9 Bitcoin FAQs

FAQ 6 - My Bitcoin history - 2017-12-24

Today I start a blog of my history on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that has been in the press a lot lately. It allows anyone to send anyone else the digital currency and tries to prevent anyone from cheating the system. Cheating could be I have 10 bitcoins and I give you 10 and another person the same 10 coins. The Bitcoin network won't allow this.

Bitcoin was started in 2009 and was based on a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto.

I was interested in buying bitcoin (BTC) when it was either at $200 or $400. But in hindsight, I probably wouldn't have kept it but sold it to make some money.

The price of 1 Bitcoin today was $13,850. It recently hit $20,000.

I'm shocked by how much there is to know about the subject and how much is already out there just by googling Bitcoin.

I made my first bitcoin (actually a small fraction) via bitcoin mining and the picture is below.

Mining is the term used for doing two things you do with free software you can get from the internet:

Making sure that all the transactions are real and not fake. This is done by taking a bunch of new transactions and checking them to see if they're valid and solving a math problem with them.
Paying the miner in bitcoins, (currently 12.5 Bitcoins aka BTC which is $174,974.94 at the current price plus transaction fees)

There is a lot of terminology with Bitcoin so give yourself some time to understand it. If you're not a computer programmer it will be hard to fully understand all of the details of how the system works.

and here is the price today at 8:18 EST.

Excel software to understand bitcoin

I started working on some Excel software to help me understand bitcoin. The first thing I find out is that Excel is bad with large numbers as it converts them to Exponential Notation. Some of the routines I wrote or acquired from the internet:

FindPrime(svalue, evalue) - this is passed 2 integers and will return the first prime # it finds in the range
IsPrime( ) - determines if a number is prime or not
Function IsPrime(n) IsPrime = True For i = 2 To n / 2 If n Mod i = 0 Then IsPrime = False Exit For End If Next End Function
MultText(tvalue1 as string, tvalue2 as integer) - this will take an number stored as a string (i.e. has a leading ') and multiply it by the tvalue2 and return a string value. This allowed me to calculate the largest 256 bit number. Without this function, Excel keeps rounding the large numbers.
GetFactor(n) - pass it a number and it will return 1 factor
SHA256 - This is the hash routine that bitcoin uses and I found some code on the internet to do it

Loading the Blockchain
I found some software at Bitcoin.org that allowed me to download the Blockchain. But this process was taking days and I'm not sure what would have happened or what it could do for me. The process was very easy.

Understanding how Bitcoin works
I watched a video from learnmeabitcoin.com that helped me understand how bitcoin works. For my level it was perfect but some of the concepts might be over your head.

NiceHash was hacked
After downloading the NiceHash software I find out that the company was hacked and they lost $170 million in Bitcoins.

Setting up NiceHash
There wasn't much to do except for going to , downloading the software and answering a few questions.

The one confusing thing was that it asked for my wallet id. There was a link to click on how to get the wallet id, but it wasn't useful. After some hunting around their site, I found I had to join it. Typical email/psw... and then my wallet was created. My id or bitcoin address 3LAfTquNdtLo8jnhd2D8ySefx5qKCZZbQq is the number I give people to send bitcoins to.

When I looked at my computer this morning I found that I wasn't mining bitcoins. System couldn't connect to the network. I rebooted my modem, router and computer and it started working again.

Going forward I'll try to log what my experiences are in this process. In hidsight I wish I would have bought those coins and help on to them.

So in the future I will will discuss things I learn like:

ICO
Wallets
How Bitcoin works
Other coins
Participating in the opensource project

I will also be using Excel to help teach how Bitcoin works.

I watched a that appears to be a scam but I can't be sure just has a bad smell to it.

He mentions important lines of code he's found, but the code he shows during the video is nothing.

He also metions some coins that have skyrocketted:

verge
neo
Ethereum
Bitconnect
Digicube

Why would anyone tell me a way to make millions? If you know how to make millions, you make it and keep it a secret. The reason someone would do it is to buy the crypto and then tell their followers to buy after them.

ICO

Initial Coin Offering is like an IPO, is the ability to get in on a digital currency before they become public.