Las Vegas seems an appropriate place for cryptocurrency businesses to emerge, both because the coins themselves are so volatile that some gambling instinct may be required, and because Vegas is a high-tech outpost with lower taxes and lower rents than many other West Coast hot-spots, well-suited to risky startups with ambition but without huge venture backing.Jim Blasko moved there to work on low-voltage engineering for Penn & Teller, and is a qualified Crestron programmer, too (useful in a town that looks from the air like one giant light-show), but has shifted to a quite different endeavor, or rather a complex of them all related to cryptocurrency. I ran into Blasko during this month's CES, at a forum with several other cryptocoin startups, and the next day we met to talk about just how hard (or easy) it is to get into this world as an entrepreneur.

Blasko has some advice for anyone who'd like to try minting a new cryptocurrency. Making your own coin, he says, is the easy part: anyone can clone code from an existing entrant, like Bitcoin, and rename the result and that's exactly what he did. The hard work is what comes after: making worthwhile changes, building trust, and making it tradeable. Blasko's done the legwork to get his own currency, which he's bravely called "Unbreakable Coin," listed on exchanges like Cryptsy, and is working on his own auction site as well. He's also got an interesting idea for cryptocoin trading cards, and had a few prototypes on hand. (Part 1 is below; Part 2 to follow.) Alternate Video Link

Tim: So, Jim you have a couple of different Cryptocoin related businesses or enterprises that are all going on at once. But Im going to start out talking about one thing that intrigues me, which is that you have created your own coin, can you talk about how that came to be?

Jim Blasko: Creating UnbreakableCoin?

Tim: Yes.

Jim Blasko: It started off with seeing what was happening out there with other Crypto coins, seeing what was going on. This was about a year ago now. I registered the name a few months before I actually finished the coin. I knew what I wanted to call it. I am a Crestron Control Systems programmer and those are systems that we use here in large houses or casinos and it controls everything, the lights, the security, the cameras, the doors, I mean, the sound, everything is controlled by Crestron these days. So, by taking that experience I have been working with that since 1998 and by taking that experience I said, lets make our own Crypto coin, lets use bitcoins core, so lets call them bitcoin, but lets modify it a little bit, so that its faster, so that its bigger, it gives us an opportunity to give the Crypto world a second chance because not everybody got into bitcoin, a lot of people found out about it later and it was like, oh man, so we thought we can do this, I thought at least that I can do this, I always say we because we have a team now and I dont like to not include my team, my team is great, the Unbreakable team is awesome. But, I thought lets make this coin and lets not pre-mine it, lets give it to the world from day one. So, like I said we took bitcoin, we just cloned it, we made it faster and little bigger and we just said, here it is world, here it is, start mining it.

Tim: When you call it unbreakable, talk about what makes it deserve that name?

Jim Blasko: Well, SHA-256D is the same encryption algorithm that the government uses and its pretty much the best thing on the planet, it is unbreakable, even the government says its about 10 to 15 years away from being cracked itself and by then they will have improvements to it to keep it from being that, so thats what bitcoin is based on, SHA-256D, so thats why I chose that instead of what the Scrypt coin. There are too many vulnerabilities in Scrypt that I dont like and I saw that, if the government thinks SHA-256D is the best encryption, I think they are probably right, we got a pretty smart group of guys out there.

Tim: If they are telling the truth.

Jim Blasko: If they are telling the truth, but it seems to be, thats what they send all the mission data over, SHA-256D encryption. So thats pretty important stuff.

Original post:

Jim Blasko Explains BitCoin Spinoff 'Unbreakable Coin' (Video 1 of 2)