Category page of all posts on the web site that are tagged as related to cryptocurrency including mining / hardware / Bitcoin / Ethereum / more
When installing Ledger Live on Ubuntu 22.04 I ran into an issue where during the genuine check it would not find my device. It was not even prompting for a PIN or showing any activity and would simply time out eventually and fail the check.
It turns out that Ledger Live needs some udev rules to work correctly. In this quick guide I’ll cover how to set up and fix Ledger Live in Linux!
Fix Linux Ledger Live USB Connection Read More »
I won’t lie. When I opened the Nebra Outdoor hotspot I was annoyed. Like many, many Helium hotspot owners I paid hundreds of dollars and waited many, many months past expected delivery for a Helium point.
What did I get for my money and patience? I got a several generation outdated Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 from 2015 that they no doubt paid literally a single digit number of dollars for, some connector boards and wireless chips. And of course it came too late to make any money in this last bull market.
To be fair to Nebra that is a beautiful Pi setup. If only they had used a Compute Module 4 or even a 3+ but still, that is clean except for maybe the wireless-N dongle (wouldn’t have needed it if you used a better Pi). However, it really isn’t going to make me any money at this point and is more interesting as an outdoor enclosed Pi setup to me now.
That means I needed to access it by rooting the device and getting SSH access and in this article I’ll show you exactly how I did it. Let’s begin now!
Getting Root / SSH Access to a Nebra Outdoor Helium Miner Read More »
I’ve been mining cryptocurrency for a very long time. I’ve been recently building out my ASIC farm and I wanted to get an idea of how secure these are as I have a significant investment in this hardware. Considering that ASIC miners are machines that literally print money out of thin air (in the form of cryptocurrency) I figured they’d be quite secure. I haven’t seen any ASIC miner exploits found in years. That’s a good sign right?
Wrong. What happened was all of the ASIC manufacturers stopped releasing their source code. In the early days it was all available on GitHub. After the first set of hacks came out most of them close-sourced their firmware. But James, you might be saying, didn’t that work if there hasn’t been any exploits found this entire time?
Negative. Security through obscurity only slows them down but in the end you are more vulnerable as so few eyeballs will ever see the source code. As a result the security is a joke and today I’ll be presenting extremely serious vulnerabilities for multiple ASIC mining manufacturers. They are definitely *not* secure. They are making mistakes that there’s no way would have happened if the firmware was open source as I will prove to you.
The point will be that you need to upgrade to the latest firmware to protect yourself and that you should *NEVER* port forward a port from the internet to your miner or you are going to get hacked for sure, and you always were. We’re going to discuss everything you need to protect yourself against these vulnerabilities and other future vulnerabilities that have yet to be discovered. Let’s begin!
Cryptocurrency ASIC Miners – Security and Hacking Audit Read More »
For quite some time now Kadena (KDA) has been topping the charts for mining profitability. There are many other altcoins though that are power efficient to mine such as Starcoin (STC) and Siacoin (SC) and many others.
The only problem with these coins is that they can be difficult to find good pools and exchanges that will accept them. Fortunately if you know the right places to go you can essentially take care of *all* of your altcoin needs with just a couple of pools and a single exchange.
Today I’ll cover where I do all of my altcoin mining and where I exchange those tokens with minimal fees. Let’s get started!
Best Altcoin Mining Pools / Exchanges Read More »
One way I keep up with the developments in cryptocurrency is I do watch some of the YouTubers since the YouTubers are generally following the juiciest developments to farm views. With the continued news that Ethereum is going to launch Eth 2.0 and is more or less on time (now called the “Ethereum consensus layer”, how catchy) how much denial there is around this fact.
Except we are way past that point now. It’s literally these YouTuber’s job to know that GPU mining is toast and today I’m going to expose how big of frauds they are, how they really built their mining farms, what they are actually doing vs. what they’re telling you and why, as well as explain what exactly is going on with Ethereum and why if you’re planning on being able to mine with those GPUs (at least above the cost of your electricity / profitably) the math is not looking good.
Let’s break down what neither the miners or the Ethereum developers want to talk about / remember and break it down!
Why GPU / Ethereum Mining Is Toast – Stop Buying GPUs Read More »
One reality of cryptocurrency mining is that you are almost certainly going to need multiple units to reach whatever goals you have. The way most people do this is pay for / ROI on their existing units and then they will add more units and repeat the cycle again.
At first this is easy when you only have a few units but it gets more complex as you add more units. You will need better infrastructure and management tools as you scale up.
I’ve been going through this process for a ASIC farm build-out and wanted to share some of the tools I’ve found and used to make scaling up much more effective.
Today I’m going to cover an official tool from Goldshell called YottaBC that lets you do a lot of cool things like tell all of your miners to change pools at once, view the status of all miners in one fell swoop, fix miners that have lost their IP address and lots of other critical functions. Let’s take a look!
Bulk Management of Multiple Goldshell ASIC Miners w/ Yotta BC Read More »
Recently Goldshell released the 2.2.0 update which includes the new “Goldshell Hub” (featured above) which is basically a cloud control center for your miners. I was able to upgrade 23 miners successfully but I had one Mini DOGE and one ST-BOX fail during the upgrade.
