Why does my laptop sound like a jet engine? While there are an infinite number of code snippets that would land you in jail, today we’ll be talking about crypto miners. It only takes two lines of code to start a crypto-miner in your browser. This is called cryptojacking. var miner = new CoinHive.Anonymous('<site-key>'); miner.start(); The website doesn’t have to inform you that it’s running, as was the case in 2017 with The Pirate Bay.

Cheaper transactions for everyone Ever-increasing transaction costs Transaction fees on blockchains like Ethereum are once again prohibitively high. Gas prices routinely approach 200 gwei, making even the most basic transaction cost multiple dollars. Sadly we cannot change the gas price, but what if we could change the amount of gas we use? There is a simple method that anyone can use on any blockchain to reduce the gas cost of (smart contract) transactions, without relying on layer 2 scaling or waiting for EIP-1559-like proposals.

The best way to learn is to do. So what better way to learn more about the inner workings of a blockchain than to build an SDK for one? The goal when coding was to create a functional blockchain SDK and learn some things along the way. Here follows a brief highlight reel of what I’ve encountered along the way. This post goes into the guts of what a transaction is and comes back out wielding a functional development kit.