https://stadivm.com/blog/bitcoin-guide/
Monday, December 3, 2018
[Daily Discussion] Monday, December 03, 2018
Thread topics include, but are not limited to:
- General discussion related to the day's events
- Technical analysis, trading ideas & strategies
- Quick questions that do not warrant a separate post
Thread guidelines:
- Be excellent to each other.
- Do not make posts outside of the daily thread for the topics mentioned above.
Other ways to interact:
- Get an invite to live chat on our Slack group
- Set your flair to trade pretend money in the Flair Game
- Weekly threads: Newbie Mondays and Fundamentals Fridays
How Useful are Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies During War?
The extreme point of clarifying relationship between countries is war. For either sides, military actions are accompanied by heavy casualties and terrible events. But, even during a ruthless war, the price of money did, does and will exist, always and everywhere.
So, what about the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies during military activities? The Coin Shark will tell more about that.
Endless Hack Stories
https://i.redd.it/g2sitto7s1221.jpg
Let’s face it, the internet has been buzzing with endless hack stories, one after the other — celebrities, politician, CEOs and even scientists have fallen victim in recent years. Vast swathes of sensitive and classified data have been leaked and exposed. We thought it would be a good idea to take a closer look at some of the higher-profile cases and ask; what happened, how, and what were the consequences?
Russia’s Alleged Election Hack
The 2016 US presidential election was the epicentre of a prolonged hacking scandal of a kind history had never seen before. As a candidate, Donald Trump was at first perceived by many as an unlikely contender because of his character, numerous eccentricities and patterns of behaviour that many thought to reveal downright buffoonery. Even so, in the end, he prevailed over the “perfect” Democratic candidate, former State Secretary, Hillary Clinton. The first scandal to rock the presidential race was the Democratic National Committee email leak. Almost 20 thousand emails to and from DNC staff members, including key officials, were allegedly stolen by Russian hackers and handed over to WikiLeaks. The publication was damaging, and the source was never disclosed.
The leaked content exploded like a bomb since it contained suggestions that the party leaders had worked to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination (as we all know, he ended his race on July 12, 2016, by formally endorsing Clinton to run against Trump). DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the scandalous aftermath.
Needless to say, that didn’t exactly help the Democrats in the following stages of the race and might well have actually contributed to Donald Trump’s ultimate victory. On July 31, in an interview with Fox News, Hillary Clinton openly accused Russia’s intelligence services of hacking into Democratic National Committee computers. Allegations that Russia interfered have pretty much been the focus of attention for America’s political elite ever since and been the catalyst for ever-more scandals. In late December 2016, President Obama’s administration ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats from the US as a means of sanctioning Russia for “malicious cyber activity” referred to as ‘Grizzly Steppe’ in a new FBI report. The scandal expanded even further when the Director of National Intelligence released a joint intelligence report in early January 2017, followed by the US Department of Justice opening a Special Counsel investigation into the ‘Russian interference’.
Whether or not Russian intelligence services really did ‘hack’ the US election and tip the balance in Trump’s favour remains an open question to this day. What we can say for sure is that the hack contributed extensively to increasing tension between the two superpowers and no one can say for sure where it will all lead. If that doesn’t teach everyone a lesson about the importance of data security, we don’t know what will!
Sony Pictures Hack: Reputations in Tatters
Movie executives at Sony Pictures paid a heavy price in November 2014 for a massive data leak instigated by a hacker group calling itself “Guardians of Peace”. The hackers got their hands on personal information of about more than 47,000 current and former company employees; this included executive salaries, emails, copies of unreleased Sony films, and a whole host of other data. The attackers made threats and demands for payment without clearly specifying what they actually wanted, and while Sony tried to figure out the scale of the damage and how to respond, the bad guys started leaking the data.
