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MeetingMinutes2016

Meeting Minutes

2016

2016-12-05

• Meeting space for 2016-12-05 unaviailable due to scheduling conflict. Discovered 2016-12-01
• December meeting canceled; next meeting scheduled for the last Monday in January, 2017-01-30

2016-11-07

• Met at Webair in Garden City
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex up to ~$708 USD/BTC
• The new official Bitcoin core client (0.13.1) which implemented Segregated Witness was releaed and which implements a "soft fork" which will kick in at 95% popularity
• Lidmug's bitoin node is using ~2GB of RAM
• Found that fail2ban is using ~1GB of RAM, indicating that logs it is scanning need log rotation
• Briefly described the RAM "cold boot" attack
• Discussion of Linux kernel RAM handling, virtual RAM vs resident RAM for processes
• Discussed what Segregated Witness is for
• Revisited Bitcoin node fork choices (Classic, Core, Unlimited)
• Discussed terminal multiplexer programs Tmux and GNU Screen which allow leaving programs running as well as detaching/re-attaching to terminal sessions from multiple locations
• Discussed firewall hardware options such as machines from PCEngines like the Alix and APU, the latter of which has Gigabit Ethernet (These boards are available locally at Mini-Box.com
• Mentioned Juniper/Cisco compatible Linux distribution VyOS
• Discussed inotifywait to recursively monitor changes to files in Linux

2016-10-03

• Met at Webair in Garden City
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex up to $612 USD/BTC, slowly rising
• Set up an example Tor hidden service on a local CentOS 7 VM
• Made a test Bitcoin transaction with minimal transaction fee for how long it would take to complete
• Noticed clunky rounding behavior with BreadWallet
• Rebooted the Lidmug server for kernel update (required because kernel updates mess with Docker)
• Upgraded the Bitcoin node on the Lidmug server due to the seperate daemon being deprecated
• Discussed the NLNOG test ring which requires IPv6 for participation
• Mentioned that there is now a Congressional caucus on Bitcoin

2016-08-29

• Met at Webair in Garden City
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex down to $575, stabilizing
• Discussed recent Bitfinex breakin and 36% loss to users of the exchange (to both Bitcoin accounts and cash) to deal with recent breakin losses to Bitfinex
• Discussed Ethereum fork which means there are now two copies of the blockchain, each which have different values ($14/eth and $2/eth-classic)
• Discussed Avagadro's number, comparing it to the number of possible Bitcoin addresses: 2⁹⁶ = 7.922x10²⁸; whereas Avagadro's number = 6.022x10²³
• Discussed Bitcoin spam transactions and some details about how the transactions were "eaten" by the miners to get rid of them before the Bitcoin protocol was updated to disallow them
• Watched (most of) the "Stealing Bitcoin with Math" talk from HOPE 2016
• Watched bits of mining Bitcoin with pen and paper
• Had a look at the graph of Bitfinex BFX/USD "IOU token" trading value; currently $0.4055

2016-07-24

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex slightly down to ~655 USD, oscillating.
• Discussed the halving of the Bitcoin block reward
• Had a look at the Bitcoin Market Capitalization (and other charts)
• There's an upcoming Bitcoin meeting in California with Bitcoin miners from China to discuss increasing the block size
• Found videos for HOPE XI -- the Hackers On Planet Earth conference 2016 in New York City
• Discussed the Ethereum hard fork, specifically the fact that the original Ethereum [ETHC -- Ethereum Classic] fork is now worth 0, and rolled back the Ethereum contract exploits. (Which means that the fork was successful.)
• Patched configuration for a webserver exploit
• Had a look at the graph of Bitfinex BFX/USD "IOU token" price -- currently $0.4055.

