Bitcoin is an open sourcepeer-to-peer (a.k.a "p2p") electronic cash system that's completely decentralised, with no central server, trusted authorities or middle men. The availability of bitcoins can't be manipulated by governments or financial institutions. Bitcoin already has a number of exchanges for converting to and from other currencies; BitcoinFX, New Liberty Standard, Bitcoin Exchange and Bitcoin Market.
Bitcoin may last for years and become a popular global currency, or it could be just a flash in the pan, but either way I think this is an important sign of the times to come. This is one of the first truly decentralised currencies and has paved the way for hundreds more to compete together in the new arena of Cipherspace over the coming years. This is one of the key factors in the transition of global society into the post-nation-state economy talked about in The Sovereign Individual.
In a p2p computer network there are no servers, the entire network is composed of users running instances of the application on their computers. Each running instance offers a small amount of processing and storage resource to the network so that it can deliver the services it was designed for such as redundant storage, anonymity or voice-over-IP applications.
In the case of a p2p currency system, some of the services the network is designed to offer are privacy, verification, authentication, currency creation and transfer of ownership. To ensure a reliable and tamper-proof system requires a lot of resource, and that amount is proportional to the amount of coins in the network. The network is able to pay the users for the resource they offer by making the coin-creation process part of the network protocol itself instead of being handled by a central trusted authority. This creates a natural and incorruptible link between the supply of currency in the network and the demand for it.
Even aside from the ability to exchange bitcoins for other currencies, it still makes a very useful tool for independent organisations and groups because it allows them to trade and settle accounts amongst themselves independently and privately. It effectively gives them a "bank" that has a trustworthy system of accounts that can't be tampered with and requires no corruptible central authority to operate. See the Bitcoin Whitepaper for more detail about how it works.
To try Bitcoin, download the Bitcoin software, then once it's running, click 'Generate Coins' which will pay you bitcoins in exchange for your computer working to validate bitcoin transactions. Check the exchange rate to calculate how many bitcoins need to be sent. The payer can purchase additional bitcoins if needed. The payer's previously generated bitcoins allow for a lower out of pocket payment. The payer then sends the bitcoins to the receiver using the Bitcoin software. The receiver can then sell their bitcoins for dollars. The receiver's previously generated bitcoins allow a higher dollar payout.
See also
WeBank- Report organised by Nesta and OpenBusiness.cc about P2P finance
Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network. Four talented young programmers from NYU's Courant Institute are trying to raise money so they can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data.
Enter your Diaspora "seed", a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG the GNU implementation of OpenPGP) your pictures, videos, and more. For a little more detailed explanation, checkout this blog post.
Another extremely interesting aspect of this is KickStarter which is the donation system that the Diaspora team have used to raise development funds for their project. KickStarter allows anyone to set up a new project and to specify what their goals are and how much money they need to achieve them. The site then accepts donations from people who want to support it, but if after 30 days the project hasn't met their required amount, the people get their money back. This is an ingenious idea which is similar in some ways to the escrow model seen in many online project management environments.
The Diaspora project is an example of a very successful project on KickStarter. The team required $10,000 to work solidly on their development over the summer break, and had received more than that after only 12 days! At the time of writing this article the total received is $166,926 and there's still 17 days to go!! Click here to see what it's up to now.
Update: Diaspora's funding closed on 2 July having received $200,642 from 6479 backers :-)
I just found this amazing site called The Book Depository which has an excellent selection of over two million books at very good prices, and is somehow able to deliver almost anywhere in the world completely free!!!. They have a cool live map showing what books are being bought around the world right now :-)
The Book Depository is the UK's largest dedicated online bookseller offering the largest range of titles in the world, available for dispatch within 48 hours. Founded in 2004 to make 'All Books To All' we focus on selling 'less of more' rather than 'more of less', differentiating ourself from other retailers who increasingly focus on bestsellers.
In 1971, electrical engineering professor Leon Chua proposed a theoretical basic electronics component called a memristor. In 2008, Hewlett Packard brought the memristor out of theory and into the real world. See Memristor: the fourth circuit element.
Memristors have similar physical behavior as synapses in the human brain. Production scale memristor memory with tens of billions of memristors should mean that memristors that mimic over one hundred billion synapses could only be a few years away. The human brain has one hundred trillion synapses. A human scale emulation of one hundred trillion synapses might only take one hundred near term memristor chips. Having comparable hardware in terms of numbers of similar components does not mean you can make them behave like a brain, but getting hardware with the right number of neurons and synapses would give researchers a reasonable chance at human brain emulation. The hardware could be ready in the 2020-2025 timeframe for neurons and synapses. more...
Merry Christmas from the Organic Design team! although it appears that activity has dropped off a lot this year, things are still developing well behind the scenes. Our organisational system has been in use for the last six months in our private work wiki, it's almost ready for the demo version to be unveiled here on our public site for people to download and install. See wiki organisation for more information.
We're now ready to use Vanadium for our form validation, but there are some restrictions due to the dual-use nature of our forms (that the same forms are used for creation, updating and searching for records).
When the form is used for searching no validation should occur because a completely empty form is legitimate for a search query, and also every field must allow regular expression characters when searching.
For this reason the ":only_on_submit" option must be used so that the Vanadium validation only occurs when the form is submitted not dynamically as fields entries are changed. E.g.
<input class=':required :only_on_submit' />
In addition to this, when the form is submitted validation should not occur if it was submitted by the Search button (having id "ra-find"). To do this a patch has been added to the OD JavaScript which is loaded by all OD wikia wiki's.
We've been having a few "Too many database connections" messages being reported so we've had the RAM upgraded from 2GB to 4GB which should hopefully fix it. Also a second 500GB disk has been added so that one can be dedicated to content and the other to backup.
The site was running SimpleSecurity 3.4.8 which was an older version that hasn't been updated since July 2007. We hadn't been able to upgrade to the most recent version because it requires at least MediaWiki version 1.12, but since we've recently upgraded the site to MediaWiki 1.14 the upgrade to the latest version of SimpleSecurity was finally possible. So today the upgrade was made and we're now running the latest version (SimpleSecurity 4.3.0 from the MediaWiki subversion repository).
One of the issues with the upgrade from SimpleSecurity 3.x to 4.x is that the older version uses the #security parser function to apply permissions settings to articles, whereas the newer 4.x versions extend the native MediaWiki protection page. So to ensure that all the articles which had been protected with the old parser function would still remain protected, the SS3Dummy extension was created to make the #security parser function act as a category link. The result of this is that all articles containing the old #security parser function are automatically categorised into Category:Private which has been made readable only by administrators using SimpleSecurity4.
The new RecentActivity extension has been created over the last couple of days. It was a quick and easy extension to create but provides very useful information about the last articles which have been edited or created in the wiki by anyone, or by a specific user. We've added the "Recent Activity" folder to our sidebar tree which you can see on the left showing the new extension in action. Logged in users can also see the articles they've personally recently edited or created. Below is a list of the last ten articles created in the wiki.
