Overview Many of the viewers of my tutorial on what happens when you send BCH to a BTC address have asked for more specific help on how to recover funds in this scenario. Fortunately, not all is lost if this happens – it just depends on the context. For non-custodial wallets (where the user controls
Overview Unfortunately, sometimes Bitcoin private keys are lost. Users destroy wallets, throw away hard drives, or simply never backup keys in the first place. A seemingly obvious solution to the problem of a lost key might be to try and “guess” all the possible keys until you find the one that unlocks your addresses. One
Overview One of the biggest perks of offline wallets (like paper wallets and hardware wallets) is the ability to store private keys away from prying eyes. In previous code companions, I talked about the challenges of building uBitAddr, a custom offline keypair generator that works with BCH, BTC, LTC, and ETH. However, you probably want
Overview On October 31st, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto graced the world with his vision for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system called Bitcoin. The cryptocurrencies we use today started with this abstract and the ideas contained within. I highly recommend anyone interested in Bitcoin or other open blockchain projects read the original whitepaper, but it can be
Overview The advent of HD wallets has made key management a far easier task for cryptocurrency users. These “Hierarchical Deterministic” wallets can generate an infinite amount of private keys and addresses from a single seed, eliminating the need for the periodic backups required by the old-style, nondeterministic wallets. Despite the ease of backup, there are
Overview As it stands, all of the top cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin) use proof-of-work mining to secure their networks. With proof-of-work, special nodes on the network called miners use their computing power to try and solve a mathematical problem. This problem is designed so that a miner has to do a bunch
Overview At a recent event at Duquesne University, a student asked me to explain what Bitcoin is. And as an addendum to her question, she stated that her impression is that Bitcoin is only for rich people… As an educator in the space and a strong believer in the power of cryptocurrencies to change the
Overview When sending money to someone else using Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, or another cryptocurrency, you send funds to the other user’s address. This unique identifier for the other user’s wallet may look like a “random” string of letters and numbers, like this: 13GuDW2Km8TR6iCYP8E5QGhNky2ne7T17r. (Note: this is just a random address; don’t use it!). But
Overview In a previous tutorial, I shared the first published version of my uBitAddr project. This software and hardware project is a totally open source, open hardware, DIY offline address generator. It allows the user to generate a private key and the associated address for long-term storage, in something like a paper or metal wallet.
Overview Getting started with Bitcoin isn’t as intimidating as it would seem. In another tutorial, we discussed how to get started with a mobile wallet, using Bitcoin.com’s app or the Coinomi wallet. We learned how to install the wallet, safely back up our funds using the seed phrase, and get an address for loading up
