested and where. Because I do not make as much money as an accredited investor doesn’t mean that I should be precluded from reaping as many rewards from my investments as possible. This is where the SEC and Satoshi’s vision collide the hardest for me.

SPDI Banks: It’s happening!

September 16, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

SPDI Banks have been a topic for a long time on WyoBlock and today Kraken was given the first SPDI charter by the State of Wyoming. Kraken is now the first digital bank in the United States.

While this was being announced I was teaching a blockchain class and mentioned that Kraken had applied, but the decision was pending. I’m going to have to update my PowerPoint presentation.

Why DeFi Isn’t Ready for Prime Time.

September 3, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

Ok, so “Bart Simpson” patterns are frequent in crypto price charts. However, there is usually activity before and after the pattern, and the pattern doesn’t usually include an 800x pump and an 810x dump. The chart above is the trading chart for HotDog Token – a liquidity platform claiming to be like UniSwap that within 9 hours went from a value of $1.31 to nearly $8,000, and then down to $1.00. At the time of writing the value of a HotDog Token was just over $0.02.

When I talk about crypto or teach a class on blockchain this is the exact kind of hot garbage I warn listeners and students about. This token offered promises of one million percent returns on APY. In the midst of DeFi hype, people actually bought in. In fairness, it is plain to see that if one bought in during the first two hours and sold before the final hour – they made serious gains. This is a pump and dump manipulated by those who have the liquidity to start the craze, and then they walked away by selling to suckers.

Crypto trading has been likened to the Wild West. If this is true, then Defi is like the “Lord of the Flies.” Nobody knows who’s in charge, everybody is hungry, and Piggy is gonna die. DeFi has a lot of promise, but if mainstream adoption is ever going to come to pass the legitimate operators need to educate users. It is impossible to regulate technology that is borderless and trustless, so all that can be done is to educate.

Like my sweet little Grandma used to say, “If someone offers you one million percent in returns for next to nothing, it’s too good to be true, Dumbass.”

Also, who puts their hard-earned money into a token named after food? A token that has nothing to do with food. Seriously?

Wyoming SPDI Banks and Your Bank

July 23, 2020July 23, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

New guidance came out yesterday from the Office of the Comptroller of Currency regarding the authority of national banks to provide cryptocurrency custody services for customers. The letter (link here) is in response to an un-referenced query that states that a national bank that is a current provider of existing asset custodianship schemes can provide custodial and secure storage services for cryptographic keys. Props to Jonathan Gould, who drafted the letter, for explaining to the uninitiated that cryptocurrency coins exist on the blockchain and that wallets only hold the private cryptographic keys that enable ownership.

So, what does this mean? It means that if your bank is chartered nationally that they could offer to hold onto your private keys. For a fee, I am sure.

Why would I want to do this? This option is attractive for crypto investors who are concerned that they could lose their private keys. Once they’re gone, they are gone. Bitcoin does not have tech support and there are no do-overs. It is also attractive for estates where assets may be divided at a later date. It may appeal to people who are intimidated by, and don’t want to deal with this:

The gibberish above is a (modified) private key that is usually held in a wallet and is never seen by the user. It is often generated by 12 or 24 words that are hashed together to form public and private keys. Those words (written down as a paper wallet) are usually all that is required to recover a private key. The guidance letter goes so far as to state:

Keys can be stored in “hot” wallets or “cold” wallets. Hot wallets are connected to the internet, which makes them convenient to access but more susceptible to hacking. Cold wallets are physical devices that are completely offline (for example, paper or hardware wallets that can be stored in a physical vault). Currently, cold storage is considered the most secure method of storing cryptographic keys.

So, if I can write down words or use a hardware wallet and store them safely myself – why would I go to my bank and pay? If you are asking yourself this question then you understand what makes crypto different and why Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. If you are not comfortable with this question, yet still want to be in crypto, then use these services and on-ramps that are being built for you. I am not a crypto elitist. I believe that the more people that enter the space that the merrier we’ll all be!

