What skill sets should non-professional BTC-ers try to acquire?

[OROBTC]

...

saturn643 wrote:

If you are on linux you should be able to just install GPG through the package manager. The site I linked has the docs and man pages so you can use the command line. If you are on windows I recommend you actually use GPG4USB. It can be portable and it works well and is simple to use.

Looks fairly simple I suppose, I will check up on it soon (emphasis mine, on Windows).  Thanks!

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VPNs may be a tad complicated, Denker, but thank you too, I will look into that as well.

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[BirtRenaldsFan]

They should know how to do research. Study the rise and fall patterns and utilize it to their advantage.

It's all a gamble in a sense.

[franky1]

[Sidebar: 15 - 18 years ago I was able to use all of this cool software like OLAP, SPSS and PGP for free or cheap, it was all EASY!  Now I have not been able to find any of those three for cheap & easy...  Software availability is going BACKWARDS in many cases, grr...]

welcome to capitalism of the real world... thank god bitcoin is here to change things

[The Sceptical Chymist]

There were definitely some good suggestions here--I took absolutely no computer science courses when I was in college.  Most of what I took was chemistry, biology, and the pharmacy-related courses.  I had to use computers extensively but never really learned about them. 

With respect to bitcoin, a little bit of cryptography would be useful.  Math and statistics (I had a lot of that).  And any adult who hasn't gone to college I think owes it to themselves to take at least one course in computers.  I'm thinking of doing it myself one of these days.  And the suggestion of Tor is useful, though I haven't made myself familiar with it.  I don't use the darkweb.

[Dabs]

There was a short documentary on bitcoin released last year? 2014? Or something. Some really old stuff in there, but it's good to know a little history, plus it was entertaining to watch. Try here: http://bitcoindoc.com/ I think I found somewhere else where you can get it for free (may be not legal, depends, dunno. hehe. didn't care at the time.)

As for GPG, https://gnupg.org/download/index.html

http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows
http://gpgtools.org/ for mac

Go send me an encrypted email and I'll reply. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find my public key and my email address. Or you can encrypt a message and send it in a PM. A lot of bitcointalk members do that.

As for other skill sets, I think, if you managed to do okay with SQL, you'll pick up bitcoin fast. All my resources were from this forum or anything I can find in google or the wiki.

The rest, well, I believe a lot of old timers were basically self taught. While this forum has a lot of noise, you'll find good stuff around here.

[cjmoles]

Nice!  Very constructive thread here.  There is certainly a multitude of different paths one can take while attempting to master bitcoin.  It's a technology that is evolving at a pace that rivals Moore's Law and new, innovative applications of the technology are being developed everyday.  With that in mind, I would suggest researching some of the innovations being developed around turing capabilities and smart contract applications.  That seems to be the direction that the technology will inevitably pursue.

[OROBTC]

There was a short documentary on bitcoin released last year? 2014? Or something. Some really old stuff in there, but it's good to know a little history, plus it was entertaining to watch. Try here: http://bitcoindoc.com/ I think I found somewhere else where you can get it for free (may be not legal, depends, dunno. hehe. didn't care at the time.)

As for GPG, https://gnupg.org/download/index.html

http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows
http://gpgtools.org/ for mac

Go send me an encrypted email and I'll reply. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find my public key and my email address. Or you can encrypt a message and send it in a PM. A lot of bitcointalk members do that.

As for other skill sets, I think, if you managed to do okay with SQL, you'll pick up bitcoin fast. All my resources were from this forum or anything I can find in google or the wiki.

The rest, well, I believe a lot of old timers were basically self taught. While this forum has a lot of noise, you'll find good stuff around here.

Thank you, Dabs.  My evening's work (um, after the New Year's celebrations) yielded only a GPG/email working withing my new website's boundaries only.

I run windows, so I will try that http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows.

