To use Bitcoin you need a Wallet. Users of Bitcoin currently do
so though one of the many Wallet Providers such as- Bitcoin-QT (Core Project), Bitcoin Armory, and Electrum. New users can be overwhelmed very easily as they require a full PC environment (something quickly being replaced by other devices). This SMS service allows all current cell phone holders to interact with the Bitcoin via a hosted account. This means you can take your wallet with you wherever and have it at all times.
Dont have Bitcoin? Sign up for the Faucet.
Pick node near you, simply send a SMS to get get started! First come first serve, each new number that sends a message will automatically make an account. If you do not get credited btc right away, it can still come next time the fountin is filled.
Global Networks. The Final Frontier.
There are many phone numbers one can enter the network from. These nodes can be international, (Currently US, UK and Canada) but they all reach the same central cloud service. If any node becomes unresponsive you can simply send a SMS message to a new node and pick up exactly where you left off.
Different nodes can host modified versions of the primary code. Changing the language of the service is as simple as texting a new node. You can be in the middle of an English language Bitcoin transfer and start texting a different language on a different node and pick up right where you left off.
Nodes can be brought online in currently over 150 countries via the cloud infrastructure at Twilio. However with the need of two way SMS building and maintaining these networks is going to require a lot of resources.I currently apply no fee's and provide the hosting and SMS completly from donations and my own person funds.
Nine Trust-Based Problems With Bitcoin
Bitcoin seeks to be an electronic cash (currency) system that doesn't rely on trust. Paradoxically, Bitcoin requires a trust-based ecosystem.
As a brief summary: The Bitcoin system was developed as an electronic currency by Satoshi Nakamoto (apparently, a pseudonym). Bitcoins exist only in the online world (they have no physical form). Each Bitcoin is uniquely identified, and is part of a limited edition (only a pre-set number will be issued). And, if properly executed, Bitcoin transactions are anonymous and non-reversible. For a more detailed explanation of Bitcoin's architecture, see Benjamin Wallace (Wired) or The Economist .
Bitcoin is intended to be digital cash/currency, based on cryptography and peer-to-peer networks, rather than trust. As Nakamoto explains:
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.
Nakomoto cites as conventional currency's root problem: "all the trust that's required to make it work." But Bitcoin requires us to replace trust in legal systems, institutions and procedures, with a system where we must:
Trust the willingness of counterparties to accept Bitcoin as currency for payment -- a huge leap of faith. Purchasing Bitcoins means participation in a 100 percent trust-based system, without any legal mechanism to compel their acceptance. Conventional currencies rely not just on trust, but also on the force of law. For example, in America the "Legal Tender Statute" (31 USC Sec. 5103) specifies that: "United States coins and currency. are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." No country issues Bitcoins, and no government legally compels anyone to accept them as payment.
Trust unregulated institutions with your personal bank information just to purchase Bitcoins. As described in Mother Jones. if you. have qualms about handing over all of your bank information to an anonymous internet stranger, then you might want to just give up now. The major Bitcoin exchanges don't accept credit cards.
Trust a cryptographic, peer-to-peer network computer technology most Bitcoin users don't understand.
Trust that Bitcoin (really, a beta) won't be replaced by a superior digital currency system, rendering original Bitcoins obsolete and worthless.
Trust that the Bitcoin Foundation /other participants won't create additional Bitcoin series, thereby diluting the value of the original Bitcoins.
Trust that governments won't intervene to render Bitcoins worthless (e.g. if Bitcoins facilitate too much drug-dealing or money laundering, the U.S. government could make their possession illegal).
Trust an anonymous creator (Nakamoto) who's mysteriously "moved on to other projects" and disappeared.
Trust that Bitcoin markets will be available to provide prices in real currencies -- as recent events demonstrate, also a leap of faith.
What is Bitcoin Mining or bit coin Answers from the Experts
Trust that your Bitcoins are stored in a secure location. Precisely because Bitcoin transactions are anonymous and non-reversible, they're highly vulnerable to theft. If your Bitcoins are stolen, they're pretty much untraceable. For a non-exhaustive list of major Bitcoin theft incidents, click here .
Rather than as currency, perhaps we should evaluate Bitcoin as the first example of Dadaist Digital art. An art work exists as part of some limited edition and has no intrinsic use. If you purchase art (for financial reasons), you must believe/trust that members of the art ecosystem will value/be willing to purchase that work at a future time.
Dadaism was:
an. international movement. repudiating and mocking artistic and social conventions and emphasizing the illogical and absurd.
One of Dadaism's first major works was Duchamp's Fountain (created under the pseudonym R. Mutt). As shown below, Fountain is an off-the-shelf, mass-produced urinal.
Source: Wikipedia; Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
The urinal designated as Fountain, however, had considerable value. Replicas, authorized by Duchamp, have sold for over $1 million each .
Duchamp made an important artistic statement with Fountain; but on another level, he created an intellectual joke about the nature of art.
Nakamoto, in "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System " and other writings, makes important observations about cryptography, currency and the nature of trust.
Bitcoin's design is highly significant and will likely influence payment systems for years to come. However, Bitcoin's implementation feels like an elaborate intellectual joke. Under the guise of eliminating the need for trust, Nakamoto demonstrates that trust is an inescapable part of payment systems.
Is Satoshi Nakamoto the Duchamp of our Digital generation? Bitcoin's inventor seems sophisticated enough to understand that, as currency, Bitcoin's long term value might be zero. But analogous to Duchamp's Fountain, Bitcoin might be intellectually priceless -- for the issues it highlights (or as the first example of Dadaistic Digital Art).
Steven Strauss is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Immediately prior to Harvard, he was founding Managing Director of the Center for Economic Transformation at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Steven was one of the NYC leads for Applied Sciences NYC (Mayor Bloomberg's plan to build a new engineering and innovation center in NYC), NYC BigApps and many other initiatives to foster job growth, innovation and entrepreneurship. In 2010, Steven was selected as a member of the Silicon Alley 100 in NYC. He has a Ph.D. in Management from Yale University, and over 20 years' private sector work experience. Geographically, Steven has worked in the US, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. You can follow him on Twitter at: @Steven_Strauss
Bitcoin Robot
Bitcoin Robot - BTCRobot.com is the worlds first working Bitcoin Robot – That is a software/bot that can execute Bitcoin Trades automatically to make you profits even while you sleep
No Brokers, No Binaries, No Forex, No Banks, No Holidays,No Censorship!
Go to BTCRobot.com To get the Bitcoin Robot
What is Bitcoin?
Here is the definition from WikiPedia
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency where the creation and transfer of bitcoins is based on an open-sourcecryptographic protocol that is independent of any central authority. Bitcoins can be transferred through a computer orsmartphone without an intermediate financial institution
Didn’t understand anything? No Probs. Just like you have money in form of papers, Bitcoin is a currency that is stored digitally in your digital vaults like computer, online disk, USB disk..etc. There is no regulatory or middle person to control Bitcoins as its an open source currency. It perfectly legal and safe!
It has value for the same reason, the paper (cash notes) in your pocket has value.
You can buy things with it.
So who all accept bitcoin to sell things? Many websites in the internet now accept bitcoin to buy their products or service. But not too many. as this is a new concept introduced in 2009 .
But its gaining very high demand and getting very very popular because of its easiness of use and absence of third-person to process transactions. If you want to learn how Bitcoin works, just watch the below video!
But you don’t have to know how Bitcoin works to use it AND
You don’t have to know anything about Bitcoin at all to make money using Bitcoin Robot!
Watch the below video to see What Bitcoin is and how it works!
What is Bitcoin Robot?
If you know about currency trading and forex robots, then it is very easy for you to understand what Bitcoin Robot is. To put it simple, currency trading is the trading of various currency pairs. like USD to EUR, USD to YEN..etc. Currency rates varies every hour and you can trade currencies to make profit. Forex (Foreign Exchange) is the worlds largest market which has a turnover of $8 Trillion Every single day !
Now there are Forex Robots . that can automatically make trades on your behalf. Its not a physical robot, but its just a software that automatically buy and sell currencies in your account by analysing and predicting the fluctuations in the currency rate. You need to have a good forex robot that predicts and make trades correctly, or else the software can lose your money. For example, FAPTurbo is one of the best forex robot ever and has already generated thousands to its users automatically.
Bitcoin Robot works the similar way – Its a software/script that trades your money (in USD) against Bitcoin Currency . Got it?
Once Bitcoin’s currency rate is about to increase, the bot buy some bitcoins using your USD . and when the rates are at the peak level, it sell the bitcoins for USD . So finally you get more US Dollars than you invested. Note that you can convert Bitcoin to any currency you want any time!
