Banca imi bank explores ethereum derivatives
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Bitcoin, and its fundamental technology blockchain , have been popping up in the news plenty over the past few years. However, discussion about them is typically a bit high level — or, OK, gibberish — leaving the average person with the vague impression that something cool is happening with currency, but very little in the way of actual knowledge or understanding.
The technology is indeed elegant, but it is not that difficult to understand. Anyone can generate a digital name and digital signature. Having these digital assets enables the following scenario:. What is All this Business about Bitcoin? But I need to make sure it reaches the intended recipient unaltered. How would I do that? The easiest way would be to ask my friend to send the whole message back to me so I can compare the two messages and see if they match.
Many people use the same approach when dictating some numbers or spelling e-mail addresses over the phone. Moreover, the message might be very long. What if the message contains a high-def video? Let each letter be associated with a sequential number i. After I have sent a primary message to my friend, I send the hash so that they can check whether the received message matches the intended one. Well, that would change its hash: My friend would expect to get , so when they get , the difference would alert us both that something went wrong.
We should note here that the hash itself could be altered or otherwise compromised. It does not serve to protect the integrity of the message a signature does that ; it is used to simplify and speed up the process of integrity checking. Also, in actual use, people do not encode their hashes and send them to their friends as separate messages; their computers handle the entire process in a way that is invisible to the users.
That simple hash method would not catch swapped letters in the message — it was just an example. In the real world, we use much more complex algorithms. Imagine there are 30 kids in a classroom, and they would like to use their own play money, which should be entirely virtual i. To do this, the kids write the values of their initial cash possessions on the chalkboard, and then write down how much money each of them gave to another person. This approach works perfectly until a teacher comes and wipes it all off the board, claiming control over the cash flows because he or she has power and, say, wants to prevent children from using the system for buying drugs from each other.
Bitcoin Safety Guide by Kaspersky Lab http: As a result of these unfavorable conditions, kids turn to keeping their financial records in notepads. Each of them keeps a notepad under their desk and constantly updates the record with transactions. Of course, they cannot shout about their purchases during class, so they use paper notes aka the Internet. So, at first sight, this is cryptocurrency in action!
Now there are 30 notes circulating in the classroom; how would one know that each of students copied the contents of all of the paper notes into their notepad? Which paper notes were copied by all of the students and can be disposed of? There is a solution to those problems: Children need to exchange not only short notes containing lines of transactions, but entire pages.
When someone has accumulated a lot of transactions, they copy accurately all of the lines, calculate the hash for the previous page, copy it on the top of the new page and distribute the new page to all of the students in the class. On receiving the page, Johnny checks it for consistency: All lines should be written in the same handwriting, the page should contain a new number, and the hash for the previous page should match the hash written on the new page. And one more thing: Each contributor should have as much money as they want to pay.
To ensure that, Johnny needs to read through the entire transaction journal and count the money. Sounds quite cumbersome, yet a computer will manage the task with ease.
So, if the numbers add up right, Johnny then accurately writes down a new page in his journal and accepts the transactions. A collection of numbered pages blocks is, in essence, blockchain. If this process is not controlled by any additional rules, each student would start their own version of page As a result, there would be 30 versions of the transaction journal circulating in the class.
How would one know which one is correct? A certain routine makes that possible: The page is created once every 10 minutes, so it can be distributed to the entire class, and the writer responsible for keeping the journal is chosen randomly.
With Bitcoin, they decided to deal with that in the following way. Students have to do some useful task — like solving randomly picked math problems from the textbook. Whoever is the first to solve the problem collects all of the notes and starts to create a new page.
And if there are many A students in a class, problems are solved faster, and the group can upgrade to the next chapter of the textbook. However, if only Karl, a straight A student, is always entrusted with the task of compiling pages, he might be in power to deny Johnny any chances to pass virtual money to anyone.
Anyone willing to do so should be a real badass student — she or he should possess computing capacity exceeding half of aggregated computing capacity of all Bitcoin users which is yielded by millions of computers all over the world. So, should Karl be capable of that meaning he invested that much in computing capacity , petty cheating would not make any sense. There is another peculiarity. An A student also writes down the solution to the math problem on the page mind you, this math problem is not really random but relevant to the page itself.
A cheater otherwise would have to solve a huge number of problems. With the aforementioned approach, our journal is evenly incremented by new, correctly filled pages. Why are tech giants betting on BitCoin? If I bribe more than a half of the class preferably, A students , I can spin the students off into a separate classroom and start an alternative history in which I never passed my money to anyone.
After that, I can return to the former class and present them a longer journal of transactions. Initially, all bitcoins could have been distributed among lucky ones who compiled the very first page. But that would have been both unfair and pointless. To get more people involved in the system, the founders agreed to distribute money incrementally: The person who solves a problem and starts a new page would put a line at the top saying: Also, everyone agrees the page is correct if the amount is exactly 50, and that in a couple of years 50 will become 25, and so on.
As a result, people grow their assets, but the total amount of coins is limited: Thanks to this principle, many people wanted to join the project as early birds and earn some money by dint of being the first — later, the money would be distributed in smaller portions and to more participants.
Also, more and more people are working really hard to nail those math problems as fast as possible.
So, now a lot of people possess of a lot of cryptocurrency. And now is when we announce that the cryptocurrency is the stock of the new Money Of The Future, Inc. The cryptocurrency is sold at a market price which starts to grow: Many want to get their hands on the money of the future. Bitcoins are a real innovation. A mysterious author or an even more mysterious group of authors did quite well right away, at the first shot, and their idea is still working. Bitcoins are pure gold for various illegal deeds.
Weapons and drugs trading, bribery, and extortion all become easy to manage because transactions are very hard to trace and impossible to shut down. In the offline world, people would just pay in cash in such cases, but online, traditional payment systems are controlled and not anonymous — hence the value of Bitcoin.
Many people think that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are made for criminals. It's really not the case klcsw pic. For legal deeds, decentralization and anonymity are useless and even harmful.
These systems have their flaws but also useful features:. We pay fees especially when sending a payment that crosses borders , but we get a valuable service. Bitcoin is faster and cheaper, but to enjoy its benefits, we have to burn an awful amount of electricity, and duplicate information over and over. If we decided to hand over those tasks to, say, PayPal, it would not be any worse. People like bitcoins because they constantly grow in price.
Demand is clearly surpassing supply, which shrinks over time. People dislike bitcoins because they constantly grow in price. Traditional economy is regulated by a central bank, which ensures the volume of available money corresponds to the volume of goods and services, making the latter become a bit cheaper over time.
As for bitcoins, this process is distorted: If the people of one country rushed to buy out bitcoins and then the bubble bursts as it does every couple of years , it would mark the start of a crisis. Bitcoin is associated with drugs, tax avoidance, murky incomes, and terrorism — precisely due to the absence of control.
Regulators therefore ban cryptocurrencies and urge people to use the traditional tools that are widely available everywhere. As for using blockchain in areas beyond exchange, the majority of projects that involve blockchain manage the same tasks in a centralized manner. They are able to do so by using one or more computing hubs, which come a lot cheaper in terms of computing power and efficiency. Now you are more familiar with Bitcoin and blockchain that the majority of the planet.
From ransomware to Web miners. Problems and risks of cryptocurrencies. Smart contracts, Ethereum, ICO.