Search
Bitcoin History Part 15: Silk Road Is Born
18.8.2019
Silk Road launched in February 2011 as the darknet’s first bitcoin-based marketplace. Within four months, it would be the darknet’s most notorious site whose reputation extended all the way to the U.S. Senate. The origins of the drugs marketplace can be traced back further, however,...
Bitcoin History Part 14: The 1,000 BTC Poker Game
9.8.2019
Bitcoin and poker have a history that stretches back to the very start. Perhaps, even, to before the start of Bitcoin as we know it, for there is evidence that Satoshi had a background in poker. What’s beyond dispute is that in March 2010, the world’s first bitcoin poker tournament took...
From Spartacus to Satoshi: A Brief History of Economic Rebellion
7.8.2019
Government dominance of human beings via slavery and violent economic oppression is as old as government itself. For thousands and thousands of years kings and rulers, usually held to be “appointed by God,” have used free, non-violent individuals as their tax farm livestock to exploit...
From Booze to Bitcoin Mining – Why Violent Prohibition Is Always Harmful
6.8.2019
Stories continue to emerge about newly discovered illegal mining operations being busted by state and corporate authorities. Just last week Iranian media reported the seizure of 177 Bitcoin mining units worth over $270,000 being smuggled via truck in the Arak region. On July 31, Russia’s...
Money and Democracy: Why You Never Get to Vote on the Most Important Part of Society
10.7.2019
It’s very odd that citizens never get to vote or have any say in regard to society’s money, even though it’s one of the most important aspects of everyday life. In fact, in developed countries, most central banks are institutions that are privatized from political interference...
Flowery V20 Talk and Government Terror: Why Darknet Crime Is the Least of Our Worries
1.7.2019
Governments and central banking regulatory bodies continue to express concern about crypto being used for criminal purposes and terror. The terror campaigns of these very same governments continue unabated, however. In the wake of the V20 summit it might seem that lawmakers actually care about...
The Politicization of Money: Crypto as a Safeguard Against Economic Propaganda
27.6.2019
Money has come a long way since its origins. From cowry shells to crypto, transferable, divisible, and economically sound means of exchange have been adopted by market actors everywhere. Modern history has brought us to a dangerous place, however, a cultural climate where politics and bad economics...
Bitcoin History Part 13: The First Mining Pool
19.5.2019
The notion that anyone could solo mine bitcoin – on a CPU no less – seems positively quaint today. But in 2010, this method wasn’t just possible – it was the norm. With an exponentially lower hashrate, less competition and a 50 bitcoin block reward, there was enough pie...
Bitcoin History Part 12: When No One Wanted Your BTC
12.5.2019
Today, bitcoin is so precious that its hodlers are prone to locking their keys away inside nuclear bunkers, bank vaults, and military grade hardware wallets. But things weren’t always that way. Back in the early days, bitcoin was deemed so undesirable that you would have struggled to give...
Yet Another JavaScript Framework
1.4.2019
On March 6, 2018, a new bug was added to the official Mozilla Firefox browser bug tracker. A developer had noticed an issue with Mozilla's nightly build. The report noted that a 14-day weather forecast widget typically featured on a German website had all of a sudden broken and disappeared. Nothing...
A historical look at lowercase defaultstatus
1.4.2019
Browsers, thank heavens, take backward compatibility seriously.
Ancient websites generally work just fine on modern browsers. There is a way higher chance that a website is broken because of problems with hosting, missing or altered assets, or server changes than there is with changes in...
WorldWideWeb
27.2.2019
For the 30th anniversary of the web, CERN brought nine web nerds together to recreate the very first web browser — Or a working replication of it anyway, as you use it from your web browser, inception style.
Well done, Mark Boulton, John Allsopp, Kimberly Blessing, Jeremy Keith, Remy Sharp...
Clearfix: A Lesson in Web Development Evolution
3.7.2018
The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actually follow this...