Bitcoin loses a quarter of its value in one day's trading | Technology | The Guardian

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In this chapter we learn, in detail, the secrets behind the mysterious Originally called 21e6, the company grew in secrecy to become one of the highest capitalized bitcoin ventures in the world.

For much of the past two years, the Bitcoin company with the most money and high profile backers was one that almost no one knew existed. Founded by the Stanford wunderkind, Balaji Srinivasan and four 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm, 21e6 proceeded to roll out thousands of computers that were built to do nothing but generate new Bitcoins — an energy intensive computational process referred to as mining. The machines were loaded 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm custom-designed chips that had names like Yoda and Gandalf, and were submerged in a mineral oil solution that dispersed the incredible heat generated by the mining process.

The company ended up running up against the difficulty of 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm money in the cut-throat business of Bitcoin mining, which became much more difficult as the price of Bitcoin dropped over the last year. This year, the company has renamed itself 21 Inc. While the company has remained tight lipped about its intentions, it is shifting away from mining Bitcoins for itself and focusing more on distributing mining hardware to consumers with the aim of supporting broader adoption of the technology.

The startup began to form in earlynot long after Srinivasan had stepped away from the genetics startup, Counsyl, which he had founded in his Stanford dorm room and turned him into a local star. Srinivasan had been 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm Bitcoin for some time, but with more time on his hands he began talking about how to create a company with Matt Pauker, a cryptographer who did a guest lecture in an engineering course that Srinivasan was teaching at Stanford.

They quickly saw the opportunity in Bitcoin mining. From the time Bitcoin was released in earlycomputers trying to generate Bitcoins took part in a kind of computational lottery. The faster a computer could run numbers through a complex equation, known as a hash function, the more chances it had to win the lottery, and with it, a bundle of new Bitcoins. By the end ofBitcoin enthusiasts at home had already found faster and faster ways to do the computations and win more Bitcoins with their existing computer hardware, generally using GPU computer chips made for processing graphics.

A few particularly ambitious engineers set out to build so-called ASIC computer chips that could be even more efficient — and designed specifically for Bitcoin mining. In early the first of these were deployed. Together, the joint computing power of all the machines connected to the Bitcoin network was equivalent to several super computers. It was these computers that were, in essence, securing the network.

But the people creating these early ASIC chips were relative amateurs, and 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm thought he could do much better by harnessing some of the top minds in Silicon Valley. In addition to Pauker, he brought 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm as co-founders the experienced engineers Nigel Drego, who trained at M.

They took their corporate name from the number of Bitcoins that will ultimately be created: At that point, in spring ofSrinivasan also began selling the company to the elite investors 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm Silicon Valley, who were still generally skeptical of Bitcoin.

No venture capital firms had made any significant public investments in the virtual currency technology. But Srinivasan had the benefit of a rising Bitcoin price to help his pitch. From the beginning, 21e6 was sold as a top secret project, allowing people to invest without needing to come out as public supporters of Bitcoin. The company was also structured as an limited liability company, rather than the C Corp typical of startups, so that people could invest with their own money.

For Srinivasan, part of the goal in approaching individual investors 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm to sell tech leaders on Bitcoin, and get them personally invested in the technology — and he would later say that it worked.

It was five months after its series A that the company plugged in its first machines and started mining Bitcoins, and the company soon commanded 3 to 4 percent of all of the mining power worldwide, they told investors. At the normal rate of mining, that would have yielded about Bitcoins a day.

Andreessen Horowitz was also recruiting Srinivasan to join as a partner, which he did at almost the same time as the 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm. In earlya growing army of 21e6 machines was rolled out, first filling up 24 racks in a data center, and then racks — soon in centers that were dedicated to the mission. The company also spent lots of time figuring out a way to submerge the machines in mineral oil, as a way to cool them and cut down on the cost of air conditioning and fans.

After the collapse of the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, the price had fallen to half that. Many ambitious companies like Hashfast 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm Cointerra, which were started by high level engineers, neared bankruptcy. One data center could hold nearly 10, machines with these chips.

But the epicenter of mining was increasingly moving toward China, where the chips were nearly free and the cost of electricity — often 21 bitcoin crunchbase openxm most expensive cost for Bitcoin miners — could be close to zero if the miner was close with a local authority of someone at a power plant.

Nowadays, most mining experts assume that over half of all Bitcoins are mined in China.

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A longstanding battle over the standards to be used in office software suites for document formats intersected last week with the debate over conflicts of interest among Wikipedia editors, producing quite a furor, the incident involved someone being hired by Microsoft to change the information in Wikipedia articles about those standards, primarily Ecma Office Open XML. Office Open XML or OOXML , a standard adopted by Ecma International last December, is one of two specifications trying to establish itself for electronic documents, the other being OpenDocument or ODF , this has been in the context of an often bitter and public debate between Microsoft and open source advocates, which played a role in the controversial departure of a former CIO for the state of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn.