Also how much you invest is totally up to you. So you don need to use any bitcoin, know what they are or make transactions using them in order to use this bot. All you need is to get the bot, make your digital vault, deposit some money and give your account information to the bot, and it will execute trades . The bot make 10-20 trades a day based on fluctuations in the Bitcoin/USD currency paid.
So it makes money every day even while you are sleeping . Cool?
Of course, you don’t get all trades as profit as the bot execute lot of trades a day, but in the end of day you you are very likely to earn profit. The bot is engineered well to analyse fluctuations in the Bitcoin Currency Market and thus it make precise and accurate decision on when and how much to trade . The bot has a good success rate your investment will double in a short time!
Do you know that 1 Bitcoin was 7 USD in 2011, $104 in August 2013 and now is around $450?
If you bought 1000 bitcoins for $7000 2 years ago, now you would have had $104,000 . Don’t worry! The demand for Bitcoin is still increasing!
But to make a trade every 2 year, you don’t need a robot! Right? Thats where Bitcoin Robots plays its role – It works not only with increments in rate, but also decrements. T he more fluctuations occur in the market, the more it trades and the more money it makes for you !
Why you should get The Bitcoin Robot?
Perhaps you are new to currency investment, drowned in Forex or new to Bitcoin investments and you don’t know when and how to make trades. That is perfectly okay as this is a new concept – and you don’t need to know that now as Bitcoin Robot is there! Bitcoin Robot help you make money by auto-trading with the money you invest! You don’t need to know anything about currency investment or Bitcoin at all to use this bot .
This is an automated money making machine or more like an assistant doing trades with your money.
Also you don’t have to pay your assistant a monthly salary - The bot just cost you $149 (Buy Now ) . And how much to invest in it is all up to you and you can stop/start/withdraw/deposit any time you want! There is no bank or no government to control you! Its perfectly legal and its the beginning to a revolution .
This is the worlds only bitcoin auto trader or the worlds only Bitcoin Robot at the moment.
The concept of a decentralized cryptocurrency without political borders can be challenging at first. Bitcoin forces us to adjust the way that we think about money and value transfer. Fortunately, the bitcoin community has been excellent at consolidating informational data through a loosely-integrated group of dedicated volunteers.
Here are the top 10 bitcoin statistics in no particular order. I have intentionally omitted certain statistics like bitcoin miners’ revenue and mining operating margin because they focus on a subset of the user community. Also, I have tried to provide alternate data sources where available to broaden the statistic’s usefulness. If you don’t see your favorite listed here or if I have missed any important statistics or charts, please feel free to let me know in the comments below.
1. Market Capitalization – This displays the historical number of total bitcoins in existence multiplied by the exchange rate for that day in US Dollars. It can be considered the bitcoin monetary base.
2. Price Chart – This chart displays the last trade price for bitcoin (BTC) against a number of currencies and ranks the exchanges by 30-day volume. Advanced charting capability is provided here. The price depth chart of BTC/USD on the MtGox exchange is usually the best indication of overall market price.
The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World . by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender.
3. Exchange Volume Distribution – This pie chart displays trading volume distribution by exchange and by various bitcoin currency pairs.
4. Network Hashing Rate – This displays hashing difficulty and the estimated number of Giga hashes per second (computation speed) that the network is performing for various time windows. Calculated by dividing maximum target by current target where target is a 256-bit number, difficulty measures how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. Difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks (or two weeks) and to find a block, the SHA-256 hash of a block’s header must be lower than or equal to the current target for the block to be accepted by the network.
5. Hash Rate Distribution – This pie chart is an estimation of hash rate distribution amongst the largest mining pools. It is important to monitor because the integrity of the network depends on a single actor not exceeding 50% of the overall hashing power. A more detailed alternate chart using a different data source, IP address that first relayed the block, is Block Origin .
6. Number of Daily Transactions – This chart displays the total number of unique bitcoin transactions per day. An alternate version is also provided that excludes transactions with the top 100 popular bitcoin addresses based on number of outputs. The advent of Satoshi Dice has probably been most responsible for the surge in nominal transaction count since late April.
7. Daily Transaction Volume – This measures the estimated transaction volume per day in US Dollars. An alternate graph visualizes bitcoin network activity in real-time, including transactions, block creation, and currency trade measured in BTC.
8. Bitcoin Days Destroyed – Applying a 7-day average to the non-cumulative chart calculation, Bitcoin Days Destroyed for any given transaction is calculated by taking the number of bitcoin in a transaction and multiplying it by the number of days it has been since those coins were last spent. Bitcoin Days Destroyed attempts to provide a reliable indication of transaction volume that strips out transfers to oneself and immediate account reorganizations since a high value for days destroyed indicates less hoarding and more old bitcoin on the move. It can be considered a measure of monetary velocity. The cumulative version can be found here .
9. Average Transaction Confirmation Time – This measures the average (mean) amount of time in minutes that it takes for a transaction to be accepted into a block. Reasonable estimates differ on the amount of time and confirmations for a transaction to be considered cleared and ‘good’ but that appropriate risk level would be associated with the transaction’s value. Also, see this excellent chart that displays transactions with fees paid against those with no fees paid.
10. Largest Recent Transactions - Culled from the last 50,000 transactions, this top 100 list gives an indication of actual transaction sizes in bitcoin occurring on the network.
Another useful site with real-time statistics and tools that I like is provided by Bitcoin Block Explorer .
Nothing guaranteed, of course this is only a rough estimate! You can also calculate rented mining by setting “Power consumption” to 0 and “Cost of mining hardware” to the rent per time frame. Default values are for a 50 GH/s Bitcoin Miner .
Become a Bitcoin Millionaire
Estimate Strategy
Extrapolating bitcoin difficulty or price is pure voodoo. It is much easier to predict the relationship of the two parameters in form of the Mining Factor. The Mining Factor 100 is the value in USD of the bitcoins you can generate if you let a 100MHash/s miner run for 24 hours. If the Mining Factor 100 rises above $2 or so everybody buys mining equipment and thus increases difficulty. If it falls people will stop mining eventually. The estimate starts with the current Mining Factor and decreases it exponentially such that the decrease accounts for the factor decline per year. Please note that a profit/loss by holding the coins is not accounted for in this estimate.
Things to consider that might eat into your profit:
The values above are only a snapshot. The network and markets are moving quickly. Check out these diagrams to get a feeling for it.Looks like if your mining operation is not profitable now, it probably will not be in the future.
With rising bitcoin exchange rates it might be more profitable to buy bitcoins than to mine. There are spreadsheets available in this thread or this one (with some FPGA data) for a more custom calculation.Bitcoin exchanges: MtGox. Tradehill. CryptoXchange .
The calculation is based on average block generation time. The closer the average generation time is to the time frame the more the resulting revenue depends on luck.
You will have to pay mining pool fees from close to nothing up to 3% depending on the pool. Unless you want to do pool hopping you should go to a pool with hopping protection. I recommend Arsbitcoin and EclipseMC (with namecoin merged mining). P2Pool is a new completely decentralized alternative.
You will get somewhere from 1% to 3% of “stale shares”. Thread .
When the block count will hit
200000 some time around December 2012 the generation reward will go down to 25BTC. This might partly be compensated by falling difficulty, raising prices, higher transfer fees, etc.
A mining computer generates a lot of heat as a byproduct. This can impact your heating/airconditioning costs depending on outside temperatures. Other byproducts could be noise and an angry wife.
Do you have lots of experience with and like working with computers during lonesome nights? You have to spend quite some time to set up the system (easily several days!) and watch it.
You will not get a 100% uptime.
You will probably not be able to reach the highest values in the Mining Hardware Comparison. Some bragging / measuring error and extensive overclocking of the cards is involved here.
Scaling effects: three cards in one rig do worse than a single card because it gets harder to get out the heat. Results in the list above do not reflect the number of cards.
A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable.
Politics and legal issues might affect the bitcoin market.
Possible additional benefits:
For suggestions, infos or links on the topic to add, please contact me directly (info [at] bitcoinx.com) or in this thread on the bitcoin forum.
Bitcoin Was the 'Victim of Its Own Success,' Not DDOS Attack
By Stan Schroeder 2013-04-11 08:45:11 UTC
Bitcoin. the world's most popular virtual currency, yesterday took a huge nosedive — from its all-time-high of $265 to as low as $105 — but the reason is not a DDOS as some have speculated.
Instead, the leading Bitcoing exchange, Mt.Gox. claims that Bitcoin was "a victim of its own success," with the lag from too much interest in the currency causing many investors to sell, which lead to a market panic.
"The rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine," wrote Mt.Gox on its Facebook page .