After a substantial Google journey and finding some very helpful posts on reddit I was able to recover both of them without waiting for Goldshell’s response on the situation. I will cover what I used to do so and where to find them in the guide but it is at your own risk and if you aren’t outside of your warranty support period you should almost certainly contact Goldshell instead.
With that caveat/warning given, I have 25 of these miners and only 1-2 were bought directly from Goldshell in the first place so I was not worried about losing my warranty or support period from them but you should be careful here and only proceed if you understand this. Let’s begin!
Goldshell BOX ASIC Miner Firmware Recovery Guide Read More »
The Bobcat 300 Helium Miner finally has an interface you can use to be able to tell what it’s doing! Better yet, it lets you do a few things like conduct an internet speed test. You can even get a detailed breakdown of which block your miner is on!
In this guide I’ll break down how to access the web interface (easy) and run through some of the features that are available at launch (1.0). The utility started installing on Bobcat 300’s via OTA updates on August 3rd 2021. Let’s begin!
Bobcat 300 Diagnoser Tool / Utility Guide (Helium Mining) Read More »
In my last series of cryptocurrency related products/services reviews I gave a positive review to the ApeSwap Exchange on the Binance Smart Chain which has continued to be a great exchange and live up to that review.
Today we will be reviewing the ViaBTC mining pool (for multiple cryptocurrencies and not just Bitcoin, lots of harder-to-find alts and that is why I’m using it) and they will not be so fortunate. Let’s jump right into it!
Review: ViaBTC Mining Pool (Mixed) Read More »
I recently received my Bobcat 300 miner after months of waiting. Much of the advice I’d read/seen on the subject suggested to leave the hotspot alone and that it takes a very long time to sync.
This is true but it assumes you configured your network correctly first and have the correct port opened to the outside world. If it’s not it will take even longer to sync the blockchain and your hotspot will have a yellow “Relayed” status. This is slowing down your sync and will harm your rewards even when it finishes since your responses to challenges will be “relayed” and will often time out before they are relayed through other hotspots.
In this guide I’ll show you how to get your network configured correctly for your hotspot to sync as fast as possible and remove the “Relayed” status!
Speed Up Helium Miner Hotspot Sync / Fixing “Relayed” Status Read More »
You’ve likely heard in the news of someone paying a ridiculously large amount of money for something called a NFT (non-fungible token) such as $387,000 for a LeBron James NBA Top Shot moment, artwork from the hottest artists in the world who have been adopting NFT technology on a massive scale, and many more uses/offerings popping up every day. It’s definitely going to continue to be a huge driving force in the cryptocurrency market and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
You don’t have to have 400 grand to start playing with non-fungible tokens and learning more about them though. Today I’ll cover where to find (relatively) cheap NFTs on the Binance Smart Chain that I have picked up to learn more about them and exactly what they do!
Bunnies, Pepes, Apes, Oh My? NFTs on Binance Smart Chain Read More »
Extremely powerful hardware tends to be very loud. Enterprise servers, networking equipment, cryptocurrency miners are three major offenders. This type of equipment tends to have very small fans that rotate extremely fast and emit a high pitched “whine”. This is fine if you are stuffing all of your equipment in a closet somewhere but for some deployments and situations this isn’t always possible
There are extremely expensive racks that have sound dampening foam and other materials preinstalled for situations like this but they are extremely expensive (thousands vs . what we will be doing which only costs hundreds). In this article I’ll show you how I modified some (relatively) cheap racks available from Amazon with acoustic foam to reduce noise from ASIC cryptocurrency miners as well as other loud equipment
Soundproofing ASIC Miner Enclosures With Acoustic Foam Read More »
The Binance Smart Chain can be a dangerous place. It offers a reprieve from Ethereum’s fees with transactions costing mere pennies but despite it’s centralized nature it has struggled with new platforms getting hacked, rugpulling, scamming, and many other pitfalls.
In order to continue the journey of learning everything I can about cryptocurrency I have decided to wade through the filth and blog about my journey and which services ended up being legit and having value and which ones were a total sham. Today let’s talk about ApeSwap!
Review: ApeSwap Exchange / DeFi on Binance Smart Chain Read More »
I have had two Ledger Nano X cryptocurrency wallets for a couple of years now. One of them died during a firmware update which they offered to replace but I didn’t print the label and send it in time. That’s on me and if that was the only problem I had I could have lived with it.
Unfortunately Ledger collects a lot of personal information about you such as your email address, phone number and even your home address! They failed to protect this information and got hacked and all of this data was exposed. Funds were not stolen because of the way hardware wallets work (your private key never leaves the device and is generated by the end user) but apparently everything else except the money was (all your personal data, how much you have, etc)!
I was a confirmed “victim” of this hack and I wanted to write this article to explain what (if anything) has happened since. Spoiler alert: plenty!
Life as a “Ledger” Wallet Data Breach Victim Read More »
The support on Trezor was traditionally just a link to a third party service where you had to log in through the web interface and export your keys every single time. You can’t even see your balance until you do this!
Fortunately true native Ethereum support has arrived for Trezor in the beta! Not only that, but ERC20 token support was also added which has made Trezor now an extremely capable Ethereum hardware wallet. The beta wallet supports all Trezor wallet devices including Trezor One.
In this article we will examine these new features in depth and give a final verdict!
New Trezor Native Ethereum Wallet Beta Guide / Features Read More »
