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I can program and like games

Month: March, 2014

March 5, 2014

How do you secure Bitcoin?

After the Mt. Gox thing the bitcoin course is going back up again. My initial response was “this is a Mt. Gox problem, not a bitcoin problem” and I think this seems to be the general opinion right now.

But then it looked like the most likely reason for the disappearance of the money is that some insider at Mt. Gox just ran away with it. And the more you think about it, the more you realize how easy this is. Let’s say you are an admin at a company which has a lot of bitcoins. One day you book a vacation to some Caribbean island, and the day before you leave you copy the private keys of all the big bitcoin wallets that the company has onto a thumb drive. As soon as you’re out of the country you use those private keys to transfer all of the company’s money to your account. You’re rich, and it’s not easy to see how that could have been prevented.

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March 2, 2014

Bitcoin Mining for Space Heating

When googling for the above words you find lots of people making jokes about how Bitcoin mining hardware will turn into an expensive space heater quickly after purchase because the mining difficulty increases so fast. But using Bitcoin mining hardware as space heaters is not necessarily a bad idea.

In my apartment we mostly heat with electric heaters. Which is a giant waste of money, but we don’t have a choice. And electric heaters are basically devices that try to waste as much electricity as possible, because the more electricity they waste, the more heat they generate. Sounds kinda like Bitcoin mining, right? When I realized that I turned off my electric heater and made my computer mine Bitcoin. By my estimates I will get something like 2 or 3 dollar worth of Bitcoin out of that by the end of the month. Which is 2 or 3 dollar more than my electric heater gives me.

If I had realized this at the beginning of the winter and had bought specialized mining hardware, I could have actually gone through the winter making a good amount of money. If I can’t convince my landlord to switch our heating solution by next winter, I’ll certainly be doing that next year.

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