I’m a digital forensic specialist with over 16 years in the industry. I primarily specialise in telecommunications data but I also deal with all manner of niche and emerging technologies.
My first adventure into crypto was purchasing a refurbished AMD Radeon 5850 graphics card. Being refurbished I wished to stress-test it to ensure it functioned correctly. It was then that I found Bitcoin. Whilst it is not a traditional stress test, it is effective at stressing graphics cards. I quickly joined the Slush mining pool and left it running. The 1st July 2011 saw my first ½ BTC being deposited to my address. After a couple of weeks and 1.5 BTC, I was satisfied that the graphics card was operating correctly and I didn’t mine any further. At this stage, bitcoin was trading (if you could find anywhere to trade!) at around $14/BTC.
By 2013, Bitcoin’s adoption and resultant value was increasing and I cashed out at around £100/BTC which covered the cost of the graphics card. If only I knew what was to come…
The prospect of my graphics card being profitable was of course appealing, but it was no longer viable to mine Bitcoin with the hardware I had so I looked at alternatives. I, therefore, started mining Litecoin. This continued for a while before I purchased an ASIC miner for Bitcoin in 2015 which I mined on into 2016. During this time I spent a considerable time consuming knowledge on the Bitcoin Talk forum.
The later mined Bitcoin, the Litecoin and the Bitcoin Cash generated as a result of the fork in 2017 remained dormant until the bull market of 2021 when I disposed of my assets. The profits from these sales allowed me to explore other projects which did not rely on proof-of-work such as Cardano and Polkadot and dabble in some algorithmic trading (unsuccessfully!).
The technical aspects of Blockchain technologies have interested me since first reading Satoshi’s white paper in 2011. What particularly piqued my interest was the public nature of the Bitcoin blockchain and its pseudonymous nature. From a digital forensics perspective, obtaining or generating large datasets which represent real-world data is generally very time-consuming and expensive to do. The Bitcoin blockchain on the other hand does not require this as it naturally contains records of all transactions since its inception. An amazing opportunity to not only consider live data but all historic data.
As with any technology, there’s a potential for it to be misused and I expected to find it in my day job. The opportunities were clear from the outset; censorship-resistant, pseudonymous, easily transferable and durable. The lack of liquidity and the volatility as well as the transparency of the blockchain does provide hurdles, but with the wider adoption, the former has at least become significantly less of an issue. It has, however, introduced additional hurdles with Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) becoming more common as the crypto space became more mainstream. Of course, the introduction of more privacy centric crypto projects, as well as mixers, has also lessened some of these hurdles.
During the pandemic, I found having more time on your hands can be productive. I read an enormous amount of white papers, developer documentation and opinion on various blockchains as well as completing the University of Nicosia’s DeFi and Cryptocurrency MOOCs. I also started coding an algorithmic trading program and the software which would ultimately form much of the basis for this blog.
Since then I have completed 101 Blockchain’s Certified Blockchain Security Expert (CBSE) and Blockchain Council’s Certified Cryptocurrency Expert (CCE) courses.
This blog was set up for the sharing of some of this research and general playing about with blockchains. I hope you enjoy it.
