Bitconfusion: definition. When something you've read about bitcoin doesn't seem to make sense or your formula for understanding appears to be missing key variables.
Yes I've coined the term unless someone did it before me. When you look at something and you get that feeling of 'that's not right... wait a minute'. So as I pointed out a couple of days ago, I have started using Cryptotab to have a go at bitcoin mining. As I approach the magic minimum amount of earned bitcoin required for a payment I started to think about which wallet I should send it to. I have a plethora to test (Exodus, Metamask, Jaxx/Liberty, the Enjin wallet on my mobile and not forgetting my paper wallet). I started to wonder how much it would cost if I decide to move my bitcoin to another wallet.
To start with, Exodus was very helpful. It told me my 0.00001 bitcoin would be worth £0.41 but to move that amount using the slowest & cheapest possible method would cost me £0.79. Neither Jaxx nor the Enjin wallet would allow me to simulate the transaction to see if that was a reasonable cost. Metamask doesn't appear to support bitcoin at all. I was tempted to download Wasabi wallet until I read it needed 400GB to download the entire blockchain. I then tried Electrum wallet which also doesn't appear to show transaction costs without a balance (or maybe I wasn't sure I wanted to click that 'Pay' button without knowing for sure there would be a cancel option). So the only thing left to do was Google how much it should cost and that's when I tripped over the rabbit-hole.
According to unhashed.com, miners don't process transactions in chronological order. Instead those transacting can set the fee they want to pay to get priority processing. All the transactions sit in something called the 'mempool' while miners cherry-pick the more profitable ones to process first. I can understand this but hearing it as someone who has tried to set-up a few miners over the last few weeks, I can honestly say I never saw a setting which said 'only process the transactions with higher payments'. I would obviously click that to boost my earnings had it been there. Unhashed lead me to another site (privacypro's) which features an image of Wasabi wallet showing a transaction fee of $0.02 on the slowest transaction speed. That is considerably less than £0.79. The Unhashed article states 'Bitcoin transaction fees are usually quite inexpensive; the average transaction fee at time of writing is just $0.30' (March 2019). I realise bitcoin has risen quite a lot in value over the past two years but going from $0.30 for an average speed transaction to $1.09 for a minimum speed suggests upwards of a 400% increase in price (or skimming embedded within Exodus?).
While I can't compare the others without a bitcoin balance, I can see that the Enjin mobile wallet has an advanced mode where a price can be requested in satoshi's per byte (people often point to bitcoin having value because there are only 21 million of them but neglect to point out that each is split into 100 million satoshi's which is why transactions using them are frequently in small decimal fractions; and it's really important to always double check the number of zero's after the point).
I then looked into which wallet is recommended by Cryptotab. They suggest the Blockchain.com wallet. The blurb on Blockchains website makes it sound like it's non-custodial (you have full control of the private keys) however a quick search on Google revealed a great article by Cryptosec about how their wallets could actually be classed as custodial (more in a bit). Non-custodial wallets are where you personally hold your own private keys which are codes needed to move any currency from your account. Custodial wallets are where the holding company have the keys (so you only need to remember a login password, but if they get hacked there's little defence against losing your coins). In effect, Cryptotab are operating as a custodial wallet until they pay out what you've earned (as your balance builds up in their system until you've earned enough for the payment).
Cryptalker mentioned that Coinbase is a custodial wallet which also has insurance. Personally I prefer to have my own keys so I'm not convinced any company is going to spend £0.79 to send me $0.60 which is why I kept looking for another wallet which can estimate the fees despite me not having any balance. It seems like a good idea to price-up transaction fees before you make a deposit right? Cryptosec have a good article suggesting it's ok to use custodial wallets for small amounts (up to $50 or whatever level you're comfortable with) but they recommend hardware wallets for anything over that amount. I'm not convinced spending £100-200 for a hardware wallet is necessary to secure £0.79. While I don't have any knowledge of how robust these devices are, I know I've seen changes to the USB specification over the past decade which currently tend to be backwards compatible but I wouldn't like to predict that being the case in another decade or two.
So it's good that paper wallets are similarly secure. Although they have your private key presented as a QR code, the key itself is also printed alongside (which is essential for if QR codes are replaced by something else in the future). The super-paranoid can boot from a live-CD, go to the site, disconnect their network, create and print a paper wallet and then reboot their computer to have a pretty good level of confidence in the security of this.
