Rediscovering Bitbills - The First Physical Bitcoin

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...

August 16, 2024

BTC Archeology: Where was 1.2 BTC sent in 2010?

As part of building burned.money, I've been trying to track down old cases of BTC that is likely lost. On July 14th 2010 (UTC), bitcointalk user ksd5 started a thread talking about how they co...

June 25, 2024

Installing NixOS on an OVH/Kimsufi/SoYouStart server

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. While migrating burned.money off fly.io (t...

June 21, 2024

Using Nix flakes and fly.io without Docker

Admittedly, the title is not entirely accurate - we still use Docker, but successfully get away with not having to install it locally. I've reached the point where I refuse to run Docker on my...

June 14, 2024

Contributing to nixpkgs - Part 1 - Basic Contributions

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...

May 20, 2024

Find Something to Fix

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 Ex...

May 16, 2024

Bitcoin's Signature Types - SIGHASH

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 witho...

June 10, 2018

Demystifying Bitcoin's peers.dat

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 o...

May 20, 2018

Why Bitcoin Changed The Game

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 t...

March 24, 2018