Mt.Gox added some numbers to fortify its claims. According to the exchange, the number of trades executed tripled in the last 24 hours, and the number of new accounts opened went from 60,000 in March alone to 75,000 new accounts created in the "first few days of April," with "roughly 20,000" new accounts created each day.
Mt.Gox promises to do its best to remedy the lag issues; in fact, the exchange will have to be closed for two hours "in the next 12 to 24 hours" to add "several" new servers to the system.
Problems such as these are to be expected since the Bitcoin market is still in its infancy. Still, since nothing scares off investors like a panic sale, Mt.Gox (and other Bitcoin exchanges) will have to do more to ensure stability of their system and avoid huge disturbances like this one.
Image courtesy of Mt.Gox
Bitcoin Under Attack? Dwolla & Mt. Gox Both Hit With DDoS Attacks Overnight
Another day, another DDoS attack. This time round, it’s the turn of alternative online payments provider Dwolla. which saw its website taken offline for a brief period of time. The site has since come back online, but the company said in a statement that the some users may still experience issues as the attack remains ongoing.
So far, we don’t have any details on who is attacking Dwolla or why it may have been targeted. All the company would say is that it’s working with security companies to fix the problem, whilst its notified third-party developers that use the service for sending and receiving funds.
According to Dwolla’s most recent post. the firm has made progress with its efforts to stave off the DDoS attack:
“We’ve made meaningful progress with our hosting providers, and are now beginning to test accessibility with the web app. Mobile and API testing to begin soon.”
But from reading the comments at the end of the post, it’s clear that many of Dwolla’s customers are less than pleased with its handling of the situation. Dozens of users have posted comments demanding to know when services will be fully restored, while some have been critical of the security measures put in place by the company.
“You all should have a replicated server at another hosting company for times like these. They make software to do this. Has anyone developed a disaster recovery plan?” asks one angry poster.
“Who is running the show there, this should have been factored in when you started your business. I have a lot of money sitting in my account that I need to pay my contract workers with. If you’re going to handle money, your system needs to be bullet proof! I am going to have to explore other options now.”
One recurring theme among posters is that the situation has to do with Bitcoin. As SiliconANGLE’s Kyt Dotson previously reported, the virtual currency’s value has shot through the roof over the last week due to Cyprus’s economic troubles. Dwolla’s problem is that it provides one of the easiest methods of purchasing Bitcoin, but the DDoS attack has prevented many from taking advantage of this.
“My favorite medium by which to fund my Mt. Gox account being down is in no way helping to curb my insane desire to buy bitcoins. I think I may just very well have myself a panic attack,” complains a poster named “Itchy”.
“i think this is why dwolla is down. Everyone wants to fund mTgox to buy BTC. Did they consider that?” replies “utuxia”.
Intriguingly, Mt. Gox reportedly suffered its own DDoS attack last night, according to the IDG News Service. The Japanese company, which is one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchanges, said that the attack began on Thursday night and was “stronger than average”, although the site itself doesn’t appear to have been taken offline, reports IDG.
Mt. Gox also commented on the situation with Dwolla. saying it was unable to process payments or withdrawals due to “some delays”. It added that it hopes for the situation to be resolved within the next 12 hours.
Naturally there will be speculation that the two attacks are linked. Since we reported on Bitcoin’s rapid rise last week, the virtual currency is now trading at up to $94 on Mt. Gox, although the Dutch website Webwereld reports that this briefly slipped to $77 yesterday before quickly regaining its lost value. We cannot be sure however, if this hiccup was linked to the DDoS attack or Cyprus’s decision to reopen its banks yesterday.
Bitcoin value slump during yesterday’s DDoS attack
Major Bitcoin exchanges hit with cyberattacks
Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin exchange, said it had been hit with a massive cyberattack.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
As interest has surged in Bitcoin, platforms that support the digital currency have been hit by damaging cyberattacks this week.
Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange that claims to handle more than 70% of all Bitcoin trades, said in a statement on Thursday that it had been hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack. In a DDoS attack, hackers direct a giant traffic surge to their target, overwhelming the site's servers and making it hard for legitimate users to gain access.
The attacks appear to have shaken confidence among some Bitcoin users.
On Wednesday, Bitcoins rose to $147, before pulling back overnight to around $115 as word of the cyberattacks spread. Mt. Gox said the attacks may be an effort to prompt "panic selling", with the hackers hoping to buy up cheap Bitcoins following the panic they've created -- and then waiting for the currency to rise again. They may also be aimed more generally at destabilizing the Bitcoin system.
"[R]emember that Bitcoin, despite being designed to have its value increase over time, will always be the victim of people trying to abuse the system, or even the value of Bitcoin decreasing occasionally," the exchange said.
Mt. Gox said it was suffering its "worst trading lag ever," with some users having difficulty logging into their accounts. The company said it was working to make sure the problem didn't become any more serious.
A Mt. Gox spokesman said in an email that individual accounts had not been compromised. The source of the attack, he added, is "difficult to determine."
How Bitcoin works
Bitcoin is a four-year-old digital currency developed outside the authority of governments and central banks and designed to allow worldwide payments between users. The value of Bitcoins has surged in recent weeks amid decreasing trust in traditional banking systems, particularly after Cyprus imposed a tax on top bank depositors and placed limits on withdrawals to help pay for a European bailout.
Increased media attention has also helped fuel Bitcoin's rise. On Thursday afternoon, the value of one Bitcoin was hovering around $130, up from $47 two weeks ago and just 5 cents back in mid-2010.
Andreas Baumhof, chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm ThreatMetrix, noted that financial institutions of all kinds face attacks like the one that hit Mt. Gox. Because the market for Bitcoin is so much smaller than those for other currencies, he added, such disruptions are more likely to generate big swings in Bitcoin's value.
"If I were to target a big financial institution, in no way would the value of the US dollar fluctuate," Baumhof said.
Other Bitcoin utilities have also reported problems in recent days.
Bitcoin-Central, a site for the exchange and storage of the currency, and affiliated service Paytunia said they had detected a security breach on Monday and suspended operations pending an investigation. The services said Wednesday that they hoped to be up and running again by the end of the week, and that customers' account balances had not been affected.
Instawallet, an online service for Bitcoin storage, had a notice posted on its website Thursday saying it had been "fraudulently accessed," and would be suspending service indefinitely. Users have been instructed to submit claims to recover their funds.
As the Bitcoin business matures, service providers for the digital currency will continue to beef up their cybersecurity in the same way large banks and online-payment firms like eBay's ( EBAY. Fortune 500 ) PayPal have in recent years, Baumhof said.
"I'm fairly sure this will ultimately be just a blip," Baumhof said of the disruptions this week.
First Published: April 4, 2013: 2:55 PM ET
Related stories
The soaring value of crypto-currency Bitcoin stuttered slightly last night - after a main exchange for the currency was flooded with network traffic and Bitcoin wallet site Instawallet was suspended.
Mt Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, blamed an ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for trading lags and other connectivity problems over recent days. It stated:
Mt.Gox has been suffering from its worst trading lag ever, 502 errors, and at one point some users were not able to log in their account. The culprit is a major DDoS attack against Mt.Gox. Since yesterday, we are continuing to experience a DDoS attack like we have never seen. While we are being protected by companies like Prolexic, the sheer volume of this DDoS left us scrambling to fine-tune the system every few hours to make sure that things don’t go beyond a few 502 error pages and trading lag.
The statement. issued on Thursday, goes on to speculate that the packet-flinging attacks by unknown parties may have been designed to destabilise the fledgling currency that relies on cryptography for transactions.
The attackers may have been attempting to trigger panic selling that they could then profit from by buying the currency at a low point timed to coincide with the temporary suspension of a series of attacks, it suggests.
Japan-based Mt Gox goes on to explain that it is facing an unprecedented increase in new accounts, 57,000 in March alone compared to around 100,000 in the whole of 2012, so that it is now handling 420,000 trades per month and $121m in monthly trade volume.
Bitcoin prices peaked at $147 per BTC early this week before falling back to below $120 per BTC around the time of the attacks. The exchange rate was around $134 per BTC on Thursday. Last year the value of a Bitcoin increased steadily from around $5 to reach about $13 at the start of this year. Since then - after just three months - the value has increased almost exponentially to reach the unprecedented height of $147 per BTC.
It hasn't all been plain sailing. An arcane software problem last month resulted in the price of the digital currency falling 23 per cent to $37 before quickly regaining lost ground, as explained in some depth in a blog post by Paul Ducklin of Sophos here .
