Written by UCL student Maxine Emuobosa: Beginners Guide.
And here is another one made by UCL student Killian Davitt.
Meeting with Professor Tomalczyk
Professor Tomalczyk has educated 166 finalists of high school mathematical olimpiads in Poland.
Which Crypto Coins Are Doing Well?
Wicked, it seems that there is an epidemic of fake volume, and that it comes from China primarily.
One way to see which crypto coins are NOT scams is to look at the source code dev statistics, here are some nice stats.
JesusCoin – A Crypto Currency Which Promotes Religious Hatred
Today I have looked at the official website of JesusCoin and their white paper. The same text appears in both.
Jeez: what a SHAMEFUL pamphlet FULL of HATE and NONSENSE.
Excerpts – do not blame me for these – we read for example that:
“Jesus Coin is guaranteed to save all of its owners from hell (except Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Bahai, Buddhists and Sikhs)”. The website also contains a story of “Jonathan, a devote Catholic” who raising money to “retake Jerusalem” and who is at the end “able to purchase various weapons” and “book plane tickets to the Middle East”.
I recommend all civilized people to boycott this coin.
Ethereum for Beginners
All you need to know in one page, see here.
My Position on UCL Strike
A large number of UCL academics have yesterday started a large scale strike lasting for many weeks. These people are sacrificing their salary [UCL will cut their pay down] and there is a strong support for the strike. The strike is organised on the premises that our employer, UCL, are? cutting down their pension contributions or ending guaranteed income schemes and replacing by those which are more like investments, without guaranteed returns. How interesting.
So why I am not on strike?
I definitely do not support UCL cutting down their contributions, and do I do not think that UCL management are our friends and have good intentions or that they do ever care about people who work here. Or I do not wish to see UCL giving money back to disappointed students.
However I am against this strike in particular, on ideological grounds.
I do NOT support the amin idea in this strike. In fact I do not support our pension schemes at all. It is quite naive to believe that generous pensions are our friend. I believe that employers and governments should spend money on creating new positions for senior people (e.g. emeritus professor positions) rather than on pensions. Offering employees generous pension benefits is nice isn’t it? Or is it about trying to get rid of them? I believe that most current pension systems are perverse, stupid and need reform. They are about ejecting people from social and economic niches or positions which they occupy, under the pretext that they are old. We are offered some income or compensation, if we retire. Is it a gift, a bribe or a trap? Retirement is not necessarily a good thing: people who retire early seem to live shorter lives. I am against spending lots of money on pensions which redistribute money between generations. I think that we need to give older people more than just money: dignity, freedom, power, and ability to remain active contributors to the economy and the society.
A Nice Paper About ICOs
Here it is, it covers primarily questions about regulation and investor protection. It stresses the fact that ICOs are transforming the way in which funding of new business ventures is done. Recommended for anyone interested in investing in ICOs or planning an ICO.
How to Recover Your Coins Lost due to ViaCoin Multisig Bug
In November 2017, users have lost 300 M$ in Ethereum due to a bug in Parity wallet multisig features.
At this moment the history repeats with ViaCoin: There is a serious bug in Windows ViaCoin 2.8.3. wallet found here and available since April 2017. As a world premiere, here is the solution!
How to Recover Coins Lost
This software has been used since April 2017, the bug is now in the wild and potentially anyone using Vialectrum under windows and sending to a multisig address will lose money.
HOWEVER the coins can be recovered. For this one needs to follow the following steps:
- Build the dev version from sources (tried and worked under Ubuntu 16) as explained here.
- Notes: make sure that Python3.4 or later not Python or Python 2.7.3. is used, together with git, pip3 and all the suitable packages such as setuptoools, are installed. For example “pip3 install –upgrade pip setuptools”. However it is normal that Python 2.7.3. is still present and it should not be removed. Now running “python3 — version” should produce sth like Python 3.4 or later. If stuck with Python 3.2. in spite of reinstall, see general instructions for upgrading Python and try to uninstall and reinstall Python 3 while keeping Python 2 in place (apt-get remove vs apt-get install).
- If problem with aes.h or similar files are reported missing, try things such as install OpenSSL or libssl through either “sudo apt-get install libsssl-dev” or “sudo apt-get install openssl”, no harm.
- Then run the dev gui by typing “./vialectrum”.
- Then create a new multisig wallet, for example 2 out of 4 with any mix of xpub, recovery seeds or xpriv exported from faulty Windows wallets.
- From this wallet one should be able to spend the coins lost. Just send them anywhere!
- This solution was tested and works.
The main developer romanoRNR has promised to release new corrected Windows distribution within days.
Bitcoin Crazy Ride Hits Wall Street
It is a big success for bitcoin and coincides with an incredible price rally where bitcoin has accomplished in 2017. In first days of 2017, bitcoin was worth 1000$. 5 months later in May it was at 2000$, 3 months later in August it was at 4000$, and after another 3 months in November it was at 8000$. Then it has accelerated and doubled in 2 weeks reaching the whereabouts of 16,000 $ now. We see that bitcoin price has grown way faster than exponentially! At the end bitcoin+competitors are now worth more than Facebook.
Now beware bitcoiners. The evil empire will now strike back. This is precisely the whole point of the futures market. Previously most investors would either buy bitcoins, or abstain (and maybe regret that they didn’t buy bitcoins). Now more traders than ever will trade both ways: many traders will now be able to short bitcoin and profit when the price goes down!!!
Overall many commentators say that the existence of bitcoin futures markets will rather not decrease but BUT increase bitcoin’s volatility making it maybe a weapon of financial mass destruction (Buffet). These comments are particularly visionary for bitcoin. If in traditional markets you already have the cyber security question, these questions are more likely to bite in bitcoin. There are huge risks bitcoin collapsing very badly due to a bug or a backdoor or a large cyber attack on P2P network, software and hardware ecosystem, deposits kept on exchanges, or on miner pools. In bitcoin, some catastrophic events is what is bound to happen, or is very likely, just listen to John McAffee. The show must go on.
XYZ and Saving an Extremely Rare Enigma Machine
Public donations are sought by Pilsudski Institute in London.
The most prominent host of the institute is an extremely rare WW2 Enigma machine. This machine was made in France during WW2 to assist Polish code breakers in their daily code-breaking tasks [done in close collaboration with Bletchley Park, UK]. Only two such machines exist, see here for more details.
This unique collaboration of the intelligence services of France(X), Britain(Y) and Poland(Z), was one of the most significant but also most secret success stories which have made WW2 Victory possible. A new book by Dermot Turing “X,Y&Z, the real story of how Enigma was broken” will be published in 2018. It will reveal new facts based on recently declassified French WW2 archives.