Then:

Saturn643's comment: The simplest way to encrypt emails with GPG/PGP is to just write the email in another text editor, encrypt that text using whatever GPG software you are using, and then copy and paste the encrypted text into the email as the message.

So, I will do some homework and be back...

[OROBTC]

...

Dabs has a message, or will soon.  Thank you, Dabs, it looks like your suggestion worked great re GPG.

Pretty soon I hope to master this version of PGP (GPG is from Germany, see my post just above for Dabs's link for Windows computers).

You can find my email at my Profile here at bitcointalk.  If interested in email encryption, PM me or send me an email.

Thanks to everyone who has responded!

[Dabs]

Ok. I don't know what you're trying to do yet, but go ahead. Now send me an encrypted message or sign one and I'll verify. BTW, your email in your profile is hidden.

[OROBTC]

Ok. I don't know what you're trying to do yet, but go ahead. Now send me an encrypted message or sign one and I'll verify. BTW, your email in your profile is hidden.

Either email is OK.  My website has nothing on the Home Page now.  Reasonably soon (hah...) I will put up material for public interest (maybe a GnuPG tutorial, gold information (coin properties, etc.), Peru pictures, Bitcoin matters, etc.).  While none of that sounds impressive here, most people I know are not that computer literate.

I have other plans too for the website.  Perhaps a (free) "club" for people with similar interests.  And of course private areas (like a mySQL database or two).

Thank you very much (again) for your help, I'll get a message back to you before really long, but it's past midnight, and I need to eat dinner.......


EDIT:

My email is now visible at my Profile.

[Ayle56]

There was a short documentary on bitcoin released last year? 2014? Or something. Some really old stuff in there, but it's good to know a little history, plus it was entertaining to watch. Try here: http://bitcoindoc.com/ I think I found somewhere else where you can get it for free (may be not legal, depends, dunno. hehe. didn't care at the time.)

As for GPG, https://gnupg.org/download/index.html

http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows
http://gpgtools.org/ for mac

Go send me an encrypted email and I'll reply. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find my public key and my email address. Or you can encrypt a message and send it in a PM. A lot of bitcointalk members do that.

As for other skill sets, I think, if you managed to do okay with SQL, you'll pick up bitcoin fast. All my resources were from this forum or anything I can find in google or the wiki.

The rest, well, I believe a lot of old timers were basically self taught. While this forum has a lot of noise, you'll find good stuff around here.

Thank you, Dabs.  My evening's work (um, after the New Year's celebrations) yielded only a GPG/email working withing my new website's boundaries only.

I run windows, so I will try that http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows.

Then:

Saturn643's comment: The simplest way to encrypt emails with GPG/PGP is to just write the email in another text editor, encrypt that text using whatever GPG software you are using, and then copy and paste the encrypted text into the email as the message.

So, I will do some homework and be back...

Try using gpg4usb from this website.

http://www.gpg4usb.org/download.html

It's portable and easy to use. All you need to do is unzip the zip file and double click the exe file in the unzipped folder. It's got a built in text editor and simple buttons on an intuitive GUI that do almost anything you need. I tried gpg4win but found this easier to use.

[OROBTC]

There was a short documentary on bitcoin released last year? 2014? Or something. Some really old stuff in there, but it's good to know a little history, plus it was entertaining to watch. Try here: http://bitcoindoc.com/ I think I found somewhere else where you can get it for free (may be not legal, depends, dunno. hehe. didn't care at the time.)

As for GPG, https://gnupg.org/download/index.html

http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows
http://gpgtools.org/ for mac

Go send me an encrypted email and I'll reply. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find my public key and my email address. Or you can encrypt a message and send it in a PM. A lot of bitcointalk members do that.

As for other skill sets, I think, if you managed to do okay with SQL, you'll pick up bitcoin fast. All my resources were from this forum or anything I can find in google or the wiki.

The rest, well, I believe a lot of old timers were basically self taught. While this forum has a lot of noise, you'll find good stuff around here.

