Sia And Namebase Present: ‘Own The Internet’ Hackathon (Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash) Sia and Namebase recently held a hackathon via gitcoin in which one of the goals was to build an application with handshake, a decentralized certificate and naming authority. This is a quick recap of the project I made for the hackathon. The repo can be found at handybot. Build An Application With Handshake Handshake is a promising young project, which is now live, that aims to offer an alternative to the current Domain Name System (DNS). I have been following the project and was interested in its progress. The hackathon presented an opportunity to learn more about the tech stack of the project, and get my hands dirty in trying to make an application that integrated with the Handshake network. ...

I say Mango you say Mongo (for images) (Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash) I recently looked into how MongoDB can facilitate storing and retrieving images, and had some difficulty implementing the examples I found online. Here is the solution I came up with to serve as hopeful help in the future for me or anyone else. Background MongoDB is primarily a document database, not designed for larger files, so CRUD operations for files over 16MB is not supported. Mongo’s solution is GridFS, a dedicated mongo database structure for larger files. This is more of a bucket to dump large files, which is split between two collections, one which stores the file’s metadata, while the other, the binary data source. ...

I Want AWS and Https …but how? (Photo by Caitlyn de Wild on Unsplash) It has been a spell since I have written here, mainly because I have been building out infrastructure for SmartPiggies. And in doing so I wanted to create another post for posterity. Jump to Here is the good stuff if you want to jump to the good stuff. We are moving most of our services over to AWS and I had the great fortune of navigating that rabbit hole. The initial challenge was to move one of our apps over to an AWS server, but of course we want https to be available. In previous cases we have used cerbot to generate and provider the ssl certificate, as well as manage the Nginx settings for port 443. This was very easy to implement on the Ubuntu 16.04 servers that I usually run. When looking to move over to AWS servers of course there is a twist. ...

AH HA Proxy (Or, take on me a server that stays up) (updated 04-20-2019) (Photo by marc liu on Unsplash) Happy Tax Day! Thank you to the company that sent me a W2 a month and a half after all tax documents were supposed to be mailed! The purpose of this post is a bit of a reminder on how I set up HAProxy on a Ubuntu 16.04 server, because it was a bit confusing, and hopefully it helps someone else doing the same thing, or at the very least my future self. ...

Don’t Mine If I Do! (What a pain in the a$$) (Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash) Victory! Aaaaaaaand that was quite the exercise in futility. I had been asked to pick up my mining rig from the space it was operating in. Well, it wasn’t running anymore; it was just taking up space. I ran a small mining rig that was mining UBIQ for the majority of 2018. It was a small rig (did I mention it was small), and over the course of that year it didn’t make very much in mining rewards. ...

When Crypto eats out, she orders Stake. (Or, it tastes better when someone else makes it) (Photo by José Ignacio Pompé on Unsplash) In this exploration of a retail investment thesis for crypto, the latest offering from companies hoping to capitalize on crypto for the masses is staking. Coinbase has announced the offering of staking support for Tezos. Tezos is a crypto currency project exploring governance on the blockchain. Tezos uses staking as its consensus mechanism. The idea of staking is simply locking up an allotment of tokens for the right to rewards and extending the chain, which also supports the security of the network. The more tokens that are staked, by a diverse community of supporters, the healthier that network is deemed to be. The more tokens a participant locks up, the more often that participant is rewarded with the opportunity to extend the network. This is similar to the concept of proof-of-work mining in projects like bitcoin. But it vastly differs in its security model (don’t yell at me). ...

An update to the previous post on Passive Income in Crypto. (Photo by Saketh Garuda on Unsplash) In a previous post on Passive Income in Crypto, Celsius was used as an example for making a yield on crypto deposited on their platform. Celsius is a crypto lending company that allows users to take out loans against their crypto, or allows users to lend their crypto out for a percentage return in the underlying asset. Celsius had a town hall meeting in New York last week, in which I attended. One reason I was interested in attending is because I use the platform, and I wanted to look into the eyes of the people I was giving my bearer assets to. The company uses BitGo to custody client funds, but these are not segregated accounts, and the funds are eventually lend out to counterparties. Suffice it to say, there is a high risk that client funds may never come back, but that is a 100% risk of default which can be taken into account. ...

A case for passive income with crypto. (Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash) Aquiring cryptocurrency is difficult. It is championed to be easy, or at the very least easier than it has been before. But it still isn’t very easy. Exchanges and payment providers advertise that it is as easy as linking a bank account and buying on their platform. Coinbase, probably the largest US platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, states on their webpage, “Coinbase is the easiest place to buy, sell, and manage your cryptocurrency portfolio.” That may be true, it may be the “easiest” place to do that, but that doesn’t make it easy. Although this is probably the best time to sign-up with an online exchange for buying or selling crypto, as the demand for verifying customers is probably the lowest since the past bull cycle of 2017. ...

A case for crypto. I am putting up this site as an internet reference for my ideas, and as a collective catalog of work. In doing so, the first blog post seems to be the most difficult. So rather than posting a casual introductory blog, I am going to outline my thesis of cryptocurrency for retail investment. This thesis is easier to identify today then when I first heard of bitcoin, but we aren’t quite there yet so there may still be some details about this topic to explore. I first stumbled onto bitcoin when it traded at $11 USD. I remember less the date and more the price action. I can’t remember what source pointed me to bitcoin, but it was by way of the precious metal investment space. It could have been the Max Keiser Report (as I used to watch that back in the day) or some other hard currency source. ...