What sparked the most public outrage were e-mail exchanges between Sony Pictures Chair, Amy Pascal and producer, Scott Rudin. First, it was revealed that Rudin had called actress Angelina Jolie “a minimally talented spoiled brat” in emails discussing her upcoming remake of the classic film Cleopatra (which, by the way, was never finished). To add insult to injury, there were further revelations of several racist jokes by Rudin and Pascal about none other than the then President of the United States, Barack Obama. The two had mockingly suggested they should mention films about African-Americans upon meeting the president at a forthcoming fundraising event. Both Pascal and Rudin were compelled to issue public apologies for their insensitive and insulting Jolie and Obama comments. We humbly suggest that no one would willingly trade places with those two.
Alonzo Knowles: Genius or Lousy Fence?
This curious story occurred in 2015; Alonzo Knowles, a 23-year-old Bahamian man, managed to develop a hacking scheme that allowed him to steal data concerning celebrities and famous athletes. His digital haul included unpublished film and TV show scripts, social security numbers, emails, passport details, unreleased music tracks and even sexually explicit videos. One script that’s known to have been hacked was, “All Eyez on Me”, a biopic about the legendary rapper, Tupac Shakur.
The hacker tried to profit from his theft by extorting money from some of his victims, their producers and show-runners. His actions came to official attention when “a popular radio host” contacted the executive producer of a TV show, saying scripts for the show had been offered for sale. The channel that broadcast the show contacted law enforcement authorities, and an undercover agent went to cut a deal with Knowles, who was operating under an alias, and the operation ultimately led to his arrest.
Knowles tried to sell a package of data and scripts for $80,000 but instead was sent to jail for 5 years. It seems he had a knack for grabbing the goodies but wasn’t very adept when it came to fencing them. In fact, he was very good at extracting information, he collected dossiers on as many as 130 stars!
Climategate: Global Warming, Huh?
This is a curious case because these hackers weren’t seeking to extort money or wield political influence, at least not directly. They behaved more like whistle-blowers. In November 2009, a server at the University of East Anglia (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was hacked by an external attacker who copied and released thousands of computer files and emails attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers. This was just weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change. The leak was following by an outcry from climate-change “sceptics” who argued that the documents conclusively showed how global warming was nothing more than a scientific conspiracy and that scientists had manipulated climate data.
Well, as many as eight committees investigated the allegations and leaked documents and found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct thus proving the theorists who denied climate change wrong. However, from the point of data security, this case demonstrates that even the world’s leading scientific institutions can be hacked. As for the “bad rep” after-effects, it must be acknowledged that, to this day, none of the official reports has succeeded in shaking off the sceptics; conspiracy theorists still refer to “Climategate” every now and then. Some things do tend to stick, don’t they?
Celebgate: Victims said it was “Equivalent to Sex Crime”
2014 saw a scandal in which hundreds of nude photos and videos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities were stolen from their Apple iCloud accounts and posted online, known as Fappening or Celebgate. Among other victims were Kim Kardashian, Kate Upton, Kelly Brook, Kirsten Dunst, a total of 100 stars! The hackers released some photos for free and exchanged others for Bitcoin (which were worth around $500 a piece at the time).
The fallout was massive, the victims were enraged, and the FBI investigated the outrageous violation of privacy. One interesting detail is that Apple later reported that the victims’ iCloud account information had been obtained using targeted attacks on usernames, passwords and security questions, such as phishing and brute-force guessing. Essentially they said that the breach had been made possible because the celebrities were careless and used weak passwords.
Celebgate remains the most significant leak so far of personal celebrity photos and details, we hope it stays that way.
All of this tells us again how vital user device security is. No one can promise a totally trouble-free life, not even us, but if you can’t be hacked, data security and privacy won’t be among the troubles you have to worry about. Wouldn’t that be good?
[Daily Discussion] Monday, December 03, 2018
Thread topics include, but are not limited to:
- General discussion related to the day's events
- Technical analysis, trading ideas & strategies
- Quick questions that do not warrant a separate post
Thread guidelines:
- Be excellent to each other.
- Do not make posts outside of the daily thread for the topics mentioned above.
