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To fully understand how Bitcoin operates, one would need to learn the subtleties of public-key cryptography.

In the real world, when people want to buy something using Bitcoin, they transfer their ownership of a certain number of bitcoins to other people, in exchange for goods and services.

This transfer is effected by the network of computers performing computations and thereby changing the “public key” to which the “sold” bitcoins are assigned.

The encryption involved in Bitcoin concerns the identification of the legitimate owner of a particular bitcoin.

Without delving into the mathematics, suffice it to say: There is a way that the legitimate owner of a bitcoin can publicly demonstrate to the computers in the network that he or she really is the owner of that bitcoin.

Only someone with the possession of the “private key” will be able to produce a valid “signature” that convinces the computers in the network to update the public ledger to reflect the transfer of the bitcoin to another party.

When Bitcoin was first implemented in early 2009, computers in the network—dubbed “miners”—received 50 new bitcoins when performing the computations necessary to add a “block” of transactions to the public ledger.

In principle, the developers of Bitcoin could have released all 21 million units of the currency immediately with the software.

With the current arrangement—where the “mining” operations needed to keep the system running simultaneously yield new bitcoins to the machines performing the calculations—there is an incentive for owners to devote their machines’ processing power to the network.

Here, the danger is that the issuing institution—once it had gotten the world to accept its notes or electronic deposits as money—would face an irresistible temptation to issue massive quantities.6

Bitcoin has no such vulnerability. No external technological or physical event could cause Bitcoin inflation, and since no one is in charge of Bitcoin, there is no one tempted to inflate “from within.”

Some critics argue that Bitcoin’s fixed quantity would imply constant price deflation. Although this is true, everyone will have seen this coming with more than a century’s notice, and so long-term contracts would have been designed accordingly.

Whether to call Bitcoin a “fiat” currency depends on the definition. If “fiat” means a currency that is not legally redeemable in some other commodity, then yes, Bitcoin is a fiat currency. But if “fiat” means a currency relying on government fiat to define what will count as legal money, then Bitcoin is not.

Bitcoin is an ingenious concept that challenges the way economists have traditionally thought about money. Its inbuilt scarcity provides an assurance of purchasing power arguably safer than any other system yet conceived.

We need to let the decentralized market test tell us what is the best money, or monies.

They can then be used as payment, with every transaction being recorded in a public list known as blockchain.

"The plan would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive whilst adhering to all safety and environmental standards,

they refused the offer and won't even have a face to face discussion with me on the matter."

Howells first discovered that the hard drive was missing when his bitcoin was worth around $9 million. Based on the current rates, he estimates it would be worth around $273 million.

"The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds -- without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order."

In this way, blockchain resembles another buzzword, “the cloud.” While detractors argued that the cloud was just “someone else’s computer,”

41% of those who said to have fair to expert levels of cryptocurrency knowledge said they were very likely to purchase BTC in the next 12 months, compared with just 7.9% of those with limited to no knowledge of the topic.

the need for regulation to maintain the reliability of essential aspects of the economy like electricity supply and the monetary system.

Which is why I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’s dystopian state of nature

why Republicans have become fanatics about cryptocurrency, to the extent that one Senate candidate has defined his position as being “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin.” The answer, I’d argue, is that Bitcoin plays into a fantasy of self-sufficient individualism, of protecting your family with your personal AR-15, treating your Covid with an anti-parasite drug or urine and managing your financial affairs with privately created money, untainted by institutions like governments or banks.

In the end, none of this will work. Government exists for a reason. But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making all of our lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.

he money has been recovered by the department's recently launched Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force.

"The sophisticated use of technology to hold businesses and even whole cities hostage for profit is decidedly a 21st century challenge

"The threat of severe ransomware attacks pose a clear and present danger to your organization, to your company, to your customer, to your shareholders and to your long-term success."

