Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

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If you are looking for a good history of Bitcoin, the various other cryptocurrencies that have been attempted and either failed or still hang on, and Blockchain I would say this is a great start. These two sites produced some of the first mainstream press covering Bitcoin for a general (but still reasonably tech-savvy) audience.

Not only is this comprised of various plagerized reworded content (imo), but I also believe there is a hidden agenda being pushed deep inside this manifesto. An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. Gerard's tales of vapidity, cupidity, and stupidity will have you facepalming your whole way through. The tales of how hard it is to actually spend bitcoin are interesting, and I was fascinating by the story of how when the Mozilla Foundation trialed putting a "donate in bitcoin" button their donations page, their total donations actually went down, so little do people trust bitcoin.Check out the book's page on Gerard's site for more info and easy links to purchase it in the format of your choice. And, yes, we as cryptocurrency fans perhaps need to tone down the fanaticism at times and admit that blockchain technology is not the second coming of Jesus. That being said, I agree with the sentiment that for most of the projects nowadays the blockchain isn’t even needed, and would arguably work better in a centralized way. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Gerard's style is that of an acerbic blogger (which he is- I heard of this book through his blog), and it sometimes hurts the writing- he's a bit hampered by the style and the low pagecount when trying to explain, say, the technical details of proof of work, or the massive variety of bitcoin exchange scams.

Using a variety of examples from all types of industries the case is made that while blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may have some use in the future, the uses that it is currently being promoted for are far from achieving what is promised and probably never will. Even though the book gave me new insights and informed me about some of the history of Bitcoin, it is drained in sarcasm (did make me lol at times).Hands down the worst piece of garbage I’ve had the utter displeasure of wasting my valuable time with. The book was published too early to document the most recent Bitcoin crash, or the ongoing IBM blockchain hype, or the bizarre spectacle of Kodakcoin. I don't know if it would win over an adherent, but it seems pretty obvious to me that bitcoin can just not be what its proponents promise or hope for. In this article, we will discuss what problems we had to solve at Twilio to efficiently build a resilient and scalable asynchronous system to handle a complex workflow and the advantages we got from adopting a Workflow Orchestration solution, including abstracting away state management and out-of-the-box support for retries, observability, and audibility.

Gerard is delightfully sarcastic in his treatment of the strange ideologues of the Bitcoin world, and provides a brief account of their roots in American Libertarianism, Austrian economics and gold standard fetishism. I was shocked to learn how bad the exchanges actually are, in terms of product quality and discipline. com; he quickly wrote some exchange software in PHP and reused the name because his girlfriend liked it. Bitcoin’s cryptography is solid, but it’s a bit like putting a six inch thick steel vault door in a cardboard frame. The book for that is The Politics of Bitcoin/i> by David Golumbia, a short but comprehensive monograph on the political origins of the ideas behind bitcoin.He [= McCaleb] had run the “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange” for a few months in 2007, using the domain name mtgox. But for all the strangeness of his subject matter, Gerard remains resolutely committed to the common sense aesthetic, and it’s one the world of blockchain sorely needs. It offers many cautionary tales for would-be investors, and it's laugh-out-loud funny in places too. Some of those people have become rich, without really having created any social value, and even more people have become even more rich through countless thefts and scams. The book takes a straightforwardly skeptical angle, and is explicitly intended as a non-technical overview.

The coverage of these sites and their collapse is somewhat brief given their importance in bringing Bitcoin into the wider consciousness of the public. The book covers fifteen years of cryptocurrency, from the cypherpunks to the Satoshi whitepaper to the rapidly deflating bubble. Gerard’s coverage of the technical basics is succinct and clear, but as the introduction suggests, the book’s real appeal is its Case Studies. Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain is a breezy and occasionally laugh-out-loud tour from the Bitcoin's beginnings up until mid-2017.

Replacing trusted central authorities with a hash-cracking consensus algorithm leads to excessive energy consumption, low transactions throughput, unpredictable transaction processing time and high fees. It’s an idiosyncratic journalistic beat, just as Attack winds up a fairly idiosyncratic book (the final chapter, ‘Case Study: Why you can’t put the music industry on a blockchain’ feels like it’s largely there based on the author’s wider interests, though it does have a spectacular Imogen Heap anecdote). What the author sets out to do is give the history of blockchain technology in a way that a layman can understand in and then show that many of the promises made by the promoters of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are mostly empty.