Wyoming’s SPDI Banks, are they obsolete now? Hahaha….no. This is a good thing for SPDIs. The text of the federal guidance limits itself to only cryptocurrencies, assets that can be exchanged one-for-one. SPDI banks are a level above and at least a degree removed. Wyoming’s “golden crypto opportunity” is not limited only to fungible cryptocurrencies. The best SPDI platforms that I have heard about are those that offer on/off ramps and asset management support for real estate, oil field equipment, and transportation assets that are non-fungible, bundled, or unique enough in their function or demand to be tokenized on a blockchain. Let Wells Fargo hold your uncle’s ethereum keys. SPDIs are going to help county assessors and private industry make title companies and title insurance obsolete in the real estate world. SPDIs will facilitate asset management for global interchange agreements and transportation modality that will make modern shipping look like ox carts and pioneer caravans. SPDIs are built upon the premise of bringing traditional banking services to market that envelop and grow the value of assets on the blockchain. It doesn’t matter if its coins or timeshares.

This site is for the DIYer. While Wells Fargo, US Bank, and others have their uses, when it comes to cryptocurrency if you are comfortable taking your own future into your hands please do your own research about Ledger cold wallets. They’re equally as good in a home safe, a bank’s safety deposit box, or a strategically buried coffee can. Not an endorsement, but as the old saying goes…..

Not your keys, not your crypto.

#startwithwy #blockchain #crypto #spdi #keys #ledger #wyoming #blockchain #diy #defi

DIY: Repair an Overheating GPU

July 22, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

Voiding the Warranty on an XFX Radeon RX 580 GTS XXX Edition.

So, the caption above isn’t completely correct. There are plenty of arguments about whether or not performing your own repairs will void the warranty on non-related parts. However, all thoughts regarding warranties went out the window when I re-flashed the bios on my graphics cards last year.

A few months ago I wrote about mining ETH for a year and how well my mining rig was doing. One of the eight cards has always run warmer than the others, but every card is different and it wasn’t a dangerous temperature. It consistently ran at about 144 degrees Fahrenheit. However, after that article the temp started creeping up. It would be 147 or 149 regularly. I have my thermal safety warning set at 167 degrees and my overheat shutdown set at 186 degrees.

One night I woke up to thermal alarm emails from Minerstat and I shut the rig down remotely because I am not going to troubleshoot anything at 3am. The next day I turned the rig back on and the temps kept climbing after I booted the mining software. When the temp climbed over 170 degrees, I shut it down again. I checked and cleaned connections, made sure they were tight, air-dusted the fan blades, and tried again. As I watched the temps rise again I was able to identify the problem card in the dashboard and upon physical inspection only one cooling fan was working and not very well.

Now, I got a really good deal on these cards new from Amazon, but the rig hasn’t quite yet met its ROI and Mrs. WyoBlock is not going to approve a replacement graphics card. A few YouTube videos (links below) and a quick Amazon order for fans with a wiring harness and I evaluated my “damned if I do(n’t)” situation.

Disassembly really wasn’t difficult in theory. There are only 6 screws that hold this model together. Four with springs and two smaller screws.

Notice the tiny warranty sticker on the bottom-middle screw.

I said that technically only 6 screws hold the unit together, but the way the chassis and the heat sink were stuck together had me doubting that and cursing my YouTube teachers. After increasing amounts of pulling, panic-sweating, and genuine concern the pieces finally separated.

Ah, thermal pads. That’s what was sticking them together so well.

There are four additional screws that hold the heat sink and radiator to the fan housing. After removing those and the four-pin fan connector, it’s time to get to work.

I hadn’t intended to replace thermal pads. Yes, I had thermal paste for the processor on hand. Given the condition of the pads and the fact that they spanned across more than the necessary components – I had to stop, order 1mm thermal pads from Amazon, and wait.

Thermal paste and pads only work when they can transfer heat between materials. These pads were installed in strips and the parts of the pad between the memory and the heat sink probably conducted heat very well. The parts of the pad that do not have contact will just hold heat and add to the problem. So, I cleaned them all off.

The replacement fans turned out to be OEM, so that was nice. They installed into the fan grill easily with three screws each. Be sure to use the cable channels and clips so there is no interference with the fans or the heat sink.

So fresh and so clean. Almost. Thermal pad still in place to measure the size.