We have become what the privacy theorist Daniel Solove calls “digital persons.” As such we are subject to infopolitics (or what the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou calls “datapower,” the political theorist Davide Panagia “datapolitik” and the pioneering thinker Donna Haraway “informatics of domination”).

Once fingerprints, biometrics, birth certificates and standardized names were operational, it became possible to implement an international passport system, a social security number and all other manner of paperwork that tells us who someone is. When all that paper ultimately went digital, the reams of data about us became radically more assessable and subject to manipulation,

We like to think of ourselves as somehow apart from all this information. We are real — the information is merely about us.

But what is it that is real? What would be left of you if someone took away all your numbers, cards, accounts, dossiers and other informational prostheses? Information is not just about you — it also constitutes who you are.

We understandably do not want to see ourselves as bits and bytes. But unless we begin conceptualizing ourselves in this way, we leave it to others to do it for us

agencies and corporations will continue producing new visions of you and me, and they will do so without our input if we remain stubbornly attached to antiquated conceptions of selfhood that keep us from admitting how informational we already are.

What should we do about our Internet and phone patterns’ being fastidiously harvested and stored away in remote databanks where they await inspection by future algorithms developed at the National Security Agency, Facebook, credit reporting firms like Experian and other new institutions of information and control that will come into existence in future decades?

What bits of the informational you will fall under scrutiny? The political you? The sexual you? What next-generation McCarthyisms await your informational self? And will those excesses of oversight be found in some Senate subcommittee against which we democratic citizens might hope to rise up in revolt — or will they lurk among algorithmic automatons that silently seal our fates in digital filing systems?

Despite their decidedly different political sensibilities, what links together the likes of Senator Wyden and the international hacker network known as Anonymous is that they respect the severity of what is at stake in our information.

information is a site for the call of justice today, alongside more quintessential battlefields like liberty of thought and equality of opportunity.

we lack the intellectual framework to grasp the new kinds of political injustices characteristic of today’s information society.

though nearly all of us have a vague sense that something is wrong with the new regimes of data surveillance, it is difficult for us to specify exactly what is happening and why it raises serious concern

At present even those leading the charge against the surveillance state continue to treat the issue as if it were a political scandal that can be blamed on the corrupt policies of a few bad men who must be held accountable. It is widely hoped that all our societies need to do to fix our problems is to pass a few laws.

The cancer is much deeper than this. We live not only in a surveillance state, but in a surveillance society. Totalitarian surveillance is not only embodied in our governments; it is embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions.

The very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored.

Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook

At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to advertisers and others. This similarity made them natural partners for the NSA

there is an undeniable “tyrannical” side to the Internet. But the Internet is too complex to be unequivocally categorized as a “tyrannical” or a “democratic” phenomenon.

It is possible for more people to communicate and trade with others in more places in a single instant than it ever has been in history. The same developments that make our civilization easier to surveil make it harder to predict. They have made it easier for the larger part of humanity to educate itself, to race to consensus, and to compete with entrenched power groups.

If there is a modern analogue to Orwell’s “simple” and “democratic weapon,” which “gives claws to the weak” it is cryptography, the basis for the mathematics behind Bitcoin and the best secure communications programs. It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower. The same technologies that allowed the Allies to encrypt their radio communications against Axis intercepts can now be downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection and deployed with a cheap laptop.

It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the “tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out. But acknowledging them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle — is the first step toward acting effectively

Humanity cannot now reject the Internet, but clearly we cannot surrender it either. Instead, we have to fight for it. Just as the dawn of atomic weapons inaugurated the Cold War, the manifold logic of the Internet is the key to understanding the approaching war for the intellectual center of our civilization

People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012

After the Journal this week provided examples of how the site still promotes deceptive and divisive videos, YouTube executives said the recommendations were a problem.

When users show a political bias in what they choose to view, YouTube typically recommends videos that echo those biases, often with more-extreme viewpoints.