As previously reported. a good portion of the recent increase is likely due to the banking crisis in Cyprus. Interest rates are low across Europe, while exchange rates are volatile, factors that make gold, silver and (for the tech savvy) Bitcoins seem like a safe haven. The Dow Jones industrial average has recovered to pre-crash heights but the same can't be said of stock markets in Europe.
The increased value of Bitcoins has made the currency an increasingly attractive target for cybercrooks, among other unwelcome problems, as well as more positive development such as plans to establish the first Bitcoin ATM in Cyprus.
After temporarily suspending its services this week following a security breach, Bitcoin wallet service Instawallet has announced an indefinite suspension of service while it develops a more secure architecture.
Our database was fraudulently accessed, due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service as-is.
In the next few days we are going to open the claim process for Instawallet balance holders to claim the funds they had stored before the service interruption.
security documentary on the future of cyberhacking, are bitcoin attacks the next big ddos attacks?
Last week payments start-up Dwolla was also hit by a DDoS attack which also affected third-party developers. Dwolla accepts Bitcoins but it's unclear whether or not the attack on the service is tied to the latter run of hacker attacks against Mt. Gox and Instawallet.
Individual Bitcoins exist as a digitally signed solution to a complex mathematical algorithm. New Bitcoins are "mined" by working out solutions to unsolved algorithms. There are an estimated 11 million Bitcoins in circulation, worth around $1.4bn at current prices, out of a total 21 million Bitcoins that can ever be created, according to limits hard-wired into the system (PDF) .
Regulators are looking to apply money-laundering rules to virtual currencies such as Bitcoin but success on this front is far from assured and may be resisted by some, and not just by libertarians and cypherpunks who've found common cause in backing a digital currency outside the control of governments.
Bitcoins are increasingly going mainstream through development. Expense management firm Expensify, for example, has added Bitcoin as a reimbursement option .
Bitcoin is progressing to the point where the currency offers the cheapest means to carry out foreign currency exchange. However, the use of Bitcoins to anonymously pay for hard drugs and other illicit items on the Silk Road trading marketplace is something that will be undoubtedly used by politicians and other critics to bash the currency. ®
DDoS cripples Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox after trading resumes
(Credit: Satoshi)
Update at 6:15 a.m. PT Friday: Bitcoin's tumble continued after trading resumed. As of now, the digital currency is trading at $69.
Less than two hours after the resumption of Bitcoin trades following a lengthy suspension, currency exchange Mt. Gox is offline, the apparent victim of a distributed-denial-of-service attack.
"We are experiencing a stronger than usual DDoS," the Tokyo-based exchange said tonight in a Google+ post. "We are working in it."
Mt. Gox. which handles three-quarters of the trades in the digital currency, announced a suspension of trading this morning after a rollercoaster trading day yesterday that saw Bitcoin's valuation drop 61 percent before recovering a bit with a 37 percent loss. The decentralized digital currency, which had quadrupled in value in the past four weeks, traded as high as $266 per Bitcoin yesterday before a dramatic correction trimmed its value to $105. It eventually recovered to trade as high as $145 a Bitcoin.
Related stories
Mt. Gox denied that yesterday's price plunge was the result of a DDoS, saying that the price drop was due to an unexpected influx of new trades. After allowing the market to "cool down," Mt. Gox resumed trading this evening and Bitcoin immediately lost 35 percent of its value before rebounding to near its previous levels.
The decentralized currency, which was established in 2009 to avoid the prying eyes of law enforcement officials, has grown in popularity in recent months thanks largely to financial uncertainty in Europe and nascent investor curiosity. But the platform also has been the frequent target of hackers who are allegedly trying to disrupt trade execution to manipulate the currency's value.
Bitcoin's value dropped $30 in one day last week after Mt. Gox was the target of a "major" DDoS attack that it said created "its worst trading lag ever."
"Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can," the Japan-based exchange said in a statement at the time. "Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit."
While Bitcoin has been popular lately with investors, it also has been a frequent target for other criminal activity, including thefts, hacks, and scams. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars was stolen in one such virtual heist last year.
Bitcoin Price-Drop Caused By Rush Of Interest, Not DDOS, Says Mt.Gox Exchange; Newcomers Now Opening
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The Bitcoin correction we wrote about yesterday was not caused by a DDOS attack on one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, Mt.Gox. but rather by a massive spike in interest in the crypto currency, according to Mt.Gox.
During trading yesterday the value of Bitcoin plummet by 60%, dropping from a high of $265 to around $150 (at the time of writing it has climbed back up slightly, to around $180 ). As the value of Bitcoin dropped, San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill claimed the fall was a result of distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp .
But Mt.Gox has now posted a notice on its Facebook page explaining the dramatic dive as the result of too much interest in Bitcoin. As its infrastructure slowed down under the volume of new users crowding in, it said the resulting lag then caused traders to panic and sell off currency — triggering the drop.
Earlier this month the Tokyo-based exchange was hit by a DDOS attack — which it said had caused its “worst trading lag ever “. But this time the lag was caused by the Bitcoin goldrush, and existing investors’ fearing a Bitcoin bubble.
Mt.Gox said 60,000 new accounts were opened in the first few days of April alone, vs 75,000 for the whole month of March, and added that it is seeing an average of 20,000 new accounts opened per day, while trading volume has apparently tripled in the past day.
As a result of the increased strain on its infrastructure, Mt.Gox said it may have to temporarily close the exchange for two hours in order to add more servers. ”We have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand,” it added. “We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance.”
As well as needing to bolster its infrastructure to cope with the influx of new users, having previously been a DDOS target — and with the value of Bitcoin still so high and the market so volatile – Mt.Gox can expect to be a target for hackers for the foreseeable future, which is another reason it needs to beef up its infrastructure.
Mt.Gox’s update follows below in full:
Hi everyone, just a quick update on the situation and what happened last night.
First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success!
Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!
To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys:
- The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs.
- The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day.
Due to these facts we have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand. We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance.
Also please note that we may have to close the exchange for two hours in the next 12 to 24hrs to add several new servers to our system.
Thank you for your understanding and continuous support!
Update: A notice on Mt.Gox’s Facebook page , posted several hours after the prior update, confirms the planned network downtime maintenance has been completed. However it also says the exchange is now under DDOS attack.
Bitcoin Suffers A Correction Amid Apparent DDOS Attacks On Some Exchanges
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Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150 .
We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is falling because of there are apparent distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp. A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users.
This also happened last week when Mt. Gox when Bitcoin reached $142 and hackers attacked the exchange. At that point, Mt. Gox said it had suffered ”its worst trading lag ever.”
The Tokyo-based exchange said last week that hackers are engaging in a strategy to manipulate the price of the currency: “Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.”
It looks like this may be happening again. Aside from that, any kind of 400 percent increase over 30 days is probably unsustainable from a technical point of view. A correction at this point would be healthy and natural.
Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions
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Say you've created a cryptographic currency called bitcoin that promises users relative anonymity and untraceable transactions. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is that these virtues also appeal to hackers, malware developers, and organized crime rings who wouldn't think twice about committing virtual bank robberies.
Earlier this month, for example, Bitcoin Internet Payment System (BIPS), a Denmark-based Bitcoin payment processor, suffered a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Unfortunately for users of the company's free online wallets for storing bitcoins, the DDoS attack was merely a smokescreen for a digital heist that quickly drained numerous wallets, netting the attackers a reported 1,295 bitcoins -- worth nearly $1 million -- and leaving wallet users with little chance that they'd ever see their money again.
"On November 15th BIPS was the target of a massive DDoS attack, which is now believed to have been the initial preparation for a subsequent attack on November 17th," Kris Henriksen, the CEO of BIPS, said via Reddit. "Regrettably, despite several layers of protection, the attack caused vulnerability to the system, which has then enabled the attacker/s to gain access and compromise several wallets."
BIPS has been conducting a digital forensic investigation and working with authorities to try to identify the perpetrators. It said that early results showed that the attack originated "from Russia and neighboring countries."
The BIPS heist followed two separate October attacks against Australia-based Inputs.io, in which attackers netted about $1.3 million in bitcoins after stealing all 4,100 bitcoins being held by the free e-wallet service.
The value of bitcoins continues to fluctuate wildly due to a bubble created by bitcoin speculators. In 2011, for example, the currency's value fell from $33 to just $1 per bitcoin before rising to more than $900 earlier this month on MtGox, the world's biggest bitcoin exchange. But that bubble burst the next day, when the value of bitcoins fell by half. As of early Wednesday, however, the currency's value had once again skyrocketed, trading at more than $980 on MtGox.
That rise in value has driven hackers to attack online wallet services that store bitcoins. "Each of these companies had been operating officially for only a few months, yet already had entrusted to them millions of dollars that are now in the hands of cybercrooks," Paul Ducklin, head of technology for Sophos in the Asia Pacific region, said Tuesday in a blog post .
