2 How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization

Lecture 2 in the series

1. Centralization vs. Decentralization:

1. Who maintains the ledger?
2. Who has authority over which transactions are valid?
3. who creates new bitcoins?
4. who determines how the rules of the system change?
5. how do bitcoins acquire exchange value?

2. Distributed consensus

3. Consensus without identity: the block chain

4. Incentives and proof of work

1. How to pick a random node?
2. How to avoid a free-for-all due to rewards?
3. How to prevent sybil attacks?

5. Putting it all together

1. What can 51% attacker do?

[Source]
[Download here]

Smart Traffic lights are the way of the future

First came heard of this idea when I was attending a hackathon, that team won. I had a feeling I should join but they were a very large team already... Anyway, recently thought about it again and found globalnews and torontostararticles and after reading them I remembered what realization I had back in the summer, when self driving cars are allowed on the roads, they will work with the smart lights to coordinate the commute to be even faster! that is just great :)

Let me know what you think. Comment below.

1 Intro to Crypto and Cryptocurrencies

Lecture 1 of Preston University online course of the series

1. Cryptographic Hash Functions
2. Hash Pointers and Data Structures
3. Digital Signatures

[Source]

[Download here]

How long does it take to learn bitcoin?

First hearing about bitcoin in 2013, I had to do a lot of research which mainly consisted of wikipedia and bitcoin.it along with as many various youtube videos and other crypto related websites and videos from all over the web, and even in-person meetups.

Finally on Feb 16, 2015 Prinston University released a video with Ed Felton Lecture 1 — Intro to Crypto and Cryptocurrencies.

This is amazing, as far as I can tell it is the first of its kind course offered by a well known university and I can't wait to see the subsequent videos. I decided that I will review and understand what's in these videos in depth and since there are many sections in each video I used the youtube timemarks and links so anyone can reference the topics. Find those posts here.

Let me your thoughts on bitcoin and on the learning of these technologies in the comments.

Thanks for visiting.

State of communication - or how messaging apps work these days

Quick summary of best, most used forms of communication I am faced with in the North American culture:

Text - sms messaging
Facebook messaging
WhatsApp
Telegram
Google hangouts
Skype

All the above have web version, mobile app version, group chatting, read receipts (some with less detail) and some have conference call with video options


What else to be covered? how to combine them? which ones do you use? how secure are each of them? only telegram (from what I can tell) is open source, does this matter?

Let me know in the comments below