The humble begginings

The humble begginings

Bitcoin master thesis StackExchange

Over the course of the summer I got further into the topic of Bitcoin. I joined the forum, read some materials here and there, but didn't want to get too much into working on anything until I got the topic of my master thesis. I did, however, manage to overload my wife's computer while mining and playing Terraria at the same time. She wasn't too pleased to say the least and had to go with her first thing in the morning to get a replacement for that. Next time I'll know not to try installing a shiny, new high-powered graphic card into a slightly old PC.

In September I started to work on some code, trying to understand better how Bitcoin works. I managed to create my little online calculator (http://tpbitcalc.appspot.com/), and started working on implementing some Bitcoin-related packages. The amount of information available to the raw workings of Bitcoin wasn't too great, so I had to dig up all the information I could from places like the forum, the wiki, and of course, the Stack Exchange. Discovering that last website was really an interesting experience. It was the first time I stumbled across any of the Stack Exchanges and I found this to be a very valuable tool for a lot of things. Not to mention that it really helped me to learn a lot about Bitcoin and give back to the community (now if I could grind some more reputation...;) ).

But then first hurdles appeared on the road. I guess this is what you get when trying to implement a new concept with some new technology. As it turned out Golang didn't have an implementation of secp256k1 (the ECDSA curve used by Bitcoin), Google App Engine did not want to communicate in any other way than through HTTP, and understanding how to implement the Bitcoin Script was too much for me.

Luckily I was able to work on two Bitcoin sub-projects at once (a Block Explorer and a Pool), which allowed me to take a brake from one and start on the other if things became too hard at times. Too bad starting programming the Pool it turned out that Golang didn't have HTTP JSON RPC implemented...

How did it all start?

How did it all start?

Bitcoin master thesis mining value bubble

Where did my adventure with Bitcoins start? As far as I remember, it went like this:

At the time I was a student of first semester of MSc course in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering. I was taking a boring lab at the moment, Modelling and Analysis of Informatic Systems. I googled around for some info on the PSN hack, came across the LulzSec Twitter account, and I saw this message:

I thought that it was intriguing that there was some way to send such a small amount of money to someone, and then I started looking around for what those "BitCoins" are. Soon after I was hooked on the concept of creating your own money. The book of value of Bitcoins was only starting, so like many people I was doing my calculations and looking into getting some hardware. Did manage to mine and sell some part of a coin before the value stated going down, but at any rate, I didn't get rich;).

By that time I learned a bit more and knew that if I wanted to earn anything in the long run I had to get into making my own mining pool, rather than mining. The costs of getting a decent mining rig was too much for a student, and the ratios between how much it costs to mine coins and how much they are worth didn't calculate. I decided to incorporate it all into my master thesis, but since the summer break has already started, it was hard to get in contact with anyone form the university and ask them to be my supervisor...

Getting started

Getting started

Bitcoin first post greeting master thesis security

I've decided to start a blog about my adventure with Bitcoins. I'm currently working on a master thesis set out to create a Bitcoin application and analyse the security of the network, so expect a number of posts about the technical details on the subject. Hope you all will find it interesting.