I didn’t have any bent fins or debris so a bit of rubbing alcohol and a coffee filter to clean the contact surface and it’s nice and shiny.

Nice new pads for the memory chips and the resistor bank.

A slightly larger than usual drop of thermal paste because I was nervous about mating to copper.

Reassembly is disassembly in reverse order. Make certain to reconnect your 4-pin fan connector before setting the circuit chassis to the heat sink. Gently fit the circuit board to the heat sink and line up the screw holes before applying any real pressure. Tighten screws to hand-tight and then stand back admiring your work. Either it’s fixed or a pretty new paperweight for the office.

I re-installed the card in the mining rig and was, admittedly, surprised when the “blue light of life” came on and the fans started moving. So far, so good. I cautiously watched the Minerstat dashboard as the temps gradually increased over the first few minutes. The temperature of the card stabilized at 138 degrees – 6 degrees cooler than it ran before I started having concern and issues. Not bad. However, as the card has been running for over 12 hours at the same load and static fan speed – the temperature has dropped to 127 degrees! An amazing improvement.

It almost makes me want to replace the thermal pads in all my cards. Not really.

YouTube Links:

Polish Language, very detailed visual step-by-step.

JAW Media, step-by-step on a used card.

Replacement fans on Amazon.

#crypto #minerstat #rx580 #mining #ethmining #diy

Making Cents of Satoshis

June 15, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

The numbers that come after the decimal in an amount of bitcoin are called satoshis. Named after the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, satoshis, or sats, work like cents within a dollar. Except they weren’t designed to be pennies.

Glassnode released new information today that the number of Bitcoin wallet addresses with at least 0.1 bitcoin, or BTC, is at an all-time high. Meaning that more money is coming into the market. You may be wondering what the big deal is about owning 0.1 BTC, isn’t that simply 10 bit-cents? Who cares about a dime?

The US Dollar is customarily represented with two decimals to identify the parts of a whole in the numeric value – $0.00. Since the US Treasury has a monopoly on producing the dollar the whole numbers to the left of the decimal can grow infinitely (apparently) and we keep it simple at two decimals on the right. Bitcoin is capped at 21 million; that is all that can ever be produced. Because it is a finite number it must be incremented to a greater degree to allow for smaller transactions as the value of a single bitcoin grows. Bitcoin has eight satoshis after the decimal to accommodate all sizes of transactions. Where a dollar is one-hundred cents, one bitcoin is one-hundred million satoshis.

Let’s break it down. At the time of writing one bitcoin is trading at $9,555.

1 BTC = 9,555 USD
0.1 BTC = 955.5 USD
0.01 BTC = 95.55 USD
0.001 BTC = 9.555 USD
0.0001 BTC = 0.9555 USD
0.00001 BTC = 0.09555 USD
0.000001 BTC = 0.009555 USD
0.0000001 BTC = 0.0009555 USD
0.00000001 BTC = 0.00009555 USD

When interacting with bitcoin and exchanging it, it is helpful to work in satoshis.

1 BTC = 100,000,000 sats
0.1 BTC = 10,000,000 sats
0.01 BTC = 1,000,000 sats
0.001 BTC = 100,000 sats
0.0001 BTC = 10,000 sats
0.00001 BTC = 1,000 sats
0.000001 BTC = 100 sats
0.0000001 BTC = 10 sats
0.00000001 BTC = 1 sat

So, with Glassnode’s new data we can see that the number of Bitcoin wallets with more than 10 million satoshis (0.1 BTC) is at an all-time high. As the value of a bitcoin grows so will the value of a satoshi. For this reason it is important to think and operate on the right-hand side of the decimal point. It is a bit of a shift from the “0.00” we are accustomed to, but this is one of the key components of the Bitcoin protocol that make it an anti-inflationary digital cash system.

Portions of a bitcoin can be bought, sold, or exchanged. For those looking into Bitcoin this should further demonstrate that one does not need to buy a whole bitcoin to participate. “Stacking sats” is a common phrase in crypto for buying what you can when you can and holding onto it because there is a belief that the value of a bitcoin will rise over time. Not financial advise.

