How I Brute Force Blockchain.info Wallets

• Here is the actual command I used to recover a recent wallet. The recovery took about a week on an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card. This is a batch of 300 million passwords, but it took over 1 billion total passwords to crack this wallet because my process involves ever-larger password sets. Pro Tip: Blockchain.info/Blockchain.com wallets ...more

How to Extract a Crypto Wallet Seed from an iPhone

• https://twitter.com/HeroicLife/status/1479945740797550595 1: Jailbreak the iPhone A "jailbreak" (or "root" for Android devices) means gaining super-user permissions on your iPhone. These permissions allow apps to escape the "sandbox" that limits what apps can normally do on IOS. There have been dozens of different jailbreaks, but they all work the same way: a jailbreak finds a vulnerability ("exploit") in ...more

Can Bitcoin Fix Big Tech Censorship?

• Today is the start of Hereticon, an annual conference that celebrates heretical ideas. Why celebrate thoughtcrime? According to Hereticon:  While our culture is fascinated by the righteousness of our historical heretics, it is obsessed with the destruction of the heretics among us today Most of the heretics of the past were wrong, just like today’s heretics. But history teaches us ...more

Is Private Censorship Still "Censorship?"

• Commentary on my last post: Whether it's a private entity or the government doing the censorship, it's still wrong and harmful, and for some of the same reasons. Government censorship is far worse than private censorship because it eliminates your ability to speak on any platform. But the value of free speech is a universal principle, not a ...more

How To Tell If A Cryptocurrency Or DeFi Platform Is A Scam

• My survey of 2500+ crypto scam victims identified some key signs that a crypto project is a scam. Whether it's a scam from the start, or just doomed to fail and waste all your money, here are six ways to tell if a crypto project is a scam: 1: Does this project have a legitimate profit ...more

How To Tell If A Cryptocurrency Or DeFi Platform Is A Scam

• (If you're a victim of a crypto scam, read this first.) My survey of 2500+ crypto scam victims identified some key signs that a crypto project is a scam. Whether it's a scam from the start, or just doomed to fail and waste all your money, here are six ways to tell if a crypto project ...more

Survey of Crypto and Defi Scams 2021 Whitepaper

• 2021 has been another bull market for cryptocurrencies. Unsurprisingly, billions of dollars flowing into an unregulated market have attracted plenty of scammers too. Besides the risks of theft from platforms and crypto wallets, 2021 has seen a rise in DeFi scams and theft events. While DeFi (theoretically) provides protection against some risks, it also introduces new ...more

Inflation Is Here Today. Five Ways To Protect Your Wealth

• Are you sitting on cash because it is "safe?" It isn't. Your USD savings are losing 7 to 15% in value every year. That isn't "safe." It's stupid. The official rate is 6.8%, but that excludes real estate and investments, which are up over 20% YTD. The M2 money supply is up 40% since the end of ...more

Stablecoins in an Unstable World

• For those new to the cryptocurrency market, stablecoins represent one of the more difficult aspects to understand.  The reality of this point is further cemented when one has come into crypto because of Bitcoin or some other specific project or protocol that potentially serves as a universal ledger or universal unit of account.  While the ...more

Why are there so many scams in crypto?

• Original posted at The Bitcoin Consultancy If you can imagine a way to lose money in crypto, I’ve heard it. Since 2017, I’ve heard from thousands of victims of every crypto scam imaginable.   But for every crypto scheme which is outright theft, there are ten trash crypto-assets created mainly to take your money and run. Each project has a ...more

Six Reasons Why Bitcoin Is Superior To Gold

• Gold and Bitcoin are fungible, durable, portable, divisible, & scarce. Both have limited acceptance today: there are few goods & services you can buy directly with gold or bitcoin.  But Bitcoin has six advantages over gold: 1: Bitcoin is far more portable than gold. You can send it anywhere in the world instantly for a trivial fee.   2: ...more

How to transfer Bitcoin from a Multibit Classic or Multibit HD wallet into Electrum

• Multibit was one of the better Bitcoin wallets between 2011-2016. However, in 2019, both Multibit Classic and Multibit HD have been abandoned by its owner Keepkey and are no longer supported. If you still have Bitcoin in your Multibit wallet and need to get it out, read on. You can still try to send Bitcoin out of ...more

Six Reasons Why Bitcoin Is Superior To Monetary Gold

• Gold and Bitcoin are fungible, durable, portable, divisible, & scarce. Both have limited acceptance today: there are few goods & services you can buy directly with gold or bitcoin. But Bitcoin has six advantages over gold: 1: Bitcoin is far more portable than gold. You can send it anywhere in the world instantly for a trivial fee. 2: Bitcoin transactions ...more

How to Protect Yourself From DeFi Platform Hacks

• Yesterday, BadgerDAO users had $120 million stolen because the platform was hacked. The current theory is that the hackers injected malicious scripts using Cloudflare. These scripts modified the transactions made by the website to redirect funds to the hacker's wallet. Here are some tips for avoiding these hacks: Always Review The Transaction Details Below, you can ...more

Common types of scams in crypto and DeFi

• Sometimes it's obvious that a scheme is a scam. In other cases, it's a grey area. For example, are copycat coins, pyramid schemes, and vaporware coins necessarily scams? In crypto, it could be argued that there is a spectrum from obviously legitimate to obviously scam schemes, with the exact divide being a gray area. Common ...more

Is Inflation Good For The Poor?

