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Maybe you’ve heard about the recent attack on Bitcoin Gold exchanges, where the attackers stole some BTG using a form of double-spend attack.

Now, you might start to wonder: How is that possible? The genius of blockchain is in preventing exactly this type of attack. But this crucial property holds only under certain network conditions. Let’s explore how such an attack is possible and what you can do to protect against it.

What is double-spend?

A double-spend problem is an issue of any electronic token exchange system, which stems from the digital nature of the asset. When something is digital, it means it…

This article closes the series about dumping Bitcoin forks, which started with this post. In the previous instalments we introduced various ways how to claim and dump them. The most valuable forks were described in more detail. This article will sum up all the other forks I claimed and dumped, since they do not deserve their own full post.

Make sure, before doing anything, to read the safety notice in the introductory post. To be honest, none of the forks in this post are worth the time unless you have hundreds of BTC (in which case, you probably don’t need…

In any non-trivial system, failure is inevitable and incidents happen. How we deal with the incidents aftermath determines if they just cost money or we gain something from them.

I’ve heard John Allspaw say a quote about incidents or outages, which fits perfectly:

Incidents are unplanned investments in your company’s survival.

So you have made this “investment”, everything is back up and running and now you should get as much value from it as possible. The first part of this process is conducting a post mortem.

Root cause fallacy

In many organizations, an after-incident analysis is called “root cause analysis” and therein lies…

I am sure this has never happened to you, but try to imagine. Your on-call phone just got the message: The site is down! You open your Nagios dashboard and you are greeted by a sea of red. All Apache servers are not responding. The database connections are exhausted. Load balancers are screaming that they have no healthy backends. Everything else looks dead quiet. Everybody starts throwing around their guesses, what is going on.

The conversations and events described below are entirely fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Team lead…

It becomes increasingly difficult to write something about particular fork, as they are getting indistinguishable. This time, we’ll dump BitcoinX (BCX). So in this article I will focus more on yet another method of claiming, which is mildly interesting, without commission and can be used for many forks.

As usual, go read the Safety notice in my initial post in this series, if you haven’t done so yet.

About BitcoinX

So BCX is yet another fork, with a pretty homepage listing all the same stuff all the other forks do. As far as I can tell, the only change they did is…

If the ways I dumped Bitcoin Cash, Gold, Diamond and Super were too boring for you (they were, indeed), this time we’ll get our hands a bit more dirty. If you follow this story, you will become richer. That is, richer with knowledge, because there is not much to be made off dumping Bitcore (BTX).

As usual, go read the Safety notice in my initial post in this series, if you haven’t done so yet.

Origins

Bitcore is one of the many forks created after the road was paved by BCH and others, so I will not even pretend to know…

Getting into more obscure forks (but believe me, there are many more to come), I decided to do a double take, because I got rid of these two the exactly same way. The previous cases were both 1:1 forks, meaning you got one unit for one BTC. This time we’ll see first case of unit change, which I think is a clever trick, to be honest.

If you haven’t done so yet, please read the Safety notice part in my introductory post to this series.

Bitcoin Diamond

Since we already have Bitcoin Gold, it’s only natural that someone would create Bitcoin Diamond…