Fun fact from bitcoin.org:
Bitcoin – with capitalization, is used when describing the concept of Bitcoin, or the entire network itself. e.g. “I was learning about the Bitcoin protocol today.”
bitcoin – without capitalization, is used to describe bitcoins as a unit of account. e.g. “I sent ten bitcoins today.”; it is also often abbreviated BTC or XBT.

Follow Up: Is Nimiq (NIM) the Future?

June 10, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

Six months ago I wrote about Nimiq and their crypto for everyone, NIM, being the future. I am always looking at small caps that have business cases for things that I would actually use. This is what attracted me to Nimiq, it’s stupidly easy. Seriously, go to Nimiq.com and set up a wallet. It takes thirty seconds; I’ll wait.

Easy, huh? Behind the ease-of-use and cute Nimiqon (a visual representation of your cryptographic wallet address) is a serious javascript, web-native, and highly-secure electronic cash protocol. There’s more, but I’ll stop here because you’ve already set up your wallet and are on the site, and you can read the white paper and road map for yourself.

Since the first post, Nimiq’s market share has gone 10x and buying one-hundred thousand NIM costs a whole lot more. However, NIM isn’t just for holding. The use case is to spend. Right now if you find an item that you want to purchase from a foreign vendor there is a good chance that your credit card company is going to charge you fees for the transaction and subject you to an exchange rate that is almost certainly in their favor. NIM is cash. It crosses borders nearly instantly without fees or exchange rates.

Not financial advice. I would never recommend that someone buy cryptocurrency. I also don’t mean for WyoBlock to turn into a Nimiq fanboy site, but things have been slow lately and I was right about this technology catching on. If you choose to obtain NIM and use it as cash as an American – pay your taxes. Then write your elected representatives about how restrictive and pointless our crypto laws are in the U.S.

One Year of Ether Mining

May 28, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

Mrs. WyoBlock is a very understanding woman who early last year approved the purchase of a “reasonable” amount of computer parts to build a “reasonable” mining rig. It was the middle of Crypto Winter and only a crazy person would want to put their hard-earned money into proof-of-work crypto mining. Yes, the money spent could have purchased crypto outright and I would probably be at a higher profit than my current ROI. However, I wanted to support networks that I believe in and once my 16-month ROI is complete I will have a machine that can keep earning as my savings grow.

A “reasonable” mining rig turned out to be a pro-am GPU set-up inspired by VoskCoin on YouTube. I went Team Red. or AMD, because of Ethereum. The Ethash algorithm (formerly Dagger-Hashimoto) was the only reasonable proof-of-work set of coins by ease of entry. The price of Bitcoin ASIC miners did not fit the reasonable criteria and the Nvidia cards were much more expensive and I didn’t really believe in any of the networks that they mine optimally. After a few weeks of price watching I found AMD RX 580 8gb GPUs for an insane low price on Amazon. So, I bought eight of them, a basic motherboard, a good enough processor, 2 power supplies, and fistfuls of USB/PCIE risers.

When the parts arrived I was very pleased that six of the eight GPUs had sequential serial numbers and I had hoped to win the silicon lottery and get the sought after Samsung chip units. Upon BIOS-modding I found that all eight units had Micron chips, but this wasn’t necessarily bad news. The build went together like an expensive adult LEGO set, just like the YouTube video. I deviated from Vosk with the operating system.

I chose Minerstat’s Linux operating system, MSOS. I trust Ubuntu and I liked the user interface and remote management that MSOS had to offer. It installed easily and whenever I have had questions their tech support and Discord channel are awesome. For AMD cards MSOS has ClockTune available for tweaking. With MSOS and ClockTune I was able to get over 32 Mh/s out of each card, a total of 258 Mh/s at ~685w. These numbers exceeded my initial calculations and moved up my ROI. Most impressively, it’s been running at this pace for a year.

So, my original ROI was 18 months and my modified ROI was after seeing the stable hashrate was 16 months. My “reasonable” rig looks like it might even beat that time frame by a month, even with the crazy price swings that Ethereum and Ethereum Classic have experienced since I flipped the on switch.

