Author: grant

12 or 24 Words in your BIP-39 Wallet? Use a passphrase or not?

On Sep 20, 2018:

If the attacker needs your 24-word seed and your passphrase, that is a good security mechanism. It means that if somebody finds your 24-word seed lying around, you shouldn’t have it lying around, but if they do find it and it’s not sufficiently physically secured, then brute-forcing it, brute forcing the password, will require either a lot of infrastructure or a lot of time. ―Andreas M. Antonopoulos

A relatively complex passphrase will keep you safe for several weeks, a month. A very strong complex passphrase will keep you safe for months; unless the person is willing to spend a million dollars on hardware to break that passphrase. ―Andreas M. Antonopoulos

TODO: Find out how long it takes today.

How much does it take your Bitcoin wallet?

How much does it take your Non-Bitcoin wallet?

What makes Bitcoin so BIPping better?

BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. A BIP is a design document providing information to the Bitcoin community, or describing a new feature for Bitcoin or its processes or environment. The BIP should provide a concise technical specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.

We intend BIPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Bitcoin.

When the 51% vote it so then it is made it so.

Additionally, every I can do it better than Bitcoin! crypto needs to do better those BIPs, and every new one that comes after that.

That might take a while, if ever.

How to find the secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction?

Satoshi left a secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

It refers to this article in The Sunday Times. The point is to prove that the chain was created at least by that date. It’s also a tongue-in-cheek joke about the nature of currency and how governments manage it. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Here is how to find it yourself albeit using the Bitcoin GUI instead of the command-line interface.

Continue reading “How to find the secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction?”

Be sure to set up your Bitcoin node with the full transaction index!

Out of the box, you can only look up a transaction by its index when the transaction is associated with a wallet you own. This optimization makes sense from an efficiency perspective because should you waste disk space on transactions that aren’t your own? That is a good point, but you don’t save much space.

Continue reading “Be sure to set up your Bitcoin node with the full transaction index!”