2016-06-27

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor
• Bitcoin price on Bitfixex up to ~660 USD. Earlier this month the Bitcoin price got over 750 USD. Then there was a drop, and then another rise after Great Britain voted to leave the EU.
• Briefly discussed Ethereum "heist" which seems to be an issue of Ethereum's design concerning contracts
• Made a purchase using OpenBazaar for testing
• Had a look through BizaarBay which is a cached index of OpenBizaar
• The Bitcoin block reward is going to half again in 11 days
• We're planning on meeting at WebAir next month in Garden City

2016-05-23

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex down to 443.25 trending upward
• Looked at some video of a couple of guys setting up a room full of miners, then looked at the S7 miner and power supply for it ($600 and $200). Seems like it takes millions of dollars to set up a mining pool. And sure enough the power supply requires 205+ Volts line input.

2016-04-25

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex up to 461.1 trending upward
• Discussed OpenBizaar, a peer-to-peer version of eBay
• Watched a video of John McAfee making fun of the McAfee company
  (Holy cow this guy is a nut.)

2016-03-28

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor
• Bitcoin price on Bitfixex down to 423.7 USD, trending downward.
  (There was a recent price spike from 413 -> 431)
• Discussed Extreme Thin Blocks for transmit bandwidth saving
  Also discussed edge cases where transactions may have an identical hash
  Watched an XT Block video
• Bitcoin Classic making slow progress (66 out of the last 1000 blocks)
• Found the kryptoradio project by accident looking for an example of Ham Radio QSL cards related to Bitcoin
• Had a look at the Geo Guessr game which drops you in a Google Streetview and you try to figure out where in the world the area is. (Pretty fun)
• Had a brief look at YaCy, a decentralized search engine

2016-02-29

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor (leap year!)
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex up to 439.5 USD, level
• Had demonstrations of using a Trezor device
• Briefly discussed the server being DDoSed (again) due to our node supporting Bitcoin Classic
• Bitcoin Core is down to 72% of the total -- 20.9% are Bitcoin Classic
• Read reddit comments by botneko-chan in the DDoS started again. Have a nice day, guys :) thread concerning how he produced this latest round of DDoS attacks on Bitcoin Classic nodes
• In response to the DDoS attacks, classic-cloud.net was created to spin up Bitcoin Classic nodes
• The unconfirmed transaction backlog (mute your audio when clicking the link!) is now up to 33 MB and seems to be continuously going up due to hitting the block size limit

2016-01-25

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor (after 28" of snow 2 days earlier)
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex down to 392 USD, trending downward
• 0.2% of Bitcoin nodes are declared as running "Classic" even though no code exists for that yet
• Infighting about Bitcoin forking seems to be raging again
• Found alternate DogeCoin charts to find out the price now that Cryptsy has halted trading
• One member updated their Testnet3 app without backing up their wallet and lost their Testnet3 coins.
• Traded some Testnet3 coins, 3 members got more coins from a Testnet3 faucet
• One member purchased a Trezor so we'll get to play with it next month
• Discussed SPV mining where there are occasionally blocks mined that contain no transactions
• Discussed the fact that BTC-e is the oldest yet shadyest Bitcoin exchange

2016-01-04

• Met at CSHL in Cold Spring Harbor
• Bitcoin price on Bitfinex up to 435 USD, trending upward
• Discussed some details on the new new Bitcoin Unlimited node fork
• Coinbase exchange (the largest exchange) now supports Bitcoin-XT.
  As a result is now banned from being discussed in http://reddit.com/r/bitcoin
• 10.8% of Bitcoin nodes are now running Bitcoin-XT
• Discussed Bitcoin mining difficulty now being > 150 billion
• Had a look at some available ASICs comparing hashing vs power... 0.055 to 0.07 Joules per GH (Giga hash)
• Mike Tyson has made a Bitcoin wallet with his facial tattoo as the logo; we looked up the origin of the circumstances in which he got the tattoo and compared it to the tattoo on Chakotay from Star Trek Voyager
• Miners that have attempted to support Bitcoin-XT have been DDoSed until they've given up on it.
• Went over Bitcoin mine census on various BIP proposals