Category: News

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Rapid Report on the Bitcoin Blockchain’s Environmental Impact

This week, there’s been a wildly incorrect report on the ecological impact of running the world’s Bitcoin mining machine, promulgated primarily by one digital researcher and one columnist over at Vice’s Motherboard.

Our CEO, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, has tracked the growth and spread of Bitcoin in general dating back to 2011, and has issued reports via various publishing channels since 2013 on the topic. Today, he re-capped the history of the histrionics of the environmental impact of Bitcoin, as well as an update to its current environmental impact.

The report was underwritten by Roger Wilco client bitqyck, and is made freely available for download here on this site.

To receive the download link, simply fill out the form below.

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How to Securely Liquidate Your Bitcoin Cash

The Roger Wilco Agency has issued a report titled How to Obtain & Convert Your “Bitcoin Cash”, commissioned by bitqyck, Inc, which reveals that there is “an overbearing elephant in the room of this amazing technology called Bitcoin: ridiculously long transaction resolution times.” The decentralized nature of Bitcoin makes it attractive to a global audience and creates greater financial security because the value of the tokens is not susceptible to the stability of any particular political or economic entity – but the shared ownership can also have its challenges. Software developers who work on Bitcoin’s core code have spent considerable effort in an attempt to find a solution for the long transaction resolution times.

Bitcoin is based on mathematical proof rather than the characteristics defined by a political entity, and the code is open source, providing transparency. The ability to create alternative groups, called pools, allows for participants known as miners to create a permanent divergence in the blockchain, known as a fork. The original Bitcoin software client will likely be the most valuable and stable for some time to come, and any new fork will succeed or fail based on widespread acceptance by participants or their decision not to use that client. As the software developers politicked in reaching a fix for the issues with transaction resolution, a small group called the User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) rejected the solution and created a hard fork known as Bitcoin Cash.

On August 1, 2017, the Bitcoin blockchain split, creating a second set of tokens, with Bitcoin (BTC) as the original and Bitcoin Cash (BCC or BCH) as the new blockchain, according to Bitcoin Cash 101: What Users Need to Know Before the Fork published by Coindesk. This split resulted in the doubling of coins possessed by anyone who controlled their private keys. The Roger Wilco report indicates that the value of the coins in this new blockchain may be at risk, because “as many predicted, the tools, mining, support and code around ‘Bitcoin Cash’ are very weak and unreliable.” This report further advises that any BCC held should be “immediately liquidated.”

The Roger Wilco report was created to facilitate a secure and expedient method to liquidate newly acquired Bitcoin Cash. While there are multiple methods that can work, the report details and illustrates a specific method that is the most secure and least likely to end up with a compromised wallet. The report includes step-by-step instructions on how to claim control of these new tokens as well as how to sell them and transfer their value to your regular wallet. Bitcoin value was $4,601.10 and Bitcoin Cash value was $633.17 as of August 6, 2017.

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IBM Watson IoT interviews Mark Hopkins on how to secure IoT

Mark Hopkins, the founder of Roger Wilco Agency, attended IBM’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas from March 19th to 23rd. During his visit, IBM Waston IoT held a brief Twitter interview with him about how to address security in the Internet of Things (IoT). Mark briefly explained using Blockchain hash files to secure devices accessing the internet.

Without a doubt, the world is more connected than ever, thanks in large part to smartphones and tablets. Untethered from large bulky computers, people can access information from anywhere as long as they have a solid connection to the internet. This is called the Internet of Things, which has garnered much attention, partially due to its lack of security. In October of 2016, DynDSN, a company that creates a bridge between smart devices and the internet, servers came under attack which took down large portions of the internet in one of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) ever. (See NPR’s talk on the attack here). Smart devices are known to have weak security, and this was taken advantage of by hackers who tapped into several devices to launch a DDoS attack on DynDSN. Now the world is looking for a way to prevent such attacks from happening in the future, and Blockchain might just be the answer.

In his article “2 ways Blockchain technology could have prevented last week’s massive IoT-launched DynDNS attack” on Rizzn.com, Hopkins gives an overview of how to utilize Blockchain technology to authenticate a smart device. Hopkins suggests using hash files to create a static-like IP for devices. Here’s how it works:

  • The connecting IoT device checks its hash file against a Bitcoin node and looks for the most recent ledger entry.
  • If the hash file returns a different number or hash file, the device will know it has been tampered with.
  • The user is notified of the tamper and can take action.

“I think the Blockchain poses a much more elegant solution to this particular issue,” Hopkins puts it.

Blockchain is an in-market technology, can be very affordable, and easily accessible with the use of Hyperledger from IBM or other Blockchain technology.

Ask us more about Roger Wilco’s work on Blockchain by visiting our site.