http://blogs.umb.edu/williamfleurant001/2012/01/13/bitcoin/I wonder why so many instances are in Russia and Ukraine. I know that the Ukrainian banking system is viewed with great suspicion by its citizens.
Is he referring to HOW MANY MINING RIGS are out there or is 739,000 the number of wallets?
?
Thanks in advance
739,033 unique computers running BitCoin.
Jan 13th, 2012 by William Fleurant
It’s 2012, and epic 2011 was totally being epic 2011.
I recorded 739,033 unique computer IP addresses using the BitCoin Currency over a 3 month period. Plus, According to MTGOX:
49.9883/BTC (BitCoins) is trading@ $6.45978/USD.
That’s $323 for 50 BitCoins. Happy-Happy Joy-Joy. The Google Maps KML file is also quite rich. If you want to check that one out (and have the GPU/CPU power) contact me:
Snippet of a side project of mine, introducing my independent findings on the Worldwide usage of BitCoin. Data collected on a machine -not- running BitCoin. Read the WiKi to find out how. But, I would start by grepping the source code.
If you enjoyed this choppy post, send some bitties! I’m @ 1PWsG31ywicAmF2jgQR3CxiCgULmWT33nj
BitCoin is a currency. This currency is so different because anybody can use an Internet connected computer to generate BitCoins. It can be exchanged for other currency, commodities, and a variety of services. Similarly, it can be withdrawn or exchanged like all other currencies. But instead of a leather wallet or plastic credit card, BitCoin uses an encrypted digital wallet. This protected wallet can conduct transactions from a smartphone [3], an ATM machine [4] and of course a personal computer.
This process of using ones computer to generate a BitCoin is in fact called mining. Mining for BitCoins independently is very competitive. It absolutely requires expensive hardware for the ability to gain a substantial return on investment. An initial investment of almost three thousand dollars should generate about 3½/BTC per day. [5]
Snippet of Hipster Data Collection section.
In addition to using the free city lookup database, I was also able to utilize a CPAN Perl module to plot waypoints of GPS via their GeoIP API. Note that before running the code GeoIP city lookup provides, recompiling the source with an output according to their API is required for their bash wrapper (output to ./.libs/ with all other compiled C)
Start a WireShark filter to match ‘dst.port == 53’ and if on a Unix (Apple) or Linux computer the command ‘tcpdump –nqi eth0 udp port 53’ will suffice. Then, all of the captured DNS requests answered will be observed. In this 3 month case, there was a substantial number of IP Addresses which are read by the GeoIP application which in return are sent out for further resolution of origin via the computers default Domain Name Server and finally passed back through GeoIP for a database match and are attributed with such matching variables which are written in CSV format and saved to file. The reversing of IP address to location took over 24 hours. I created a bash script to monitor this step.
I recorded the data from the centralized server and logged all connecting, and disconnecting clients. The data was recorded non-stop. I used a variety of programming languages to capture, parse and manipulate the data. Ruby, Perl, Sed, Awk, PHP, GPSBabel, GEPLOT, Excel and Microsoft Word programs were utilized. I first used MySQL Database but that was not necessary with the programs and scripts I utilized and wrote afterwards. It took 45 hours to produce this document with a total of 7,542,601 observations [20].