On this occasion, Doug Mahugh , an Open XML Technical Evangelist for the company, became concerned about the Wikipedia articles in question and offered to pay someone to fix them, the offer was openly acknowledged by the person who received it, Rick Jelliffe , in a blog post titled, " An interesting offer: His biography on the O'Reilly website describes him as a standards activist, making him someone whose established credentials and relative independence would serve Microsoft's purposes, he and Mahugh both indicated that Microsoft did not seek any kind of editorial control over Jelliffe's efforts.

The revelation exploded into a media frenzy about the possibility of paid editing activity on Wikipedia. Perspectives on the incident ranged widely, some taking it as confirmation that Wikipedia policies are inadequate to deal with disputed issues, others seeing it as Microsoft living down to its reputation for heavyhanded and counterproductive public relations.

Responses from the Wikipedia side in the press were generally negative about Microsoft's approach. Jimmy Wales said that he was "very disappointed" and reiterated his concerns about paid editing see archived stories. David Gerard and Mathias Schindler also corresponded with Mahugh and Jelliffe, encouraging further dialogue to improve the articles.

Various press reports included several clarifications from Microsoft, the company indicated that it had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to get the Wikipedia articles fixed; that it perceived the problem as being partly driven by corporate competitors such as IBM ; and it added that no payment had yet changed hands. On the first point, it was subsequently determined that Mahugh had made a single edit to the talk page in August , then one more after hiring Jelliffe.

Jelliffe, editing under his own name , has been more active as a Wikipedia editor, since disclosing the Microsoft offer, he has primarily been active on talk pages related to the standards in question, although he has directly edited Open standard and Standardization. On account of the publicity surrounding the incident, the articles on the standards have been quite heavily edited recently to address some of the points raised. Prior to registering an account, Jelliffe also created the Wikipedia article about himself back in November While he did not know at the time that Wikipedia policy discourages such efforts, Jelliffe has since become more familiar with such details and posted an analysis of how the conflict of interest policy applies to his situation, he focused on the question of whether it was appropriate for him to "edit material relating to Microsoft".

Regarding his assignment, Jelliffe concluded "there is no conflict of interest created by me accepting an editing job from Microsoft to neutrally edit articles that are not about Microsoft, and not about their products, but about technical aspects of an Ecma standard that is before ISO. This drew a response from Tim Bray , an executive with Sun Microsystems and thus on the opposite side of the document standards debate, but also a "personal friend" of Jelliffe.

Bray expressed his opinion that Jelliffe was "deeply wrong" about this issue, although he felt Jelliffe would be an evenhanded editor. Bray argued that the draft was a Microsoft creation and would never have become a standard without the company's efforts.

The incident produced some spinoff effects in addition to the main points of debate, after reading the TechCrunch summary , Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo decided to conduct an "experiment" by making one-sided edits to the TechCrunch article. TechCrunch owner Michael Arrington took umbrage at this, calling it vandalism and saying he lost a great deal of respect for Microsoft after defending them originally.

Outside the immediate orbit of affected parties, real vandalism was promoted by one of the usual suspects.

Vandalism ensued, with pages relating to "reality", "commodity", Colbert, and others quickly protected. A similar incident occurred in late July and early August see archived story. A week later it was founded that the aircraft has crashed into the Makassar Strait, january 8 — Russian oil supplies to Poland, Germany, and Ukraine are cut as the Russia—Belarus energy dispute escalates, they are restored three days later.

February 2 The IPCC publishes its fourth assessment report, having concluded that climate change is very likely to have a predominantly human cause. February 3 — A truck bomb explodes in Baghdad, Iraq, killing at least people, february 26 — The International Court of Justice finds Serbia guilty of failing to prevent genocide in the Srebrenica massacre, but clears it of direct responsibility and complicity in the case.

April 3 — French high speed train, the TGV, reaches a top speed of April 18 — A series of attacks take place across Baghdad, Iraq, April 24 — Gliese c, a potentially Earth-like extrasolar planet habitable for life, is discovered in the constellation Libra. July 24 — Five Bulgarian nurses were released from Libyan prison after eight, august 4 — The Phoenix spacecraft is launched toward Mars to study its north pole. August 14 — Multiple suicide bombings kill people in Qahtaniya, august 15 — An 8.

November 6 — A suicide bomber kills at least 50 people in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, november 14 — High Speed 1 from London to the Channel Tunnel is opened to passengers. Microsoft — Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of , it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies.

The companys initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills.

In they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,, with Gates as the CEO.

Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a Fortune magazine article. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in , as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. In , a new format for Microsoft Word followed. The same InfoWorld article reported that IBM threatened to leave standards bodies that it said allow dominant corporations like Microsoft to wield undue influence, richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has stated that Microsoft offers a gratis patent license for OOXML on terms which do not allow free implementations.

Microsoft, the contributor to the standard, provided a covenant not to sue for its patent licensing. The covenant received a reception, with some like the Groklaw blog criticizing it. Later versions of the ECMA standard are aligned and technically equivalent to the corresponding ISO standard, Part 4 is to be read as a modification to Part 1, which it requires. It acquired its current name in , when the European Computer Manufacturers Association changed its name to reflect the global reach.