Malware writers have also taken a keen interest in bitcoins, with some -- especially Russian gangs -- modifying their crimeware tools to identify and steal any bitcoins found on infected PCs. "There are numerous malware families today that either perform Bitcoin mining or directly steal the contents of victims' Bitcoin wallets, or both," according to a blog post from Robert Lipovsky, a researcher at security firm ESET.
Other malware attacks have started closer to home. Last week, for example, the New Jersey state attorney general's office announced that it had settled a complaint it filed against Commack, N.Y.-based online gaming company E-Sports, as well company co-founder Eric Thunberg and software engineer Sean Hunczak. According to the complaint, Hunczak designed malware that infected about 14,000 computers that subscribed to the company's service, and which mined their PCs for bitcoins, which the perpetrators then sold for about $3,500. Under the terms of the state's $1 million settlement agreement, the company will pay a fine of $325,000, but the rest will be vacated, providing the company complies with a 10-year compliance program.
But not all bitcoin heists have been executed via hack attacks or malware. For example, a China-based bitcoin exchange called GBL launched in May. Almost 1,000 people used the service to deposit bitcoins worth about $4.1 million. But the exchange was revealed to be an elaborate scam after whoever launched the site shut it down on October 26 and absconded with the funds.
Given the potential spoils from a successful online heist, it's not surprising that related attacks are becoming more common. "Please be advised that attacks are not isolated to us and if you are storing larger amounts of coins with any third party you may want to find alternative storage solutions as soon as possible, preferably cold storage if you do not need immediate access to those coins," said Henriksen.
Bitcoin users have echoed that suggestion. "One note of warning: don't trust any online wallet," read a comment on a recent Guardian feature. "The two biggest ones have already been robbed. Use your own wallet on your own computer and back it up on a USB stick."
"Remember, you don't have to keep your Bitcoins online with someone else: you can store your Bitcoins yourself, encrypted and offline," said Ducklin at Sophos.
Knowing your enemy is the first step in guarding against him. In this Dark Reading report, Integrating Vulnerability Management Into The Application Development Process. we examine the world of cybercriminals -- including their motives, resources and processes -- and recommend what enterprises should do to keep their data and computing systems safe in the face of an ever-growing and ever-more-sophisticated threat. (Free registration required.)
Bitcoin Password Grab Disguised As DDoS Attack
Attacks against bitcoin users continue, as online forum Bitcointalk.org warns users their passwords might have been stolen in distributed denial of service hack.
Aficionados of the cryptographic currency known as Bitcoin might have gotten more than they bargained for recently, after a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack appeared to be used as a smokescreen for launching a password-stealing attack against users of Bitcointalk.org.
Michael Marquardt (a.k.a. "Theymos"), one of the administrators of the popular bitcoin discussion forum, Sunday warned its 176,584 members of the attack. He said the attack had been traced to a flaw in the systems of domain registration firm AnonymousSpeech, which specializes in anonymous email, as well as running hosting servers outside the United States and the European Union. Attackers hacked AnonymousSpeech to change the bitcoin discussion forum's DNS settings to an attacker-controlled server.
According to Marquardt, the DNS redirection attack was spotted Sunday by forum manager Malmi Martti (a.k.a. Sirius), who immediately moved the domain to a different registrar. "However, such changes take about 24 hours to propagate," he warned, meaning that users remained at risk unless they logged on to the forum using its IP address, rather than trusting domain name servers to resolve to the non-malicious site.
What was the risk to forum users? "Because the HTTPS protocol is pretty terrible, this alone could have allowed the attacker to intercept and modify encrypted forum transmissions, allowing them to see passwords sent during login, authentication cookies, [personal messages], etc.," Marquardt said. "Your password only could have been intercepted if you actually entered it while the forum was affected. I invalidated all security codes, so you're not at risk of having your account stolen if you logged in using the 'remember me' feature without actually entering your password."
In other words, anyone who logged into the forum between Sunday and Monday, and who entered a password, should assume that it was compromised by attackers.
What were the bitcoin forum attackers gunning for? The most likely explanation would be participants' usernames and passwords, which -- if reused on other sites -- might have allowed attackers to drain people's online bitcoin wallets. Likewise, attackers might have been interested in gathering email addresses of people who are interested in bitcoins to target them -- via phishing attacks -- with malware designed to find and steal bitcoins from their PCs.
The DNS hack and DDoS attack against Bitcointalk are just the latest exploits in a long string of attacks targeting bitcoin e-wallet services and payment systems. Last month, Denmark-based bitcoin payment processor Bitcoin Internet Payment System suffered a DDoS attack that allowed the attackers to hide their real target: online wallets storing 1,295 bitcoins, which they successfully stole. At the time, their haul was valued at nearly $1 million.
As that haul suggests, the rise in bitcoin-related attacks can be attributed to the bitcoin bubble, which has seen the value of the cryptographic currency rise from a low of $1 per bitcoin in 2011, to $1,200 per bitcoin as of Wednesday.
The rise in bitcoin's value has lead to a number of malicious attacks, as well as a rise in efforts of a different nature. Last week, for example, Malwarebytes researcher Adam Kujawa warned in a blog post that a number of free toolbars and search agents have begun including bitcoin-mining software, which can consume massive amounts of system resources, slowing PCs to a crawl.
Bitcoin mining isn't inherently suspect. In fact, it's crucial to the success of bitcoins, because it's what records the chain of bitcoin transactions. Furthermore, the bitcoin system is set up to reward -- with bitcoins -- anyone who successfully solves related cryptographic puzzles that help maintain the public bitcoin ledger known as the "block chain." But some people have begun turning PCs into nodes in their personal bitcoin-mining empire, such as online gaming company E-Sports, which was recently hit with a related $325,000 fine by the New Jersey state attorney general's office.
In the case of toolbars and search agents with built-in mining software, however, users who agree to the accompanying end-user license agreement (EULA) might be authorizing a third party to turn their PC into a bitcoin-mining platform. "So take note if your system is running especially slow or if a process is taking up massive amounts of your processing power; it might be malware or even a [potentially unwanted program] running a miner on your system," said Kujawa at Malwarebytes.
"Looks like the bad guys are adapting all of their various technical attacks and business models to the bitcoin world," CounterHack co-founder and SANS Institute hacking instructor Ed Skoudis said in a recent SANS email newsletter, responding to the Malwarebytes report. "Given the stakes for rapid money-making here, we'll surely see even more creative bitcoin-related attacks in the near future."
Advanced persistent threats are evolving in motivation, malice and sophistication. Are you ready to stop the madness? Also in the new, all-digital The Changing Face Of APTs issue of Dark Reading: Governments aren't the only victims of targeted "intelligence gathering." Enterprises need to be on guard, too. (Free registration required.)
Nothing guaranteed, of course this is only a rough estimate! You can also calculate rented mining by setting “Power consumption” to 0 and “Cost of mining hardware” to the rent per time frame. Default values are for a 50 GH/s Bitcoin Miner .
Estimate Strategy
Extrapolating bitcoin difficulty or price is pure voodoo. It is much easier to predict the relationship of the two parameters in form of the Mining Factor. The Mining Factor 100 is the value in USD of the bitcoins you can generate if you let a 100MHash/s miner run for 24 hours. If the Mining Factor 100 rises above $2 or so everybody buys mining equipment and thus increases difficulty. If it falls people will stop mining eventually. The estimate starts with the current Mining Factor and decreases it exponentially such that the decrease accounts for the factor decline per year. Please note that a profit/loss by holding the coins is not accounted for in this estimate.
Things to consider that might eat into your profit:
The values above are only a snapshot. The network and markets are moving quickly. Check out these diagrams to get a feeling for it.Looks like if your mining operation is not profitable now, it probably will not be in the future.
With rising bitcoin exchange rates it might be more profitable to buy bitcoins than to mine. There are spreadsheets available in this thread or this one (with some FPGA data) for a more custom calculation.Bitcoin exchanges: MtGox. Tradehill. CryptoXchange .
The calculation is based on average block generation time. The closer the average generation time is to the time frame the more the resulting revenue depends on luck.
You will have to pay mining pool fees from close to nothing up to 3% depending on the pool. Unless you want to do pool hopping you should go to a pool with hopping protection. I recommend Arsbitcoin and EclipseMC (with namecoin merged mining). P2Pool is a new completely decentralized alternative.
You will get somewhere from 1% to 3% of “stale shares”. Thread .
When the block count will hit
200000 some time around December 2012 the generation reward will go down to 25BTC. This might partly be compensated by falling difficulty, raising prices, higher transfer fees, etc.
