Richi's blog

Category: BitCoin

  • Paying online without a credit card

    I can still remember the times when travelling without a credit card could be really inconvenient. But since Maestro and Cirrus cards work around the globe, it’s fine without. The time where shopping on the internet without a credit card was inconvenient to impossible was not so long ago. In a recent post, I announced […]

  • Fading out my credit card

    Once upon a time there was no internet. When you went to a restaurant, you had to pay in cash. If you had no cash with you, you might have been lucky if the owner knew you good enough to think you were credit worthy. But what if you were in another city? Then some […]

  • MultiSig with HardwareWallets

    2014 is touted as the year of multi-signature for BitCoin. It is being integrated into some wallets and services. But not quite the way I expected. Electrum has an implementation that assumes multiple hierarchical deterministic wallets distributed over different machines, that know the other’s master private keys. -> This should work well for corporate environments […]

  • electrum server on a cubox

    I don’t even remember if there were alternative wallets available when I started with BitCoin. I used the reference implementation exclusively for a long time. Now there is a wide variety to choose from. They fall in three main categories: full node, light client and web wallets. They are nicely listed and explained at bitcoin.org full node Every […]

  • HW1 tiny BitCoin hardware wallet

    While the trezor is certainly a great device for securing BitCoins, I’m also interested in alternative hardware wallets. Even in my very first discussions about increasing the scurity of BitCoin we talked about SmartCard solutions. After all, that’s also how I secure my GPG keys. But a regular SmartCard alone only protects the keys. If […]

  • What could go wrong when ordering pizza?

    For some months now it was possible to order pizza for BitCoin in our area. I wanted to give it a try since it was announced. But only last Thursday, I proposed to my coworkers to order pizza. And that I would pay with BitCoin. It was meant as a demonstration how cool the virtual […]

  • The Rise and Rise of BitCoin

    As part of the Zürich Film Festival last week, they presented “The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin“. I couldn’t make it to one of the screenings where the director and the main actor were present. The room was fully booked, which I noticed with delight. I didn’t learn too much from the film on the […]

  • Trezor BitCoin HardwareWallet

    Today I received my Trezor BitCoin HardwareWallet. When I ordered it in June 2013, the expected delivery Date was October. But as it happens all that often with BitCoin related hardware, the dates get pushed back. They offered a device with plastic case for XBT 1 and one with an alloy case for XBT 3. […]

  • sweet dreams

    For my last army service, I was ordered to Eschenbach SG near Rapperswil to help in an arsenal. It’s actually a long story, how it came to that. Compared to a regular service, it was very much relaxed. I could go home every night, which is quite nice, especially if you have a young family. […]

  • Pimp my miner

    For a while now, I thought about mounting a simple display somewhere that shows the most important parameters of my BitCoin miner. First I started with an AtMega equipped with an Ethernet module. But parsing json without any library support became too cumbersome quickly. So I copy pasted together a small python script, and used […]