Thank you, Dabs.  My evening's work (um, after the New Year's celebrations) yielded only a GPG/email working withing my new website's boundaries only.

I run windows, so I will try that http://gpg4win.org/download.html for windows.

Then:

Saturn643's comment: The simplest way to encrypt emails with GPG/PGP is to just write the email in another text editor, encrypt that text using whatever GPG software you are using, and then copy and paste the encrypted text into the email as the message.

So, I will do some homework and be back...

Try using gpg4usb from this website.

http://www.gpg4usb.org/download.html

It's portable and easy to use. All you need to do is unzip the zip file and double click the exe file in the unzipped folder. It's got a built in text editor and simple buttons on an intuitive GUI that do almost anything you need. I tried gpg4win but found this easier to use.

Thank you Ayle56!  I will try that one out too.  "Easy is good."  It looks like I can have as many Keys as I want, so I will play with a few and pick my permanent one once I get the hang of everything.  Besides, it looks like my current password may be compromised, in that I sent a close version to a friend.  But, one thing I have learned here in Internetbitcoinistan is that you cannot be too careful.

Standard Disclosure:  

I am trying to learn all of this myself (with all of your help, and again, my sincere thanks to you all), I did not study Computer Science or related, so my skill set is not so great.  And I was always one of the slower students, just ask any of my teachers/professors, they would tell you the same if they remember at all...

[Dabs]

Yes, go and make a few private keys, play around, revoke them, publish them, etc. Make small ones (1024 bit) and large ones (3000+)

Then when you think you are ready, go make larger keys if you want. (4096 is the largest practical key.)

[OROBTC]

Yes, go and make a few private keys, play around, revoke them, publish them, etc. Make small ones (1024 bit) and large ones (3000+)

Then when you think you are ready, go make larger keys if you want. (4096 is the largest practical key.)

Dabs, you have (will soon) a message!  Maybe I did it right?  

I used Ayle56's link to get another set of keys, but I think I have a better understanding of importing keys, etc.

Now I have to figure out how to find my public key number two...

Does this ever end?   (Ah, I already know the answer)

Ayle56, I'll drop you a line (PM) sometime too.

[xmax]

I would personally like to learn how the coding and programming works.  i see on here where there is a puzzle where you can earn some BTC if you can break the codes, but it all looks foreign to me and I do not understand any of it.  Do I need general coding knowledge in order to be able to code with Bitcoin code?

[OROBTC]

...

Dabs and Ayle56

You both have a message, although Dabs got one that might be incorrectly formatted (the LATTER message is probably the right one).

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xmax

I suspect ANY puzzles here at bitcointalk are WAY beyond my capability!  I would bet that only highly-skilled programmers or other experts in BTC can break such codes.  As mentioned (ad nauseam?) above, I am not any kind of expert here.

*   *   *

For the moment, I am learning email encryption as part of my 2016 efforts to learn a few technologies of interest.  My new website will give me ample opportunities to learn (by struggle) new technologies...

Maybe pick up a little more German and Italian too.  See Europe again before it all changes... 

[Dabs]

Got your message. First one was "modified". Don't change anything in between the ---BEGIN and ---END parts.

For German and Italian, while I am not fluent, I recommend looking for Pimsleur. Actually, for most languages. I have not tried the others so I have no experience with them.

I will send you another encrypted message.

[OROBTC]

Got your message. First one was "modified". Don't change anything in between the ---BEGIN and ---END parts.

For German and Italian, while I am not fluent, I recommend looking for Pimsleur. Actually, for most languages. I have not tried the others so I have no experience with them.

I will send you another encrypted message.

Yes, that's where I messed up in my message, I probably executed a "Cut & Paste" wrong.  (Whoops, I just lost my Queen to a stupid mistake!)

For Italian, all I have to do is talk w/ my wife.  She was born in Peru but has been taking Italian on-and-off for 18 years, she's pretty good at it. 

