The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Alvin Toffler, American writer and futurist.

Cryptocurrency frauds constitute a very sensitive issue. Though sensitive and unpleasant, we cannot evade it and act as if it does not exist. The Alpha and the Omega for fighting the frauds are knowledge and capability for reasonable thinking.

Cryptocurrencies stay out of the legislation of any country. Their very essence protests against interference and control executed by the government. Therefore, the options offered by the cryptocurrencies for the development of the business also open possibilities for development of fraudulent projects.

Negligible involvement of the states in the life of cryptocurrencies means only one thing: the quad has become a bicycle. In order to balance, we have to be responsible, reasonable and learned.

This is a guest post by Edvin Dahlstrom

Is privacy good or evil? Does any person have a right to be privacy-protected? Can we apply common statement "If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" to our lives?

Right now, society is desperately looking for the answers to these particular questions, but it seems that government has solid position regarding them, too. Lack of privacy in our lives seems to be relatively farfetched problem for the majority of people, but eventually debates could turn into a serious confrontation. A careful eye would notice that for now there is little resistance.

This is a guest post by Ray Patterson

Read the first part

Crossmating: The Altcoin Boom

By the mid-summer of the year 2013, more than a hundred altcoins were up and running, with almost half of them appeared in the latest couple of months. Should we mention that all those 'newbies' were LItecoin forks and utilized scrypt? Another trend of the season was an upstart Proof-of-Stake from PPcoin, so scrypt+PoS combo could be called 'standard alt-coin-beginner package'.

Such (quantitative) popularity of scrypt and exponential growth of Bitcoin complexity led to a simple thought: scrypt-ASICs will appear as soon as they are profitable. Despite the fact that giant November bubble (when Bitcoin was rated up to $1200) was far from beginning to balloon, the search for the new PoW function started again...

The Proof-of-work concept appeared for the first time in the paper "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail" in 1993. Despite the fact that authors never used this notion in the article itself (it is 6 years before it appears), we are going to name it this way (or PoW).

So, what was the Idea proposed by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in their paper?..