The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin
"In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list's veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. His email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. The idea of digital money - convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks - had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. Yet every effort to create virtual cash had foundered. Ecash, an anonymous system launched in the early 1990s by cryptographer David Chaum, failed in part because it depended on the existing infrastructures of government and credit card companies. Other proposals followed - bit gold, RPOW, b-money - but none got off the ground.
One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem. If a digital dollar is just information, free from the corporeal strictures of paper and metal, what's to prevent people from copying and pasting it as easily as a chunk of text, 'spending' it as many times as they want? The conventional answer involved using a central clearinghouse to keep a real-time ledger of all transactions - ensuring that, if someone spends his last digital dollar, he can't then spend it again. The ledger prevents fraud, but it also requires a trusted third party to administer it.
Bitcoin did away with the third party by publicly distributing the ledger, what Nakamoto called the 'block chain.' Users willing to devote CPU power to running a special piece of software would be called miners and would form a network to maintain the block chain collectively. In the process, they would also generate new currency. Transactions would be broadcast to the network, and computers running the software would compete to solve irreversible cryptographic puzzles that contain data from several transactions. The first miner to solve each puzzle would be awarded 50 new bitcoins, and the associated block of transactions would be added to the chain. The difficulty of each puzzle would increase as the number of miners increased, which would keep production to one block of transactions roughly every 10 minutes. In addition, the size of each block bounty would halve every 210,000 blocks - first from 50 bitcoins to 25, then from 25 to 12.5, and so on. Around the year 2140, the currency would reach its preordained limit of 21 million bitcoins."
(Benjamin Wallace, 23 November 2011, Wired Magazine)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Concrete Canvas and Concrete Canvas Shelters
"Concrete Canvas Ltd. manufacture a ground breaking material technology called Concrete Canvas that allows concrete to be used in a completely new way. Concrete Canvas was originally developed for the award winning Concrete Canvas Shelters, a building in a bag that requires only water and air for construction."
(Concrete Canvas Ltd.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Space: Building a Broadcaster in a Box
"Back in August last year, Tony Ageh asked us a question: 'How would you deliver a 'pop-up' television channel to desktops, mobiles, tablets and connected TVs?'
The typical response, particularly within the BBC, would be a suggestion to re-purpose much of the infrastructure we already have: media ingest, metadata management, transcoding, web publication, device targeting.
There was a snag, though. In fact, there were a couple. First, this wasn't just a pop-up TV channel - this was a 'broadcaster in a box', which could later be handed over to arts organisations to pick up and run with."
(Mo McRoberts, 1 May 2012, BBC)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Modular architecture central to Christchurch's urban regeneration
"Martin Trusttum, from CPIT's Faculty of Creative Industries, likens his ArtBox project to a game of Tetris. 'It's just like Tetris but in slow motion. They are cubes and eventually they will come together to form a precinct.'
ArtBox will be located on the corner of Madras and St Asaph streets on the old Southlander Tavern-Jetset Lounge site opposite Anton Parsons' sculpture Passing Time.
It is a rare collection of mobile and flexible modules designed by Sydenham-based F3 and will offer about 18 spaces suitable for galleries and studios. It offers a practical, timely solution to the many low-cost premises used as galleries and studios destroyed by the February 2011 earthquake. "
(Vicki Anderson, 07 September 2012, Stuff.co.nz)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Confluence of Digital Journalism and Digital Humanities
"I've increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually beneficial. That sentiment was confirmed by the extremely positive reaction on Twitter to a brief comment I made on the launch of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, including from Jon Christensen (of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, and formerly a journalist), Shana Kimball (MPublishing, University of Michigan), Tim Carmody (Wired), and Jenna Wortham (New York Times).
Here's an outline of some of the main areas where digital journalism and digital humanities could profitably collaborate. It's remarkable, upon reflection, how much overlap there now is, and I suspect these areas will only grow in common importance."
(Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