It took quite a while to compile this article for today as I've continued to play Alien Worlds and also look for a new wallet whilst editing. The good news is I think I've finally found the right wallet. Despite not having any funds as yet, Atomic Wallet allowed me to enter the transfer amount and give me control of the fees with a user-friendly slider. It allowed me to get the fee below £0.02 which makes it far more likely that a sum of £0.41 could actually be transferred; although probably with a really long wait. It does however suggest that the tiny sum we are talking about will not exceed the fees and so that £0.79 minimum suggested by Exodus wallet is their minimum, not the minimum which the network can deal with (so it's bye-bye Exodus at this point).
While Atomic supports Bat and Enj tokens, it does not appear to handle wax or tfuel. To be honest I'm ok with that for now. There are loads of other currencies and tokens for me to research. You can turn on/off specific coins and tokens using the three-sliders icon in the top-right corner of the main wallet window. There's also a mobile version of the wallet so I think I might be happy to use this one for now.
As for Cryptotab? Well I opted to give my PC a break last night. I'm becoming a bit wary of the fact that Cryptotab seems to drop my hash numbers when the browser doesn't have focus, but there isn't a corresponding drop in my CPU performance. While I was leaving it open and active overnight, I can't be sure it was dedicating all it's run-time to mining bitcoins for me. This is typical for mining programs as they tend to be compiled to devote a few percent of run-time to the developers. While I'm ok with that when it's openly stated, I have to wonder if there's an additional percentage of Cryptotab run-time which is being snarfed and given over to their cloud-boost functionality for other users. This would explain why my hashes go down, but not the performance drain on my system as can be seen below. This is just my suspicion as I can't actually prove it one way or another but it does illustrate why anything involving crypto needs to be upfront about how it works.
We can see in point 1 that the hashes per second are less than at point 2 and yet the processor usage (point 3) is higher in this scenario than when the Cryptotab browser was actually active (point 4). In the first image on the left, there are a few additional processes as I had another browser open but I was surfing, not using anything CPU-intensive which should account for the reduced hash amount. The main reason for me to use Cryptotab is because browsers have evolved to a point where things which run in them are sort of sandboxed. They have adapted over the years to be on the defensive against incoming code which might try to take over the computer. Mining inside the browser is slightly less-likely to result in my system being hacked and my personal data being stolen. Unfortunately it is the potential for data-theft which stops me running mining programs on the best equipment I could be using.
I might have just discovered a workaround for this which I will try out over the next few days. While I couldn't get NiceHash to be worth using on my old laptop, it might do better on my main system. I've discovered that it can be configured to run from a USB flash drive so in theory disabling my internal drives and booting from this becomes a possibility. Disabling the drives should isolate my data but obviously I won't have access to all of my software while mining. I think I can work around that for a day or three, just to see how it compares with Cryptotab.
I will update whether or not this is successful after my testing.
Crypto News 1/5/21
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So if anyone is reading this, I've had my ears in the crypto world recently and here's a few things you may or may not be aware of. Gary Vee has been telling his followers to get hold of some Etherium this week for something he's announcing on May 5th. I wonder if he saw my comment on his YouTube channel about NFT's with geolocation replacing traditional postcards? On Thursday, Shea Newkirk a.k.a. 'CryptoStache' mentioned a big event happening with Theta tomorrow but couldn't say what. Master Google told me this would probably be the launch of World Poker Tour NFT's coming to Theta.tv. Which reminds me, when I checked out the Stache's website I noticed an older video about profiting from BAT tokens without the hassle of going through an exchange. That's one I need to revisit.
Finally Ran and the Banter-bag group mentioned they would be getting the guys behind Alien Worlds on their show on Monday 3rd May. They were also suggesting it's a good time to invest in TLM for which I should thank them as the virtual ore I've mined since that announcement is still bringing in about 1.6 wax per TLM. As a gamer rather than an investor, I think there are reasons why Aether deserves more attention. There are still some NFT's which can be minted in R-Planet where recipes are known and the only block to obtaining them is having the huge amounts of Aether necessary to craft them. There was quite a spike in Aethers value last week as the recipe for Oxygen was discovered and a quick check of the elements list today shows there are still quite a few yet to be discovered. The prize for being the first to find is to have your name on the discovery and the 599 next people to craft the same element get an NFT too.
That's it for now. So much to mention due to the possibility of running NiceHash from a USB flash drive on this PC tomorrow so I might not get to post for a couple of days. As usual everything here is for information/education and... you know the score. The usual disclaimers are now at the top of the article instead of down here..