A mining computer generates a lot of heat as a byproduct. This can impact your heating/airconditioning costs depending on outside temperatures. Other byproducts could be noise and an angry wife.
Do you have lots of experience with and like working with computers during lonesome nights? You have to spend quite some time to set up the system (easily several days!) and watch it.
You will not get a 100% uptime.
You will probably not be able to reach the highest values in the Mining Hardware Comparison. Some bragging / measuring error and extensive overclocking of the cards is involved here.
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Scaling effects: three cards in one rig do worse than a single card because it gets harder to get out the heat. Results in the list above do not reflect the number of cards.
A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable.
Politics and legal issues might affect the bitcoin market.
Possible additional benefits:
For suggestions, infos or links on the topic to add, please contact me directly (info [at] bitcoinx.com) or in this thread on the bitcoin forum.
Nothing guaranteed, of course this is only a rough estimate! You can also calculate rented mining by setting “Power consumption” to 0 and “Cost of mining hardware” to the rent per time frame. Default values are for a 50 GH/s Bitcoin Miner .
Estimate Strategy
Extrapolating bitcoin difficulty or price is pure voodoo. It is much easier to predict the relationship of the two parameters in form of the Mining Factor. The Mining Factor 100 is the value in USD of the bitcoins you can generate if you let a 100MHash/s miner run for 24 hours. If the Mining Factor 100 rises above $2 or so everybody buys mining equipment and thus increases difficulty. If it falls people will stop mining eventually. The estimate starts with the current Mining Factor and decreases it exponentially such that the decrease accounts for the factor decline per year. Please note that a profit/loss by holding the coins is not accounted for in this estimate.
Things to consider that might eat into your profit:
The values above are only a snapshot. The network and markets are moving quickly. Check out these diagrams to get a feeling for it.Looks like if your mining operation is not profitable now, it probably will not be in the future.
With rising bitcoin exchange rates it might be more profitable to buy bitcoins than to mine. There are spreadsheets available in this thread or this one (with some FPGA data) for a more custom calculation.Bitcoin exchanges: MtGox. Tradehill. CryptoXchange .
The calculation is based on average block generation time. The closer the average generation time is to the time frame the more the resulting revenue depends on luck.
You will have to pay mining pool fees from close to nothing up to 3% depending on the pool. Unless you want to do pool hopping you should go to a pool with hopping protection. I recommend Arsbitcoin and EclipseMC (with namecoin merged mining). P2Pool is a new completely decentralized alternative.
You will get somewhere from 1% to 3% of “stale shares”. Thread .
When the block count will hit
200000 some time around December 2012 the generation reward will go down to 25BTC. This might partly be compensated by falling difficulty, raising prices, higher transfer fees, etc.
A mining computer generates a lot of heat as a byproduct. This can impact your heating/airconditioning costs depending on outside temperatures. Other byproducts could be noise and an angry wife.
Do you have lots of experience with and like working with computers during lonesome nights? You have to spend quite some time to set up the system (easily several days!) and watch it.
You will not get a 100% uptime.
You will probably not be able to reach the highest values in the Mining Hardware Comparison. Some bragging / measuring error and extensive overclocking of the cards is involved here.
Scaling effects: three cards in one rig do worse than a single card because it gets harder to get out the heat. Results in the list above do not reflect the number of cards.
A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable.
Politics and legal issues might affect the bitcoin market.
Possible additional benefits:
For suggestions, infos or links on the topic to add, please contact me directly (info [at] bitcoinx.com) or in this thread on the bitcoin forum.
Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First Purpose-Built Miner
Yifo Guo, co-founder of ASIC builder Avalon. Photos of Guo are by the author.
A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.
Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM .
Here in the U.S. Silicon Valley venture rich-guys continued to bet on the promise of this burgeoning internet-of-finance disruption, while the department of the U.S. Treasure that combats money laundering, FinCEN, for the first time, issued guidance on decentralized virtual currencies. tacitly giving bitcoin the legal thumbs up but also paving the way for impending regulations.
And quietly in the background, a company called Avalon shipped the first ASIC-based bitcoin miners. custom-built rigs with specially-designed chips for efficiently printing the market’s hottest commodity, ushering in what can be considered the internet’s first gold rush. (Someone recently paid $20,000 for a $1,500 miner from batch two on eBay. At the time of this writing, another auction has a batch two Avalon miner going for over $19,000.)
After opening up its third batch of 600 miners for sale yesterday, customers from around the world from countries like Argentina, the UK, and even Egypt (although the majority of orders came from the big three of the U.S. Russia, and China) made sure Avalon’s units sold out in fifteen minutes. We had the chance to sit down with Avalon’s founder, Yifu Guo to talk bitcoin, mining, and the future.
Yifu Guo with an Avalon ASIC bitcoin miners at BitInstant's offices in New York
Motherboard: So how and when did you get involved with bitcoin?
Guo: It was early 2011 when some article about bitcoin popped up in my RSS feed. I don’t remember the exact article but I remember thinking at the time that this was the stupidest thing ever. It would never work. But what kept my attention was that it was open source and after a few days of thought and further research, I concluded that this was legit.
What did you do from there?
At first I just got involved with the community. I didn’t do anything presentable per se, but I participated in some feature discussions, became a regular in the forums. One of my first projects was this website that showed verified physical locations that accepted bitcoins called Bitcoin Navigator. It's still up (sometimes).
What was the community like back then?
The community was very. immature, I’d say. It was mostly tons of speculation. There was nothing really meaningful you could do back then. Mining was the central focus because of the profit incentive. And so a lot of people were just mining these things and so was I. The two long term goals then were to build services around bitcoin while also getting people to accept the concept.
Most of the core developers are idealists, much like the community now. A lot of the people in the community are definitely in it for the money, to get in early and watch the price rise. That’s essentially why it blew up very quickly (in July of 2011). There was no volume, but there was a ton of speculative hype and so a bubble formed.
This time around, there’s still a ton of interest, but there’s also more volume. Every day since reaching the new all-time high, more people are getting into bitcoin. They realize it’s not going to go away. And the people who believed from the beginning never left.
When did things start getting more serious?
I think things were always kind of serious. I would say it really took a turn in September in 2011, when the first bitcoin conference convened in New York City. I went, and all these important bitcoin insiders showed up, like Gavin Andreeson, Jeff Garzick, the entire core dev crew basically, as well as the people running real world bitcoin services. Not [bitcoin creator] Satoshi Nakamoto obviously, but a lot of early people showed up. There was this electric buzz, people talking about the projects they were working on, imagining this bitcoin-powered future. It was incredibly exciting.
"The Holy Trinity of bitcoin is the hardware support, the meshnet for powering the infrastructure free of outside control, and then bitcoin itself."
It was at this time that I started getting to know a lot of the core community. Not the speculators and miners, but people who were actually trying to build out this ecosystem around this idea. I had this sort of epiphany. What I realized was that for true bitcoin adoption, we needed hardware. Tons of software was being developed but no hardware. So I set out to make an Android-powered tablet back then, a simple, cheap tool merchants could use as a point-of-sales. That project is still ongoing, by the way.
Soon after, Occupy Wall Street happened. I knew someone who was doing tech ops and I wanted to help out, since bitcoin and Occupy are, in a way, philosophically aligned. I met someone working on this meshnet project. which was essentially this apparatus that would provide everyone in the area with internet access.
It was then that I realized that this was going to be the Holy Trinity, if you will, of bitcoin, where you have the hardware support, the meshnet for transferring information and powering the infrastructure and services free of outside control, and then bitcoin itself.
Avalon's ASIC assemblyline in Shenzhen, China, via Avalon
This was around the point that I became fully immersed in the bitcoin community. The next conference I attended, in San Francisco, was in March (there was also one in London in late 2012) and by that point, I had come to terms with the fact that this was the future. By then, I had been working on this tablet prototype for a few months.
A month later, in April, I finally had the opportunity to go to China to take the next step and figure out logistically what I had to do to get this thing manufactured. It was there that I ended up meeting one of my future co-founders. That, along with being on the ground in Shenzhen would eventually allow us to fast track our ASIC production when the time came.
"We can’t have a monopoly in mining. It's not very good for decentralization."
From an ASIC perspective, things got serious in around June or July when Butterfly Labs first released their ASIC lineup, which was a big deal. They promised to ship in October, and in a matter of days took in over a million dollars, That, on the one hand, was exciting because bitcoin is progressing technologically, but on the other hand, we were aware of the potential risks. We can’t have a monopoly in mining. It's not very good for decentralization.
