A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 7): Being Consistent

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents The Problem The next big problem with our distributed ledger is more subtle, and much harder to solve.  Indeed as we shall see it's a problem that leads to the crazy genius at the heart of Bitcoin. However, it's in no way a new problem.  I …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 6): Paying for Bitcoin’s Computers

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Printing Money: the Block Reward Another problem for Bitcoin is that someone has to pay for all the computers running this ledger.  With conventional money the government pays to create coins and banknotes from general taxation, and banks pay for systems that deal with checking accounts …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 5): Technical Description – The Big Book

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Introduction This article and a few that follow attempt a description of the technical aspects of Bitcoin in fairly simple terms.  This includes a long section describing and justifying mining. We start with the big book. One Big Book A Big Paper Book Suppose that we …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 4): Problems with Bitcoin

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Even from the very brief description so far in this series of articles you can see that Bitcoin is a kind of cool and weird form of money.  However it has some very serious problems. Technical Problems Bitcoin is slow.  In fact it’s deliberately slow and …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 3): Why the Excitement?

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Bitcoin is a New Form of Money If you're reading this I expect you're aware of all the excitement surrounding Bitcoin.  Of course it's a new form of money, and that's quite interesting.  However I could issue my own money in paper form, and I suspect …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 2): Bitcoin vs Money

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Bitcoin Overview Basics As I've already said I'm not assuming you know anything about Bitcoin.  To get started, below is a high level overview of the basics of Bitcoin and how payments in our new money are processed.  You may well know some of this already. …

CPDOs for Beginners

Introduction CPDOs (constant proportion debt obligations) are in the news currently.  In spite of a judge describing a CPDO issued by ABN Amro as 'grotesquely complicated' the basic concept behind the instrument is pretty straightforward.  This article describes the strategy behind a CPDO at a high level. Overview of a CPDO A CPDO is a financial …

Beginner’s Guide to Techniques for Refreshing Web Pages: Ajax, Comet, HTML5

Introduction This article briefly discusses the technologies used in modern browsers to display web pages, and goes into a little more detail about the user experience on those web pages, in particular how we can get part of a web page to refresh automatically when data changes on a web server. Browsers and HTML I'm …

15-Minute Beginner’s Guide to Windows 8

Introduction Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing, and is available to developers on MSDN.  It's quite disorientating for people who've worked with Windows for a while.  I've been playing with it and wrote some notes for myself, so I thought I'd turn them into a quick guide to navigating your way around it. I'm …

Delegate Syntax in C# for Beginners

Introduction I have been programming with C# since it came out but I still find the delegate syntax confusing.  This is at least partially because Microsoft have changed the recommended syntax regularly over the years.  This article is a quick recap of the various syntaxes.  It also looks at some of the issues with using …