German?  That's hard, declining nouns, adjectives and articles...  Reminds me of Latin.  Ugh!

Spanish I have down pat though: "Si no practico español en la casa, me PEGA la jefa!"  (Peruvian self-deprecation for men)

[pereira4]

I think privacy related stuff is very needed for Bitcoin, thats why stuff like confidential transactions or the bip47 that i learned through a Chris Odom speech is extremely important, we need more people improving Bitcoin's privacy, the centralized mixers aren't enough.

[Ayle56]

...

Dabs and Ayle56

You both have a message, although Dabs got one that might be incorrectly formatted (the LATTER message is probably the right one).

I got your message and sent a reply.

Recently a guy called Craig Steven Wright attempted to trick the world into believing he was the real Satoshi Nakamoto. He created a PGP key, signed a message, and tried to pass it off as something posted on the internet the same day Satoshi posted PGP content.

Someone analyzed the PGP message header and discovered it used a modern version of crypto algorithms, rather than the old version of crypto algorithms from years ago that the real Satoshi's PGP content used.

Some of the information in a PGP header can be read by anyone with the right software. The Key ID in the header can compromise your anonymity, as this quote from a webpage shows. If it's important there are ways of removing the Key ID from PGP message headers to make it more anonymous.


http://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2013/10/19/analyzing-pgp-content/

This post attempts to answer the following question: If an evesdropper intercepts a message encrypted with gpg, how much information will they be able to extract from the message without a decryption key?

I will show the unencrypted metadata added to a GPG-encypted message, and I will present commands that can be used to extract this unencrypted metadata.

In the below execution, I demonstarte the creation of a key, the encryption of a file, the deletion of the secret key, and the analysis of the encrypted file without the ability to decrypt its contents

...


Now that all the files are created and the secret key has been deleted, let’s try to analyze the pgp file to see what unencrypted data we can pull out.


root@Microknoppix:/tmp/test# gpg --list-packets test.txt.gpg
:pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid D65FA0A95D0D3E9C
data: [1023 bits]
:encrypted data packet:
length: 80
mdc_method: 2
gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID 5D0D3E9C
gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

As you can see above, this message was encrypted using the key “D65FA0A95D0D3E9C” using RSA.

Let’s try another (more human readable) tool for dumping unencrypted data from PGP files: PGPdump.


root@Microknoppix:/tmp/test# pgpdump test.txt.gpg
Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(140 bytes)
New version(3)
Key ID - 0xD65FA0A95D0D3E9C
Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
RSA m^e mod n(1023 bits) - ...
-> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + PKCS-1 block type 02
New: Symmetrically Encrypted and MDC Packet(tag 18)(80 bytes)
Ver 1
Encrypted data [sym alg is specified in pub-key encrypted session key]
(plain text + MDC SHA1(20 bytes))

As you can see, pgpdump seems to have pulled the same data, but it’s expounded a bit on what RSA does. It also appears to include information about a symmetric key, which makes sense but isn’t obvious from the `gpg—list-packets` command above.

Now, let’s try to hide the recipient of the message using `gpg—hidden-recipient` instead of `gpg—recipient`.

...


And below we peek at the gpg file’s packet’s headers to see if we can still see the recipeient.


root@Microknoppix:/tmp/test# gpg --list-packets test.txt.gpg
:pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 0000000000000000
data: [1022 bits]
:encrypted data packet:
length: 80
mdc_method: 2
gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID 00000000
gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available
root@Microknoppix:/tmp/test# pgpdump test.txt.gpg
Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(140 bytes)
New version(3)
Key ID - 0x0000000000000000
Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
RSA m^e mod n(1022 bits) - ...
-> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + PKCS-1 block type 02
New: Symmetrically Encrypted and MDC Packet(tag 18)(80 bytes)
Ver 1
Encrypted data [sym alg is specified in pub-key encrypted session key]
(plain text + MDC SHA1(20 bytes))

Success! We’ve hidden the key id of the recipient!