So this is when we decided we had to step up and this is when developing an ASIC suddenly became a real discussion. In September 2012, we announced that we would offer 300 units if we could get the crowdfunding to do it. We announced this fully knowing that our competitor would deliver the next month, but that was fine since we simply wanted to get the chips and the technology out there in the wild.
We never intended for this to be a real business. But then lo and behold, Butterfly Labs announced that they were delayed. October came and went, November came and went, December came and went and they still hadn’t shipped. Meanwhile, we’re chugging along.
Then in late January we tried to deliver. Well, we tried. It was almost Chinese New Year and nothing happens during Chinese New Year. Fast forward to now, we’re done shipping the first few hundred units, so we’re 90 percent done with batch one.
This is an obvious question, but why aren’t you mining your own chips?
Like I said, the current reality is vastly different from what we originally had planned. We always figured we would be late to the party. Butterfly Labs and bASIC (another ASIC developer that ultimately failed to launch) were supposed to launch in succession. But due to various complications and delays, it didn’t work out that way.
Avalon 2 ASIC Bitcoin Miner
If they had delivered on their promises, they would have shipped months before our first batch. We wanted to start selling chips so people could make their own units, providing a hedge from a single entity becoming too powerful, and then move onto a new project. That was our main goal. We wanted to prevent this potential monopoly. As it turned out, we became the monopoly we tried to prevent.
via Avalon
You aren’t doing any mining at all?
Nope. Fun fact: none of the Avalon team have their own mining units (outside of test units).
If this was going to be a temporary project, how much longer will you keep the business going?
At this point, we’re going to keep making them until we run out of funding, now that bitcoin mining will continue to be “a thing” rather than not. Of course, everything changes when our competitors eventually deliver. And then we will see what the situation is and go from there. The short term plan is to push for generation two chips as soon as we obtain the necessary funds.
Batch one was $1,300 and batch two was $1,500. At a cost of 75 BTC, batch three units effectively cost
$5000. What gives?
Well, one of cofounders commented on that, and the main thing is trust, which, since the beginning of the bitcoin movement, has always been the most valuable resource above all else. The first batch could have been a potential scam, so we had to price it at $1,300 (which is the same price that Butterfly Labs has been offering).
"If we wanted to maximize our profit, we could charge much more. For us, this has always been an ideal-oriented problem, not a business-oriented one."
We’ve had plenty of opportunities, such as keeping the technology to ourselves and simply mining, but that was never our intention. So how much is that trust worth? We think it’s worth $5000 by itself. Beyond that, the calculation is based on the current difficulty rate so that break-even point occurs in a month. Which, by the way, as an investment vehicle is a fairly unique proposition. It should be mentioned also that the cost of the batch two was also 75 bitcoins. That the exchange rate has moved is out of our control.
And in the end, this was never what we wanted. If we wanted to maximize our profit, we could charge much more. For us, this has always been an ideal-oriented problem, not a business-oriented one. This is one of the primary reasons we aren’t clearly in the black.
We’re lucky that we held onto the second batch of bitcoins because if it weren’t for the appreciation, we would be very, very deep in the red, which ultimately still isn’t that big of a deal. But batch three now gives the project monetary sustainability, especially since we need to purchase an SMT machine (a pick-and-place machine for mounting devices onto circuit boards) to produce our generation two chipset.
Okay, so now you’ve started shipping your ASIC systems, but as more people get the same miners, the machines become less profitable. Does it really make sense to dive in, for such a premium, this late in the game?
The whole risk/return calculation is detached from fiat currency. The loop has been closed. It’s like any other investment, part mathematics, part faith. Difficulty is not going to skyrocket by multiples of fifty or even ten.
No one can predict the future. We don’t know if Butterfly Labs is going to ship or how fast they’re going to ship. In the end, the price is based on a break-even formula of one month. After that, if you don’t think this is a profitable endeavour, then please, for the love of God, don’t buy from us and stop complaining.
Basically, as more people get into mining, everyone makes less money.
Yes. This is the gold rush. It’s first come, first serve. In reality, the first have come and have already been served. Batch one and two was where it was at.
So then what’s your advice for a prospective miner that’s been recently seduced by all the bitcoin headlines? Is it too late to join in on the fun?
[ Points to t-shirt above ] In reality, if you have bitcoins already then, I think buying a miner is kind of cool because it’s not only about making money. If you’re here for short term profits, you should stick to day trading.
Mining is sort of magical. I remember hearing a story at a team meetup in Beijing. There was this miner who had moved from Brazil, and he basically expressed that, sure, this thing is making me some money, but what it has really done is changed my life. He couldn't believe that this was real, mining around the clock in front of his house.
"Eventually you’ll be able to hook it up to APIs where it will automatically order your groceries for you."
This machine liberates people. Suddenly, you can figure out what you want to do as a human being because it takes care of your living expenses. Eventually you’ll be able to hook it up to APIs where it will automatically order your groceries for you. It’s crazy but it’s going to happen.
If ASICs are the technological pinnacle, what’s next for bitcoin and mining?
Of mining’s technological evolution? Yes. In terms of major technological developments, it will be a while. What’s going to happen is that there is going to be a die shrink in order to reduce power consumption and increase speed based on smaller gate sizes. Eventually we’re going to reach the theoretical wall because of physics. The atoms will be too small. I don’t know when that will be hit, but the sooner the better.
If bitcoin is a $1 billion market, and it only takes less than $1 million to secure the network right now, that’s not a lot of money for someone to try and take over the mining scene. The faster the technology progresses, the more secure the network is, because it will be that much harder for a malevolent entity to mess with the system. We want to reach 14 or 10 nanometers as soon as possible. IBM/Intel is playing with 7 nanometers right now. The sooner the better so we’ll never again have this scenario where one company like Avalon essentially controls more theoretical computing power than the entire network’s hash rate. This will never happen again.
So inherent technological security?
Yes. Then we can feasibly protect the network based on predictive production and performance. At some point quantum computing might show up, but what is really next? Nobody knows.
Fresh miners being tested, via Avalon
If this was never the plan, what’s next for Yifu Guo after Avalon?
Besides ASICS? I want to finish my tablet. I don’t like to build services, I like to build platforms and infrastructure. I want to build a tablet that’s open source. Apple has done a great job of convincing us that technology is expensive when what they’re really selling is a luxury good. Everyone has an iPhone even though it’s essentially a luxury product. They’ve turned the smartphone into jewelry.
Which is fine, but we want something that works but is also cheap. We’re talking really cheap. We want to cut costs tremendously and offer a $100 tablet that is as good, spec-wise, as the Nexus 7, by cutting out all the middlemen. We have access to manufacturing and engineering, and eventually we’ll have our own factories so there will be very little overhead.
What about bitcoin? Where do we go from here?
I think bitcoin still needs more acceptance and the next major milestone is mainstream adoption. Adoption is a natural organic thing that can just happen. Bitcoin’s core features–ease of transfer and production without middlemen–will always give it value.
"How can we take bitcoin’s strengths, its cryptography, its decentralization, and how do we utilize and leverage this model?"
That’s why we don’t really care about its exchange rate. We don’t look at it like a stock, we look at it like technology. It’s a platform. How can we take bitcoin’s strengths, its cryptography, its decentralization, and how do we utilize and leverage this model? Whatever business you’re running right now, add bitcoin to the equation and you’ll see instant profits.
What do you think is the root of all the uncertainty?
People need to get their head out of the sand in terms of thinking of it as a competitor to their local currencies. We no longer live in a localized economy. We live in a globalized economy and bitcoin is designed for a globalized system.
If bitcoin is useful and it has true staying power, what’s the big picture story here? Why does it matter?
Bitcoin is an enabler based around the ideals of peer-to-peer, open source, and decentralization. That’s the future and bitcoin is the vehicle that will take us there. It takes the banks and the humans and the Federal Reserve out of the equation. Without those institutions, we can do things more freely and easily. It allows us to get things done without all of the friction, and whatever we do will be built around these ideals.
I am not a lawyer but the way I understood it, people who mine are not going to have a problem. Mining pools (organizations that allow users to contribute processing power for their share of the bitcoins) might have to deal with certain regulations, such as applying for licenses.
For individual users, it should be okay, since apparently, using bitcoins to pay for goods and services is fine. Once you have the intention of turning that into dollars or some other fiat currency, then problems might arise. Ultimately this is simply guidance. Our motto used to be, ask for forgiveness, not for permission. But recently I came to terms with an even better maxim, since we’re technically not doing anything wrong. Act and defend your position. And our position is bitcoin. We believe in it.
"It’s not about how much bitcoin is worth. The exchange rate is irrelevant. It’s about the concept."
