What is Bitcoin? I am often asked that question.   Bitcoin is a form of electronic currency.  Just like you can use PayPal to pay for an online order, you can now use Bitcoin at more and more locations to make online purchases.  But, unlike PayPal, which is linked to your bank account, Bitcoin doesn't involve the banks at all. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, meaning there is no one person or entity that controls it.  The whole Bitcoin "universe" is distributed across hundreds of thousands, if not millions of peer-to-peer networked computers.  There is no one bank, country, or server that could fail and take down Bitcoin.  Traditional money is called a "fiat" currency.  Fiat currency is money that a government has declared to be legal tender for a country. Bitcoin is not a fiat currency. If you Google your questions you'll find lots of different answers to it.  It is worth taking the time to read through some of them.  Here's a shor...

This isn't earth shattering, but interesting at least.  Here is an article listing the top 6 Ethereum (ETH) wallets in terms on how much ETH they hold: https://themerkle.com/top-6-ethereum-wallet-addresses-worth-keeping-an-eye-on/ It also mentions that Poloniex, my personal favorite trading platform, is now the world's leading Alt coin exchange.

I have so many people asking me how to get started in Crypto Currencies I created a Getting Started guide on my website. There are a million ways to get started with Crypto Currency. Everyone you ask probably has a different suggestion. I've provided a Getting Started reference here as what I see is the easiest way to get start. You'll see it uses Coinbase.com as the starting point. My feeling is that while Coinbase's fees are higher than I'd like, they are the biggest, most well established player in this field and therefore the stability and piece of mind they provide is worth the higher fees.... to see more, visit the Getting Started page link above.

ColdFusion API call to Poloniex I've been doing a lot of crypto-coin trading lately and Poloniex, one of the trading platforms offers a nice API to retrieve my account information.  This was a good chance to use the HMAC() function that became available in ColdFusion 10 to calculate signatures. Whether you've been trading Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) or any of the hundreds or so other Cryptocurrencies, you'll know that the prices are constantly in flux.  Poloniex's API makes it easy to code a way to track your balance on every coin. Below is a code snippet that will demonstrate what is needed to make a successful Poloniex API call with ColdFusion 10 or above:

Note, the instructions below are how I diagnosed the problem I describe.  I'm providing it here in case these steps help you narrow down your issue somewhere along the way. I have an Antminer S7 (batch 8) unit that has been giving me problems.  It worked fine for a week or so then started slowing down.  I could hear the fan slowing down and speeding up and if I checked the web GUI of the unit I could see that “chains” 1 and 3 often had very cool temperatures, as if they weren’t even running. It would then try to get those engaged again and it would speed up and then the cycle would repeat.  Eventually, over time, I’d get a high piercing alarm sound and at that point if I checked the GUI I’d see Xs in the ASIC display instead of Os (image below). Above is how it was typically running.  After a while an alarm would sound and it would look like below: PSU: The first things I tried were to swap power supplies with a working unit.  It’s...

ColdFusion Administrator Pause Button It's the little things that count.  If you've ever been a ColdFusion Administrator, you probably have noticed what a pain in the ass the little "pause" button is when setting a Scheduled Process on hold. The problem is the Pause button looks almost identical to the Resume button. When looking at a list of a hundred processes, it is hard to find those that are paused and those that are not. Here's a tiny little gem to solve that.  This is a replacement Resume button made from the original button.  Just put this image in your "/CFIDE/administrator/images/" directory as "resume.gif".  If you are on Linux you might have to adjust the permissions to match those of the other images. Two things about it.  This isn't a GIF file (pronounced JIF) it's a PNG file.  I don't know why they do it, but the images on the CF server are PNG files that have been renamed to GIF by Adobe.  I assume it is for ...

OpenVPN and Windows 8  Problem: Internet access slows to a crawl after establishing a VPN connection with OpenVPN. After spending several days trying to get the OpenVPN Client to work under Windows 8 I finally found a solution. I think the problem is a routing issue with IPV4 vs. IPV6. The solution is to go into you network adapter properties and turn of IPV6 on the TAP adapter. Here's a step-by-step guide: Stop OpenVPN  From a command line in Windows run: start c:\windows\system32\control.exe ncpa.cpl  Right Click on the TAP Win32 Adapter, select properties. Uncheck "Internet Protocol Version 6" and Click OK.   Run OpenVPN as Administrator