Would I recommend that anyone else do this? Maybe. It’s fun and (hopefully) profitable, and crypto mining has given me a greater understanding of the space. Proof of work blockchains are being abandoned for proof of stake and other verification methods, and more expensive and profitable ASIC mining hardware is working its way in – this will affect the miners. However, as Ethereum 2.0 keeps getting pushed out and some really neat defi dapps are growing on Ethereum Classic I feel that there is still time to do some mining for profit, even with GPUs.

*Not financial advice. Nothing stated above should be considered a good idea. @VoskCoin @minerstatcom #ethash

Happy Birthday!

May 5, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

WyoBlock is celebrating its first anniversary! Thank you to the readers and subscribers from 42 different countries for your support and interest. I am truly humbled and grateful.

This last month has been slow on WyoBlock and I apologize. Working from home and daddy daycare have taken the bulk of my time and Mrs. WyoBlock is on the front lines of the pandemic, so priorities have shifted. I am amazed at all of the new “pandemic hobby” posts, tweets, and videos because I don’t know how people are finding the time.

A few things WyoBlock is following right now:

The Bitcoin halving or “Halvening” is just about six days away by block count. It’s an afterthought of the network and not part of Satoshi’s vision, but every four years the mining reward for solving and producing more blocks gets cut in half. This is to make the currency deflationary in nature and, over the long term, increase its scarcity and therefore its value. A price increase has happened before, will it happen again?

Speedy Banks. Wyoming’s Special Depository Institutions (SPDI) have been very quiet since their ability to debut in March. This site is for the DIYer and not for large investors. That might be why I’m out of the loop. Shame, they have an opportunity to attract new investments in a Corona-crazed world.

Nimiq OASIS. The Nimiq network has been working with TEN31 bank on the Open Asset Swap Interaction Scheme (OASIS) and has an encouraging beta test. This is set to go live this quarter and when it does will allow atomic (instant) swaps between fiat and crypto currencies. This is the great leap forward in mass cryptocurrency adoption if Nimiq can pull this off.

Also in an upcoming post will be an update of the WyoBlock Ethash mining rig. It has been running for almost a year straight and we’ll find out how it has performed and if it was worth it.

Thank you for your time and support over the past year. This started as place for me to share and vent, and you have kept reading despite the fact that this did not change.

#startwithwy #spdi #nimiq $nim #bitcoin #blockchain

Can Blockchain Stop Fake News?

April 14, 2020 ~ WyoCrypto ~ Leave a comment

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

Fake news. I don’t know if the weaponizing of information is an art or a science, but I do know that I am tired of becoming more skeptical and more cynical (if that can be believed). I look for sources or other articles to corroborate or contradict because I don’t know if what I am reading is original or if it has been altered from its original source in an attempt sway my opinion. Timestamps, locations, authors, sources, publishers, and content can all be cut-and-paste in an attempt to skew the information in favor of an opinion that is contrary to the original article.

Originality, or provenance, is an absolute on a blockchain because without it there is no order to the information. For blocks of information to be chained together it requires a hash that is generated from the block’s contents and the alphanumeric hash of the previous block. The hash is unique and altering any part of the contents would generate an entirely new hash.

News articles can easily be altered and reproduced with the help of bots and other tools. Rewrites take mere seconds to produce and it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern the original. However if the publishing data, contents, and timestamp of an article were hashed, we would know what came first and when and how it was altered later.

Enter LKSfoundation (LKS), an Italian company that aims to build a social platform where content can be viewed using exchangeable (fungible) tokens and also to tokenize the production of information and media by using ERC-721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). LKS will use know-your-customer (KYC) to create a secure platform for tracking sources and publishers to their origin so that readers and content managers have a guarantee of provenance. The beauty of NFTs is that they are a perfect way to identify and track copyrighted material. Because any change will lead to a new and unique token being generated.

The LKS white paper is based upon building a social space with rich content and makes specific mention of the “paternity dynamics of content” – and I would like to request that all suspected fake news take a paternity test, please.

More information:

LKS White Paper

On a non-crypto note: I have had a copy of Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics (GoodReads) within reach from my office chair for several years. It’s over 60 years old and can be read twice in a single afternoon, but Chapter 2, “The Well-Chosen Average” changed the way that I digest information forever. Because it is so easy to tell multiple truths.

@lkscoin #blockchain #token #copyright #fakenews @lks-foundation