And ultimately, I think the recent guidance is arguably good thing since it finally offers clarity. This kind of verbiage means that certain organizations can now start accepting bitcoins with more confidence knowing that the government has essentially given virtual currencies the official okay. This be a major jumping off point for mainstream adoption. Exchanges have been following the rules anyway knowing that regulation was inevitable so for most companies, there isn’t a whole lot of change.
What could the government conceivably do to bitcoin then? What’s the worst case scenario?
The worst case scenario is that they attempt to destroy bitcoin itself, and there are numerous strategies they could use, which we don’t really have to go into. But the point is, the idea will never die. Even if bitcoin dies, an alternative will arise, one that addresses the vulnerability that was previously exploited. Then you get bitcoin 2.0.
Which again, it’s not about how much bitcoin is worth. The exchange rate is irrelevant. It’s about the concept of a peer-to-peer ledger keeping system, which so far is working swimmingly. And I think the best example is BitTorrent. They’ve spent billions fighting it and failed. BitTorrent is still rampant. Meanwhile, legitimate companies are now finding uses for the technology.
Read more about bitcoin:
A Guide to Bitcoin Mining: Why Someone Bought a $1,500 Bitcoin Miner on eBay for $20,600
The world's first ASIC-based miner, via Avalon
With the price of bitcoins skyrocketing, mining is suddenly big business, so enticingly big that one wannabe miner was willing to pay a 1,333 percent premium to get his (or her) foot in the door of this wildly lucrative bitcoin bonanza. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the bitcoin gold rush.
The craziest part? This wasn’t an auction for a physical, working, ready-to-ship bitcoin mining machine from Avalon. which claims to be the first to develop turnkey, bitcoin-specific mining computers for sale. For $20,600 (bidding started at a reasonable $500 ), the lucky winner only received a place in line and the promise that an actual (pre-ordered) miner will be delivered sometime next month. If that sounds ridiculous, well, it’s because it quite possibly is.
But clearly there are bitcoin-savvy folks betting that paying 13 times the price of a machine will actually pay off. How did we arrive at this maniacal juncture? Was it greed? Stupidity? Or simple mathematics? For the full story, we’ll have to start from the top.
How bitcoin mining works
In order to keep a record of everything, bitcoin has a ledger known as the “block chain,” a shared database of all successful transactions. Every transaction that occurs must be broadcast to the bitcoin network and everyone connected to the bitcoin network has a copy of the block chain.
Click to enlarge. How bitcoin works, by Joshua J. Romero, Brandon Palacio & Karlssonwilker Inc.
The purpose of bitcoin miners is to verify these transactions and then add groups of transactions, called blocks, to the block chain. This process occurs roughly every 10 minutes. For every block added, the successful miner receives a certain amount of bitcoins for his troubles, plus transaction fees. The reward started out at 50 bitcoins, but it's cut in half every 4 years. Right now, you get get 25 bitcoins for every block mined.
Anyone can technically become a miner. The software is ready to download. all you have to do is contribute raw computing power, which means your main recurring costs are electricity bills. If you solve the next block, the spoils are yours. The more processing power at your disposal, the greater your mining ability.
But here’s the kicker. Built into the model is a “difficulty” metric, which is recalculated whenever 2016 blocks are added. As the speed of mining goes up (as more processing power is added to the system), the difficulty will increase proportionately to compensate in order to maintain the rate of one block every 10 minutes.
Mining difficulty increases at a predictable rate, via bitcoinX
What this means is that your ability to mine bitcoins isn’t necessarily about absolute computing power, but rather your computing power relative to other mines. Of course, in the end, that still means you’re going to want the most powerful hardware possible if you want to maximize your mining ability. But it also means that if you don’t keep pace, you’re going to be left behind. Which brings us to.
A brief history of mining hardware
Back in 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto first birthed bitcoin, mining difficulty was relatively low, which meant that anyone could download the software and more or less start mining with only their CPU.
The next logical step was the GPU, dedicated graphics chips usually reserved for gaming. A graphics card from the likes of Nvidia or ATI offered a significant boost over Intel and AMD CPUs. For about $150, you could buy an off-the-shelf graphics card and start a fairly profitable mining business in mid-2011.
Mining profitability over time, via CoinLab
As more miners joined the party, difficulty increased, making the profit to power consumption ratio unpalatable for those used to a higher rate of return. Bitcoin's price collapse in July of 2011 only exacerbated the situation. Even if you believed in the future of bitcoin, if you spent more on your electric bill than you made from mining, you were better off just buying bitcoins.
This initiated the advent of FPGA. or field-programmable gate array, use in mining. That's a mouthful for the technical layman, but all you really need to know is that these add-on cards, which cost in the hundreds of dollars, offered comparable mining performance to GPUs while using way less power. Better energy efficiency meant higher profit margins. Eventually, any self-respecting miner was FPGA-equipped.
A mining rig hooked up with 41 Icarus FPGAs, via Xiangfu Liu
The endgame, however, was always going to be the ASIC, an application-specific integrated circuit–in other words, a chip designed from the ground up for the specific purpose of mining bitcoins. The result is a system that is not only incredibly powerful compared to anything else, it’s also exceedingly energy efficient.
ASIC also represents the theoretical limit on the hardware capabilities of mining equipment. Sure, you could keep shrinking the die-size of the chip so that it uses even less power, but even that road eventually ends. It’s simple physics: things can only get so small. Until quantum computing arrives–if it ever does–for bitcoin miners, using ASICs is the way to go.
For a while, the bitcoin ASIC was a pipe dream. Designing and manufacturing your own chip requires significant upfront investment. With bitcoin’s future still uncertain, many figured FPGAs would be the best hardware miners ever got. Then, last summer, a company called Butterfly Labs started taking pre-orders for fully functional ASIC systems for $1,299 and promised to ship in October. Another company, bASIC, started taking pre-orders soon after.
As with most things bitcoin in these early days, the whole ordeal was contrasted by wild enthusiasm and lingering fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The guys from bASIC ended up running with the money (although it appears they have been attempting to give partial refunds). Meanwhile, Butterfly Labs, after numerous delays, has still yet to ship anything, although it’s generally believed that they eventually will.
Avalon's ASIC chips
Only one company followed through. Avalon started taking orders in September, promising delivery sometime in February. That first batch of 300 pre-orders sold out within hours. By the end of January, Avalon shipped their first two units from China just before the new year's festivities, effectively becoming the world’s first ever company to produce an ASIC bitcoin miner. ASICminer, another major developer went online in February as well, although these units were never sold to the public (but you can buy shares in the company). A new era had begun.
Where we are today
Remember, the ability to mine bitcoins is based on relative computing power. As such, whoever got their hands on those first ASIC machines–which are roughly 50 times more powerful than the next best thing–would quite literally print money. That lucky man was Jeff Garzik. who was incidentally pushed to the front of the queue by Avalon for being a core bitcoin developer. It’s an open source project after all. (The other unit went to the Bitcoin Foundation .)
Garzik made back the cost of the $1,299 ASIC bitcoin miner in about a week. The remaining units from batch one were delivered by the end of February.
Having gained some credibility and silenced the trolls, Avalon started accepting orders for batch two, which totaled 600 units at a cost of $1,499 each. Batch two pre-orders sold out within 20 minutes. Those units are scheduled to complete shipping by the first week of April. But while miners in batch two will still do well for themselves, they’ll be doing less well than batch two over time as difficulty inevitably ramps up.
Which finally brings us back to our exuberant eBayer, the one who paid over $20,000 to cut in line and join the other batch two early birds. Is the worm really worth an $18,500 premium? Only time will tell. But if the price of bitcoin continues its meteoric rise, he too, will eventually mine his money back, sooner rather than later. Under current conditions, he'll break even in 50 days, with daily revenues of $434.12, according to BitcoinX. All things considered, not too bad. Granted, it's impossible to know how bitcoin will perform in that time.
The arrival of ASIC-miners, in graph form, via bitcoin.sipa.be
We do know however, that he'll be in for some stiff competition and with it, the reality of diminishing returns as more ASIC units flood the system. Butterfly Labs–rumored to have sold over 20,000 pre-orders as of a month ago–is expected to start shipping in May or June. Still chugging along, Avalon revealed it would start taking orders for batch three in the next few days.
This time around, one of the 600 Avalon miners will cost
75 BTC (the batch three price of the systems will be calculated so that break even point will be 30 days, once the difficulty resets), which comes out to over $5000 with bitcoins trading at
$70.
If that seems pricey–it is nearly five times the price of an identical unit from batch two–it’s still only a fraction of the market value. And really, there are few other businesses whose start-up costs are designed to break even in just a month. Such is the insanity of bitcoin mania.
