In May 2011, an innocuous post[[bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7724.0::lsn]] appeared on the bitcointalk forum. Titled "Introducing Bitbills!", it became the first stepping stone in what grew to be a thriving collectibles market in the Bitcoin space.
As part of building burned.money, I've been trying to track down old cases of BTC that is likely lost.
I've been running NixOS servers for a few years now, largely hosting them across a mix of Mini PCs, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, and more recently Contabo.
Admittedly, the title is not entirely accurate - we still use Docker, but successfully get away with not having to install it locally.
For many, contributing to nixpkgs can be a daunting task - the repository is extremely active, with thousands of PRs going in every week. With the breadth of what's included in nixpkgs spanning everything from bootstrapping an OS install to npm packages, it can be hard to know where to start.
When I'm idling, I like to just… look at things. I might scroll HN, or trace random transactions on a blockchain explorer, or poke about in trending git repositories surfaced by Github's Explore.
Using Bitcoin day to day, one takes signatures for granted. You sign a transaction when you want to spend BTC, and that's about it. It simply helps ensure that no one is spending your BTC without your permission (with said permission in the form of a digital signature).
Bitcoin uses a custom format to store peer information. Although the inbuilt JSON-RPC provides a helpful getpeerinfo method to list your active connections, it offers no method to query, dump, or otherwise access the information in peers.dat, which contains far more than just your active connections. Having access to the information in this file can be helpful for a number of reasons, such as…
Bitcoin did not spawn out of nothing. The fundamental building blocks of Bitcoin were not new, but instead combined in a novel way to fix shortcomings in the individual components. This post aims to shed a little light on where the basics of Bitcoin originated, and why Bitcoin was able to succeed in creating a peer-to-peer electronic cash system where others before it failed.