Introduction

Recently I was asked why I was buying bitcoin, and why I thought it was a good investment. To answer this question, I prepared a 2 part series, and in this part, we’ll go over how cryptocurrencies came to be. In the second part, I’ll elaborate on why I think some of them are a good investment.

Part 1: From seeds to coins

Money: anything that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market.

To understand money, let’s go back 7000 years, to around 5000 B.C. The totality of the human population is around 40…

Node.js + IPFS Guide

Introduction

IPFS is a game-changer. In contrast to the web of today, IPFS could actually achieve a distributed, permanent web. And on top of that, it could be interplanetary, which is not possible at all with our current client-server architecture. IPFS leverages a peer-to-peer architecture, where every node is a client as well as a server. If you request something from the network, you will be serving the thing you requested to other nodes.

You can think of it as one giant BitTorrent swarm.

Besides the peer-to-peer architecture, the way we retrieve content on IPFS is revolutionary as well. Instead of…

I was recently working on a new project when I stumbled on a problem: I had to get all the transactions to a given account more or less in real-time. After looking through the Web3.js API docs as well as Stack Overflow, it was clear that there’s no well-defined way to do this, so I tried creating some programs on my own. This is what came out of it. Check out the full repo here.

Two Scripts

After a lot of trial and error, I arrived at 2 scripts, both good for different things. The first one was pretty slow, but more…

I’ve created a video in which we build a blockchain in JavaScript. I’ll probably accompany this video with a full-fledged medium article, but here it is!

Introduction to Enigma

Blockchains, in their current form, don’t handle privacy well. The data that is stored on a blockchain is available for everyone to inspect — a side-effect of radical transparency. Although this is still better than the current data model (whose problems I summed up below), some data is just not suitable to put on display.

Problems with the current model:

• No Privacy ~ theft (hacks), selling to other parties etc.
• Lost Natural Income ~ your data is a natural resource
• Sensitive Product Problem ~ some data is extremely personal
• Aggregated Power ~ large companies own basically all of our data

…

This article will be divided into two parts:

• A theoretical introduction to IPFS
• A practical guide on using IPFS

The first part aims to show you how IPFS works, while the second part will walk you through using IPFS and interacting with the already existing network. The second part assumes some technical knowledge and a *nix based system.

Also read: The Best Hardware wallet

If you’re looking for a more in-depth explanation of the technologies that make up IPFS, I’ve made a youtube video on that as well. Check it out below.

Theoretical Introduction

HTTP, or the HyperText Transfer Protocol, is…

When people talk about the blockchain, most people think of Bitcoin or Ethereum. In reality though, there are lots and lots of different blockchains. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, JPMorgan’s Quorum, IBM’s Hyperledger, are all different blockchains. Some focus on privacy, others on enterprise, yet others on scalability. A unique blockchain works differently, and tries to tackle other things. I’m going to go over some, in my opinion, unique blockchains and talk about what they do.

The blockchains described here are not solely currencies, because those are less interesting to me. They’re more like general purpose platforms, think of Ethereum. …

Machine learning is quite the rage these days. It sounds complicated and futuristic, although a lot of it is actually really simple. And I mean like high-school-math-simple. One example of this is regression. In this series I’ll go over 3 popular kinds of regression: simple linear regression, multiple regression and polynomial regression. We’ll use examples to make everything crystal clear. I’m including code snippets in Python for those of you who want to code along.

Simple Linear Regression

Imagine you meet a guy on the street and he’s a real bragging type. He’s telling you that he got this job at a law…