Such recommendations play into concerns about how social-media sites can amplify extremist voices, sow misinformation and isolate users in “filter bubbles”

Unlike Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. sites, where users see content from accounts they choose to follow, YouTube takes an active role in pushing information to users they likely wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

“The editorial policy of these new platforms is to essentially not have one,”

“That sounded great when it was all about free speech and ‘in the marketplace of ideas, only the best ones win.’ But we’re seeing again and again that that’s not what happens. What’s happening instead is the systems are being gamed and people are being gamed.”

YouTube has been tweaking its algorithm since last autumn to surface what its executives call “more authoritative” news source

YouTube last week said it is considering a design change to promote relevant information from credible news sources alongside videos that push conspiracy theories.

The Journal investigation found YouTube’s recommendations often lead users to channels that feature conspiracy theories, partisan viewpoints and misleading videos, even when those users haven’t shown interest in such content.

YouTube engineered its algorithm several years ago to make the site “sticky”—to recommend videos that keep users staying to watch still more, said current and former YouTube engineers who helped build it. The site earns money selling ads that run before and during videos.

YouTube’s algorithm tweaks don’t appear to have changed how YouTube recommends videos on its home page. On the home page, the algorithm provides a personalized feed for each logged-in user largely based on what the user has watched.

There is another way to calculate recommendations, demonstrated by YouTube’s parent, Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It has designed its search-engine algorithms to recommend sources that are authoritative, not just popular.

Google spokeswoman Crystal Dahlen said that Google improved its algorithm last year “to surface more authoritative content, to help prevent the spread of blatantly misleading, low-quality, offensive or downright false information,” adding that it is “working with the YouTube team to help share learnings.”

In recent weeks, it has expanded that change to other news-related queries. Since then, the Journal’s tests show, news searches in YouTube return fewer videos from highly partisan channels.

YouTube’s recommendations became even more effective at keeping people on the site in 2016, when the company began employing an artificial-intelligence technique called a deep neural network that makes connections between videos that humans wouldn’t. The algorithm uses hundreds of signals, YouTube says, but the most important remains what a given user has watched.

Using a deep neural network makes the recommendations more of a black box to engineers than previous techniques,

“We don’t have to think as much,” he said. “We’ll just give it some raw data and let it figure it out.”

To better understand the algorithm, the Journal enlisted former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who worked on its recommendation engine, to analyze thousands of YouTube’s recommendations on the most popular news-related queries

Mr. Chaslot created a computer program that simulates the “rabbit hole” users often descend into when surfing the site. In the Journal study, the program collected the top five results to a given search. Next, it gathered the top three recommendations that YouTube promoted once the program clicked on each of those results. Then it gathered the top three recommendations for each of those promoted videos, continuing four clicks from the original search.

The first analysis, of November’s top search terms, showed YouTube frequently led users to divisive and misleading videos. On the 21 news-related searches left after eliminating queries about entertainment, sports and gaming—such as “Trump,” “North Korea” and “bitcoin”—YouTube most frequently recommended these videos:

The algorithm doesn’t seek out extreme videos, they said, but looks for clips that data show are already drawing high traffic and keeping people on the site. Those videos often tend to be sensationalist and on the extreme fringe, the engineers said.

Repeated tests by the Journal as recently as this week showed the home page often fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC.

Searching some topics and then returning to the home page without doing a new search can produce recommendations that push users toward conspiracy theories even if they seek out just mainstream sources.

After searching for “9/11” last month, then clicking on a single CNN clip about the attacks, and then returning to the home page, the fifth and sixth recommended videos were about claims the U.S. government carried out the attacks. One, titled “Footage Shows Military Plane hitting WTC Tower on 9/11—13 Witnesses React”—had 5.3 million views.

The tech leaders question claims by crypto evangelists that “crypto-assets are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good” and instead urge lawmakers to “take a critical, skeptical approach” toward crypto.

digital token bitcoin taking up a $562 billion chunk alone.

The signatories write that “not all innovation is unqualifiedly good” and say that “the history of technology is full of dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns.”