• The Intercept story “Inflation is Good For You” argues that “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else.” After denying the threat of inflation, then claiming that it is transitory and that it would fade away, the mainstream is finally admitting a wave of unprecedented inflation for the foreseeable future. So now the story is ...more

How to Avoid Buying Trash Crypto That Wastes Your Money

• Original posted at The Bitcoin Consultancy Buy And Hold Your Entire Crypto Portfolio In Bitcoin The only guaranteed way to avoid falling for a crypto scam is to keep 100% of your crypto portfolio in Bitcoin. Investors fall for crypto scams when they try to beat the returns of Bitcoin through a variety of other coins and schemes. Let’s ...more

How to Avoid Buying Trash Crypto That Wastes Your Money

• Original posted at The Bitcoin Consultancy If you can imagine a way to lose money in crypto, I’ve heard it. Since 2017, I’ve heard from thousands of victims of every crypto scam imaginable.   But for every crypto scheme which is outright theft, there are ten trash crypto-assets created mainly to take your money and run. Each project has a ...more

How Fiat Money Corrupted Savings & Made Us All Market Speculators

• Originally posted at The Bitcoin Consultancy Before the world switched to a fiat monetary system, people who wanted to build wealth kept their savings in a bank. Interest rates tended to equal the average rate of profit, which was enough for all but a small minority of professional investors and entrepreneurs.  This all changed with the move ...more

How Fiat Money Corrupted Savings & Made Us All Market Speculators

• Before the world switched to a fiat monetary system, people who wanted to build wealth kept their savings in a bank. Interest rates tended to equal the average rate of profit, which was enough for all but a small minority of professional investors and entrepreneurs. This all changed with the move to a fiat monetary system ...more

What is Crypto Really All About?

• To the outsider, crypto enthusiasts largely look like a bunch of libertarian leaning, wanna be economists who appear to have a major axe to grind with the financial system as we’ve known it for the past 80 years or so.  While there is some truth to this broad brush approach at generalizing a very large ...more

Why aren't all economists rich?

• Why aren't all economists rich? Some are. Economics is the most common degree amongst the world's top 100 billionaires. Some famous economists such as David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes were very wealthy indeed. However, for the most part, economists will give you a list of excuses why understanding economics won't make you rich. They are ...more

The shortages were unevitable

• What did you think would happen? 1: Lockdowns and unemployment subsidies constrain production 2: Print trillions of dollars and throw it out of helicopters 3: Consumers start spending stimulus money 4: Manufacturing shifts to the production of consumption goods 5: Producers bid up prices of production goods and labor 6: Price increases, shortages, and unfilled jobs everywhere. It has nothing to do ...more

• McAllen, Texas is consistently the fattest city in America, and they are not happy about it. They can’t figure out why, as they have plenty of parks and organize 5K runs nearly every weekend. What they don’t realize is that for non-athletes, exercise has very little to do with bodyweight.The obesity epidemic is caused almost entirely ...more

Pick Your Horse: Gift or Trojan

• You are undoubtedly familiar with the idea of a “Trojan Horse,” an idiom derived from the Trojan War of Homer's Iliad.  A large, hollow, wooden horse is left behind by the Greeks after their supposed failure to take the city of Troy.  The Trojans take the horse back inside their city’s walls, and that night, ...more

Correction vs Crash

• Even casual crypto observers are aware of the dramatic downward price action across the crypto space over the past few weeks.  This price action has market participants weighing in with opinions regarding where the crypto market stands:  on the cusp of a short consolidation and follow-on breakout, or has the next cyclical crypto winter made ...more

How Many Horses are in the Crypto Asset Race?

• While Bitcoin is undoubtedly the most recognized crypto currency in the world, there are literally thousands of other cryptos in existence.  While we tend to call everything in the crypto space “cryptocurrencies”, this is misleading because the only thing these digital assets have in common is that they have issued tokens that power their own ...more

Bitcoin has already advanced global privacy and financial autonomy

• If Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were to disappear tomorrow, what legacy would they leave behind? I can think of three main impacts: First, Bitcoin raised awareness of the flaws in fiat money, the superiority of sound money, and the potential of people to trade with each other without third-party intermediaries. Second, Bitcoin has provided a life raft to ...more

Vellum's new Whitepaper: "Bitcoin's Rise and the Coming Crypto Economy"

• Bitcoin can seem like the merger of the Wild West and the Jetsons.  If you aren't already an expert, keeping away might seem safer.  Fortunately, Vellum Capital prepared a whitepaper that makes sense of the cryptocurrency space without being technical or sensational. Get the complete whitepaper: "Speculation Becomes Consensus Bitcoins Rise And The Coming Crypto ...more

Will Bitcoin ever go to Zero?

• In November of 2020, we posted an article that looked at whether Bitcoin was poised to push past the $20,000 barrier.  Entitled, “Will Bitcoin Go Over $20K to Reach a New ATH,” that article is worth exploring again several months later as we look to gain some perspective on where things now stand not just ...more