Of Blockchains and .NET

CoinDesk.com's article "How Bitcoin Mining Works" is one of the best articles I've seen describing the mining process and the how's and why's of the blockchain.

Another article I found quite informative despite its cheesy title is "By reading this article, you’re mining bitcoins".

And, of course, there's plenty of other articles describing the basic idea but few spend as much time as the articles above when it comes to "this is specifically how it works". Put another way, I read the articles above and said, "Okay, now I know enough to stub out a program to -- at least in theory -- do mining and otherwise explore cryptocurrencies and their underlying concepts and technologies.

The Blockchain and its Potential

I've mined litecoin off and on and FeatherCoin much more. At the time, both seemed more accessible than Bitcoin and while I garnered a handful of coins I knew even then it probably wasn't worth the electricity used.

However, that observation doesn't diminish the ingenuity of the blockchain and its potential. A recorded public ledger that is (to date, at least) tamper-resistant is intriguing, both in its implementation and its potential.

While the original page itself wasn't available the last time I looked, a Google cache of the article "Minimum Viable Block Chain" provides a good read on why the block chain concept is important and how it might be used beyond cryptocurrencies. Start there and Google onwards.

Also, check out Andreas Antonopoulos' various articles over at O'Reilly Radar:

The ecosystem article in particular was one of the first to open my eyes to the faculty contained within the blockchain.


The Blockchain and .NET

Finally, I can't help but notice that the number of .NET libraries geared specifically towards cryptocurrencies and the block chain remains small. Search GitHub or any other repository and you'll find nearly every library and tool is written in another language:

JavaScript       86
Python           41
PHP              32
Ruby             21
Java             19
C++              13
Go               10
CSS               9
Shell             6
C                 6

This isn't to say there's no .NET projects out there looking at blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Change your search ("C# blockchain") and you'll find two projects. Change it again ("C# bitcoin") and you'll find 26 projects. But, overall, the wealth of work being done is on other platforms and with other languages.

To me that sounds like a good opportunity to dive in and make a contribution, or to make your mark.

One Last Note

For an in-depth look at why Bitcoin is the province of ASIC miners and what could be done with other Proof-of-Work (PoW) approaches, see this article, "Block Chain Based Proof­of­Work Hash and Wild Keccak as a Reference Implementation". With not much digging, you'll find much more information on this topic.





Comments

  1. pslvseo a5December 17, 2018 at 9:14 PM

    CoinDesk
    This is one of the top new sources for bitcoin enthusiasts. In fact, it is the largest bitcoin news media platform in the world. The site is packed with reports and tools that break down the trends and patterns in cryptocurrency. I recommend checking out the reports on the research page.

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