It could probably have been predicted that a hyper-geeky, shockingly valuable new economic system would be all it took to compress the full cycle of internet awareness into one 24-hour period.
It could probably have been predicted that a hyper-geeky, shockingly valuable new economic system would be all it took to compress the full cycle of internet awareness into one 24-hour period.
If you got online at all today — which we can assume you did, since you're reading this — you probably ran into at least a piece of what we are referring to. Thousands of people who woke up this morning having never heard of the virtual currency exchange will go to bed tonight ruminating on the Mt. Gox outage and what the long-term effect of the Instawallet hack might be.
Why today? Probably for several reasons. The near-collapse of the economy in Cyprus laid the ginned up interest in stories about currencies. A few data points along the way pushed Bitcoins up the news agenda. Last week, as we noted at the time, the Bitcoin market passed $1 billion in value. Since, more attention has been paid to the market. Earlier this week, a tool that converts Bitcoin transactions to sound, generating a sort of Very New Age concert, went viral online. One possible trigger for the sudden rush of interest today was Maria Bustillos' article on the system at The New Yorker. The story — a comprehensive look at the technology and culture of the system — spread quickly, inspiring another series of stories this morning, further explaining details of how Bitcoin works. Overnight, the price of a bitcoin spiked and then plunged, adding more interest to the system.
Step 1: What is Bitcoin?
People who'd never heard of Bitcoin before started exploring the existing literature. Bustillos' piece, for example, or, perhaps, one of our previous stories. Or through this article, passed around this morning, which analogizes Bitcoins to the giant circular stones once used as currency on the island of Yap.
In Bitcoin, instead of expending manual labour to find a kind of stone that is rare, we expend computing power to find sets of numbers that are rare. These sets of numbers have a particular mathematical property that makes them difficult to find but once you have found them it is easy to check that they have that property, just as the Islanders could easily check that your disk was made from the rare limestone from Palau. Once you (or rather, your computer) has found one of these numbers then it is yours and you can keep it or trade it.
It could probably have been predicted that a hyper-geeky, shockingly valuable new economic system would be all it took to compress the full cycle of internet awareness into one 24-hour period.
If you got online at all today — which we can assume you did, since you're reading this — you probably ran into at least a piece of what we are referring to. Thousands of people who woke up this morning having never heard of the virtual currency exchange will go to bed tonight ruminating on the Mt. Gox outage and what the long-term effect of the Instawallet hack might be.
Why today? Probably for several reasons. The near-collapse of the economy in Cyprus laid the ginned up interest in stories about currencies. A few data points along the way pushed Bitcoins up the news agenda. Last week, as we noted at the time, the Bitcoin market passed $1 billion in value. Since, more attention has been paid to the market. Earlier this week, a tool that converts Bitcoin transactions to sound, generating a sort of Very New Age concert, went viral online. One possible trigger for the sudden rush of interest today was Maria Bustillos' article on the system at The New Yorker. The story — a comprehensive look at the technology and culture of the system — spread quickly, inspiring another series of stories this morning, further explaining details of how Bitcoin works. Overnight, the price of a bitcoin spiked and then plunged, adding more interest to the system.
Step 1: What is Bitcoin?
People who'd never heard of Bitcoin before started exploring the existing literature. Bustillos' piece, for example, or, perhaps, one of our previous stories. Or through this article, passed around this morning, which analogizes Bitcoins to the giant circular stones once used as currency on the island of Yap.
In Bitcoin, instead of expending manual labour to find a kind of stone that is rare, we expend computing power to find sets of numbers that are rare. These sets of numbers have a particular mathematical property that makes them difficult to find but once you have found them it is easy to check that they have that property, just as the Islanders could easily check that your disk was made from the rare limestone from Palau. Once you (or rather, your computer) has found one of these numbers then it is yours and you can keep it or trade it.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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