Bitcoin Pumped and the Bitcoin Family Settled in Portugal
Kenneth Rapoza asks, “Is Bitcoin becoming just another tech stock?” Whether it is or isn’t, Senator Ted Cruz recently bought the dip. On top of that, MicroStrategy made a huge splash as whales are wont to do and CoinDesk explains the corporate argument for bitcoin. Meanwhile, the city of Miami earned a whopping $5.25 million mining bitcoin. Rich Dad, Poor Dad author says bitcoin is the way to “financial paradise.” And the whole world is excited about bitcoin’s recent $200 billion gain in just one weekend.
The “Bitcoin Family” has settled down in Portugal to take advantage of 0 percent taxation on cryptocurrencies.
What do you get when you cross one of the world’s most popular pop culture magazines with the world’s largest crypto exchange? An exclusive collection of NFT artwork. Thanks to a Coinbase-Rolling Stone Magazine partnership, 12 digital artists will soon be catapulted to stardom.
How the Helium network turned a non-crypto business into a useful crypto enterprise. (An excellent read)
An NFT loophole allowed OpenSea customers to buy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs at a discount. Woops!
One year ago, Nigeria banned cryptocurrencies. Since then, Bitcoin P2P trading has increased 16 percent. Aren’t bans just incredible?
Meet the top 110 altcoins.
How the U.S. is considering a radical restructuring of the dollar in the growing digital ecosystem. (An NPR must-read)
The short life and quick death of Facebook’s Diem.
Why cryptocurrencies should be private by default.
There was a bug discovered in the land on The Sandbox. Find out what they did to fix it.
Why the metaverse will be on a blockchain.
The Internet’s Communications Protocols
Just like humans, for computers to communicate with each other, they need to understand the same language. The language of computers on a network is called a protocol. The modern internet runs on three primary networking protocols—TCP/IP, FTP, and SMTP.
TCP/IP was created in the 1970s by two men associated with DARPA. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn met at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Initially, they created the Transmission Control Program (TCP) based on the packet switching network of CYCLADES, a French alternative to the ARPANET.
The IP (internet protocol) part of TCP/IP developed separately, but Cerf and Kahn combined them in 1975 to facilitate the connection of almost any computer in the world to the ARPANET. Their work together combined the technology of packet switching, the file sharing process that today’s routers use to deliver information from one computer to another over the internet, and TCP/IP technology. By combining these two developments, they essentially created the underlying foundation for the internet.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was created in 1971 by a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
FTP is significant because it is the file transfer format used to send data files between a client and a server on a computer network. It’s the format used by website developers and web designers when they create a website and publish it to the World Wide Web. In internet technology, the client is the individual computer that accesses information on a server. The server is the computer or program that provides functionality for the client to use while accessing the internet.
Before TCP/IP, there was another networking protocol called Network Control Program (NCP), which facilitated the ARPANET. Initially, FTP ran on NCP. In 1980, that changed and FTP started running on TCP/IP. This was a necessary development for the future World Wide Web in order for users on the network to create and publish websites.
If you’ve used email, then you’re familiar with SMTP, which stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
SMTP was first developed in 1982. Several key people were significant to the mail transfer protocol coming to fruition. It was necessary because sending electronic mail over the ARPANET prior to SMTP was somewhat clunky. What made SMTP significant was that mail could be delivered from one computer to another over the worldwide network while both computers were connected to the network at the same time. Prior to SMTP, the delivery of electronic mail was more efficient when both computers were not connected to the network at the same time.
There are other email network protocols that are used today, but SMTP is the most efficient for sending and receiving email when the sender and receiver are both connected to the World Wide Web at the same time.
By 1985, the Domain Name System (DNS) and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) system we use today had been created. The DNS is like a phone book for the computers connected to the internet. It translates human-created computer host names into IP addresses so that computers on the network can identify each other more efficiently. Unfortunately, DNS names are difficult for humans to memorize, so the URL system translate IP addresses into web addresses within web browsers to make the internet easier for people to use. With these two developments, the internet was primed to make its transition into the commercial behemoth we now know as the World Wide Web.
An excerpt from my forthcoming book Cryptosocial: How Cryptocurrencies Are Changing Social Media from Business Expert Press in March 2022. Join my book launch team!
First published at Cryptocracy. Not financial advice.
Image credit: CNBC