Other ways to interact:
- Get an invite to live chat on our Slack group
- Set your flair to trade pretend money in the Flair Game
- Weekly threads: Newbie Mondays and Fundamentals Fridays
Got my Bitcoin/LN Node up and running on testnet. Have a few questions.
Bare with with me as I'm still new to fully understanding how Bitcoin and the LN work. And I'm an even bigger newbie when it comes to Linux, which is why I installed 'Raspberry PI Desktop'. I wanted to closely follow the guide mentioned below (with a few changes as to accommodate the i686 processor).
I had some old hardware laying around and decided to attempt a Bitcoin/LN Node setup using the following guide: https://github.com/Stadicus/guides/blob/master/raspibolt/README.md
My Hardware Specs:
- Asus Eee PC Atom Netbook - Processor: Intel Atom N270 (i686) 1.6 GHz / RAM: 2 GB / Hard Drive: SSD 4GB (lol...) / Supports SD Memory Card and SDHC Memory Card.
- 500 GB Portable 2.5" WD Hard Drive
- 32GB SD Memory Card
I downloaded the "Debian Stretch with Raspberry PI Desktop" disk image on the 32GB SD Memory Card. I then tried to do an install to the 4GB SSD, but I don't think the 4GB was enough disk space because the system install would stop/error at around 32%. After several failed attempts I decided to just "Run with persistence" from the SD card, which worked. After about a day and a half (breaks in between), I finally got testnet up and running. I'll be staying on testnet for a while until I familiarize myself with everything, with that said, I'm hoping some of you Linux and Bitcoin savvy people can answer a few questions/concerns.
TL;DR: I setup a Bitcoin/LN Node on testnet, and have a few questions below.
Linux Related:
- On boot/reboot I get this message below, should I be concerned? I'm not sure what it means, how can I stop this message? I'm able to just hit Ctrl+D, which the system continues booting normally afterwards.
"No Caching mode page found" and "Assuming drive cache: write through"
"After logging in type 'journalctl -xb' to view system logs, 'systemctl reboot' to reboot or ^D to try again to boot into default mode."
Bitcoin/LN Related:
- Is the LN wallet the same as my Bitcoin Node wallet? (I don't see the step where I created a wallet on the "Bitcoin" section using the guide I mentioned at the top of this post. But I do see the step of creating the LN wallet in the "Lightning" section by using the following command - "lncli --network=testnet create".)
- Do I need to unlock my wallet every time I restart? Is this required to use the LN? (I noticed when I restart my system and do a "sudo journalctl -f -u lnd", It prompts me for my wallet password, or create a new one.)
- What are the characters at the end of the command below(np2wkh) when creating a new address? Do I generate a new address every time I want to receive a payment? ("lncli --network=testnet newaddress np2wkh")
- Why does my LN wallet balance display differently than what I requested from a faucet? (The testnet faucet says 0.01 max, which I sent to my wallet address. But my LN wallet displays as "total_balance 199637".)
- If I need to restart my node, is there a correct way of doing so? How do I make sure i don't affect open channels?
I know I have other questions, but I can't remember them off the top of my head right now. Thanks
[Newbie Monday] Week of Monday, December 03, 2018
Welcome to the Newbie Monday Weekly thread at /r/bitcoinmarkets!
This is a weekly thread where you can ask any basic questions related to bitcoin trading without shame or embarrassment.
Some rules:
-
First and foremost, check out the links on the subreddit bar on the right as well as our Wiki for answers to common questions and good reading material on basic guides, strategies and indicators.
-
There are no questions too stupid, as long as they are about what to do and how to do it in bitcoin trading. If you don't like a question being asked - you don't have to answer it.
-
Be respectful, no name-calling.
-
Try to source your answers or support with chart examples, links, etc where possible.
-
This is not a a thread to ask rhetorical questions about the state of bitcoin. "With the halvening coming up, isn't it stupid not to buy every dip?" or "With only 2.7TPS how can bitcoin support a global economy" are better questions for the weekly fundamental thread.
Past Newbie Monday Threads - Link
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)