Git is a distributed (and soon decentralised) versioning or change tracking system, mostly used for managing software source code.

It was created 11 years ago with decentralised development in mind. Every copy of a repository contains the entire history of changes. Development can be done entirely offline and without the need to wait for slow servers. Occasionally these offline repositories need to be synchronised if working together with others. This was a giant step after centralised solutions such as CVS and Subversion.

Imagine a world where you had to wait up to 10–30 seconds to compare or to make changes…

The story and future of Iudex, winner of the Ether.Camp hackathon.

I’ve met Thomas Bertani at the Dublin Blockchain Hackathon last November, just at the right time for us to form a team for the Hack.Ether.Camp Hackathon in December. I think hackathons can become an addiction after a while :)

Hack.Ether.Camp was a great experience — a completely online hackathon where all coding was done in an online IDE anyone could inspect during or after the hack and where judges and the public could vote via an Ethereum contract. Kudos to Roman, the Iudex IDE is still available here.

We…

Have you heard about CountryOS? It is a GaaS — Government as a Service app.

Too bad it is only an April’s Fool joke by Estonia, the same country which has popularized the term e-Resident, has e-voting since a couple of years, and where Skype was founded among other successful startups. One could say they’re tech savvy.

What is an e-Resident?

Estonia has an authentication system built in their ID cards, thus residents can file taxes, register companies, vote, and open bank accounts online from their homes, without the need to sign physical papers and posting or bringing them personally…

PGP and SSL certificates. These are the names which pop in most heads who have heard the term PKI or public key infrastructure before.

For the last two decades, PKI was kind of equal to RSA. It is a brilliant, easy to understand method for public-key cryptography. Today you can also use elliptic curve cryptography for the same, which offers space savings. For the same level of security it requires smaller key sizes. On the flip side it takes a bit more effort to understand it.

This doesn’t mean RSA would be superseded. It is used more widely than ever…

There is a hidden feature in Ethereum you probably haven’t heard of.

As a short recap, there are two kinds of addresses in Ethereum:

• external accounts — accounts you can create yourself and make transactions with
• contracts — smart contracts deployed on the blockchain

Once a contract is deployed, it can receive and send the cryptofuel Ether.

Wait a second, does it need to be deployed to receive?

When you create an external account does it need to be registered somewhere? Do you need to make a transaction first in order to receive transactions? …

Are you new to Github and/or contributing to open source projects? Have you seen short messages like LGTM, ACK, NACK, etc. and wondered what they mean?

Here you go:

• LGTM — looks good to me
• ACK — acknowledgement, i.e. agreed/accepted change
• NACK/NAK —negative acknowledgement, i.e. disagree with change and/or concept
• RFC — request for comments, i.e. I think this is a good idea, lets discuss
• WIP — work in progress, do not merge yet
• AFAIK/AFAICT — as far as I know / can tell
• IIRC — if I recall correctly
• IANAL — “I am not a lawyer”, but I smell…

Hello, have you seen the recent price surge of Ethereum? Putting aside other questions, it is important to think about how to keep your precious Ether tokens secure. Especially if you are in for the long term as opposed to trading.

Well, you can create a wallet as a contract with every combination of usual and unusual rules — Ethereum is a smart contract platform, after all. It will enforce the rules how your assets can be accessed and disposed of. Your own personal treasurer.

(I think you should read this article, but if you are short on time, you…

This was originally posted on Zapchain.

After a couple of years using Bitcoin I took the time to finally jump into Ethereum and give it a try. Having spent the last month or so learning about it, I think the following should help you understand what Ethereum is all about, how it differs from Bitcoin and why you should give it a try as well.

Here are 6+2 key points you should know about:

1. It is a separate distributed blockchain and not a sidechain

The core is very similar to Bitcoin and creates the blockchain from the same or…