The most common cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is based on a form of blockchain technology. But there are other forms of blockchain out there, too. One of them is called Tangle Technology.
Tangle is a new way to update the public ledger that keeps track of all the transactions that have ever happened in a cryptocurrency or blockchain—the so-called block chain. In Bitcoin, every ten minutes or so, the computers that run the computers running the block chain make a calculation and update what’s on the block chain. In Tangle, you don’t need to wait until ten minutes later for the computers to do that; you can initiate the update at any time. And you can update many times faster than one block every ten minutes.
Or put another way: Tangle doesn’t use blocks or chains at all; it uses something called “directed acyclic graphs,” or DAGs for short. These are like networks with no central control points, which means they’re potentially much more efficient than traditional block chains in terms of energy consumption and communication latency (which is how long it takes to send one message).
The popular term “blockchain” is a very loose way of referring to the distributed ledgers that are used in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It’s worth remembering that there are many different blockchains, each with their own purpose.
The bitcoin blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto and is the most famous. There are two other blockchains that are quite similar to bitcoin: Ethereum and EOS. They were both created by people who saw the potential of blockchain but wanted to build on it in new ways. That’s why they call it “Ethereum 2.0” or “EOS 2.0.”
All these blockchains have something in common, though: DAGs (directed acyclic graphs). In a DAG you can represent anything as a list of points connected by directed edges; these points (called nodes) could represent anything and the edges could represent anything from simple links between nodes to complex transactions.
In some of these DAGs, the transactions have no particular direction; you can get from one node to another in any order. In others, the transactions are directed only toward certain nodes; you can’t go out of your way to get somewhere else. This allows for more complex transactions than if all transactions had to be strictly one
Bitcoin is built on a technology called “blockchain.” It’s a way of recording transactions so that they can’t be changed by anyone. The blockchain also keeps track of who owns each Bitcoin. This way, it is easy to check if someone has more than their fair share—if someone else has spent their Bitcoin more recently than you have.
Blockchain is a first-generation technology, which means it is not particularly efficient. As well as the regular costs of recording transactions and keeping track of ownership, every time a new block is created (in other words, when a transaction is included in the chain), it takes about ten minutes for the blockchain to update. This means that each new block takes up about ten minutes of waiting time.
The second-generation technology is known as “Tangle.” It’s much faster than blockchain—it updates every 2nd of August and there are no costs for using it.
A blockchain is a public digital ledger that records all sorts of things-the transfers of coins, the ownership of assets, the movement of money, etc. It is a record kept by computers on the network.
If you want to make a living from writing about Bitcoin, it helps to have a useful specialty. I think the best way to do this is to talk about how Bitcoin works. If you understand that, then you know what Bitcoin is and what it can do.
If you are just starting out, it also helps if you understand enough about the technology to explain it clearly (and if you don’t, that’s no problem either).
If you want to understand the cryptocurrency phenomenon, you need to understand the technology behind it.
Cryptocurrencies aren’t really money. They are tokens, or units of account, or stores of value, or bets on how things will turn out. It is quite possible to invent a token that has properties that make it useful as money. But none of the existing cryptocurrencies does that.
The conventional wisdom about crypto-currencies is that they are a triumph of open source software over closed source software, and more generally a triumph for decentralization over centralization. But in fact the cryptocurrency business is very centralized: around one hundred companies control about 96% of all supply. And the most important thing about open source software is that it’s open – anyone can inspect it and add improvements.
Information technology is not the same thing as information. Information is just a description of data. Information can be stored in any format, and it isn’t restricted to bits or strings of ones and zeros. It can be stored in pictures, audio files, movies, or any other kind of information that humans can perceive.
If you have a database of numbers, it may contain a lot of information. But so does the number 42. And if you tell me your phone number, it contains more information than the address has room for. Computer programs are nothing but data; they’re just arranged in a particular way.
You can store all kinds of information in databases; it’s just a question of which format you choose to use. But if you want to talk about storing information on computers, you need to know something about how computers work. That’s what this blog is about: how the things computers do are different from the things we do with paper and pencils.
To understand why computer storage systems are so different from paper and pencil systems, I have to explain how computers work. I have to explain what they’re made out of, what they do when they turn on, and so on; but before I can explain all this, I have to explain what