Eight months after ChangeTip launched, Emin Gün Sirer wished it dead. He also asked us all to celebrate its demise when it happened.
Sirer is an IT security expert, commentator and professor at Cornell University. In a blog post titled “ChangeTip Must Die” published in December 2014, Sirer stated that the death of ChangeTip was not only eminent but also desirable. He wrote:
The choice to attach a small fee for miners every time you send bitcoins is slowly going from voluntary to mandatory. Miners are already taking longer to confirm transactions that lack sufficient fees.
Segregated Witness (SegWit) does more than condense transaction data that goes into the Bitcoin block. Marek “Slush” Palatinus, architect of the hardware wallet Trezor, pointed this out when he said:
“Segregated Witness is not just about scaling. There are other issues with Bitcoin under the hood, and SegWit opens potential for applications and use-cases that are not possible today. For those who think only bigger blocks will save Bitcoin’s exchange rate this is important to understand.
Someone exploited a code loophole on the Decentralized Anonymous Organization (DAO) and hijacked close to $50 million. It took an Ethereum hard fork to claim back the funds.
Everyone is building a blockchain solution.
Ok, not actually everyone. But many have fallen in love with the Bitcoin code; some are copying it, and others are building on top of it.
The first copycats of the blockchain resulted in basically complete clones of Bitcoin. That’s how altcoins like Litecoin, Dogecoin and Namecoin came into existence.
A lot has happened since.
As June 2016 got underway, there was a new attraction in the crypto space.
And that was DAO (Decentralized Anonymous Organization). This entity had raised about $150 million from excited investors online.
Everyone couldn’t wait to see it go live. And then the unexpected happened. On the 16th June 2016, a hacker exploited weakness on a single line of its code and siphoned out about $50 million of the funds.
Does the name Nathaniel Popper ring any bells?
He is the author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.
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“We are not the customers of Facebook, we are the product. Facebook is selling us to advertisers.”- Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and writer.
Most of us can’t imagine life without social media, it’s the first place we visit in the morning and the last place we report to before falling asleep. It’s fun and exciting to link with relatives, friends and strangers at a very personal level throughout the day, and it doesn’t matter what side of the world they are in. Social media has afforded us connectedness that we’ve never experienced before as human beings. Even better, the service is free (apart from the data, of course). So, what exactly is the cost?
In the beginning, there was one blockchain (the Bitcoin Blockchain). Then came a second blockchain, and another – Now there are many, and more are being created as we speak. While they all share the same basic structure, these blockchains are quite unique. One division is between the public blockchains, known as ‘permission-less’ and private blockchains, known as ‘permission-ed’.