As a consequence, the name is no longer considered an acronym, the organization was founded in to standardize computer systems in Europe. Ecma publications, including standards, can be copied by all interested parties without copyright restrictions. The development of standards and technical reports is done in co-operation with the national, European. Unlike national standardization bodies, Ecma is a membership-based organization and it takes pride in the resulting business-like approach to standards, claimed to lead to better standards in less time, thanks to a less bureaucratic process focused on achieving results by consensus.

The memberlist of Ecma International is available on its website, thus, Ecma is not responsible for the standardization of Java.

Open-source model — Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. In the early days of computing, programmers and developers shared software in order to learn from each other, eventually the open source notion moved to the way side of commercialization of software in the years Netscapes act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the Free Software Foundations free software ideas, the new term they chose was open source, which was soon adopted by Bruce Perens, publisher Tim OReilly, Linus Torvalds, and others.

The Open Source Initiative was founded in February to encourage use of the new term, a Microsoft executive publicly stated in that open source is an intellectual property destroyer. I cant imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business, IBM, Oracle, Google and State Farm are just a few of the companies with a serious public stake in todays competitive open-source market.

There has been a significant shift in the corporate philosophy concerning the development of FOSS, the free software movement was launched in In , a group of individuals advocated that the free software should be replaced by open-source software as an expression which is less ambiguous.

Software developers may want to publish their software with an open-source license, the Open Source Definition, notably, presents an open-source philosophy, and further defines the terms of usage, modification and redistribution of open-source software.

Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be reserved by law to the copyright holder. Several open-source software licenses have qualified within the boundaries of the Open Source Definition, the open source label came out of a strategy session held on April 7, in Palo Alto in reaction to Netscapes January announcement of a source code release for Navigator.

They used the opportunity before the release of Navigators source code to clarify a potential confusion caused by the ambiguity of the free in English. Many people claimed that the birth of the Internet, since , started the open source movement, the Free Software Foundation, started in , intended the word free to mean freedom to distribute and not freedom from cost.

Since a great deal of free software already was free of charge, such software became associated with zero cost. The Open Source Initiative was formed in February by Eric Raymond and they sought to bring a higher profile to the practical benefits of freely available source code, and they wanted to bring major software businesses and other high-tech industries into open source.

Perens attempted to open source as a service mark for the OSI. The Open Source Initiatives definition is recognized by governments internationally as the standard or de facto definition, OSI uses The Open Source Definition to determine whether it considers a software license open source.

Rick Jelliffe — Richard Alan Jelliffe is an Australian programmer and standards activist, particularly associated with web standards, markup languages, internationalization and schema languages. Ltd and he has a degree in economics from the University of Sydney. Jelliffe is the inventor of the Schematron schema language, its idea of using XPath to state constraints has been widely adopted and adapted. Jelliffe commented on the offer in his blog and this led to press coverage.

The main feature of TopologiLinux is that it not require any partitioning. It is based on Slackware and Cooperative Linux, TopologiLinux has been chosen as one of nine open-source projects used as principal examples in a study of the characteristics of open-source software. TopologiLinux cannot be set up through DOS, the user may boot the system through coLinux on Windows or directly on the computer by booting with the TopologiLinux disc.

Wubi andLinux, a Ubuntu-based coLinux distribution Paravirtualization Comparison of platform virtualization software Gacek, Cristina, Arief, the many meanings of open source. He is the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia, Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, where he attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school. Later, he earned bachelors and masters degrees in Finance from Auburn University, in , he and two partners founded Bomis, an adult web portal featuring entertainment and adult content.

The company would provide the funding for the peer-reviewed free encyclopedia, Nupedia. He is historically cited as a co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the co- designation, Wales serves on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the non-profit charitable organization that he helped establish to operate Wikipedia, holding its board-appointed community founder seat.

In , he co-founded Wikia, a wiki hosting service. His role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the worlds largest encyclopedia, Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before midnight on August 7,, however, his birth certificate lists his date of birth as the 8th. As a child, Wales was a reader with an acute intellectual curiosity.

When he was three, his mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman, as he grew up and learned to read, it became an object of reverence. But Wales soon discovered that the World Book had shortcomings, no matter how much was in it, there were only four other children in Waless grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth-grade students and the fifth through eighth-grade students.

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a school in Huntsville. Wales said that the school was expensive for his family, and you know, the very traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life. He received his bachelors degree in finance from Auburn University in and he began his Auburn education when he was 16 years old.

Wales then entered the PhD finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a degree to enter the PhD finance program at Indiana University. At the University of Alabama, he played Internet fantasy games and he taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD, something he ascribed to boredom.

In , Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, Wales has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and he wrote computer code during his leisure time. In , he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, Wales described it as a guy-oriented search engine with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine, the Bomis venture did not ultimately turn out to be successful.

Though Bomis had struggled to make money, it provided Wales with the funding to pursue his greater passion, while moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early s, Wales had encountered Larry Sanger, a skeptic of the philosophy. The company originated in as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed International Business Machines in , IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.

IBM is also a research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 24 consecutive years. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and focusing on higher-value, also in , IBM announced that it would go fabless, continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries.

They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. By most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, in , IBMs tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process unprecedented amounts of data, its clients including the U.

In , he stepped down after almost 40 years at the company helm, in , the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed.