virtual money Archives

Let’s imagine that you liked a bicycle at a sports shop and ordered one to be shipped to your home. How would you like it if the shop shipped everything seperately? The frame is in one box, while the wheels are in another. The gears and chain are a tangle, while the handlebar is just a stick with two rubber ends. The seat is a disembodied piece of cushion. Would you be happy with the sports shop and buy from them ever again? No, you’d love it if they ship it completely assembled. You want them to deliver it to you so that you are ready to go. The only fixing you would want to do is some tuning to the brakes and some adjustment to the seat height.

So why should software be any different? Why is it that when we install something, we should have to take care of installing the dependencies, hoping that they don’t clash with those of other applications? One app requires .NET run time version 4, but a new one you are about to install requires .NET run time 5. An app on Linux requires ImageMagick library, so now you have to go find it and install it first. To install Mac OS applications with dependencies, you need to learn about the entire ‘brew’ system.

What if someone simply ships an entire working app with all its dependencies as part of a ‘box’. Just like your bicycle, where the sports shop takes care of assembling the wheels, handlebar, gears, chain and the seat to the frame. That is the concept of containerised apps, these days made popular by Docker. Continue reading “There is a container for that!”

You have probably heard about digital currency like Bitcoin in the recent years and read how it’s trading at an insanely high value when compared with standard currency. On 18^th October 2017 (today), 1 bitcoin is trading at 3900 pounds, 5200 dollars, 4400 euros and a whopping 342000 Indian Rupees. To put this in perspective, a single bitcoin can purchase an 800cc hatchback car (Alto, Eon, i10) in India. Other cryptocurrencies are trading at very high values too.

What exactly is cryptocurrency? Why is it gaining popularity and how does it work? What exactly is mining? While the users of cryptocurrency try to explain the concept to the people who are not initiated, they fall short of easy examples and stick to their indecipherable jargon which can make the listener pull his/her hair out. In this post, I try to explain cryptocurrency to you in as lucid a language as possible. Continue reading “Understanding cryptocurrency”