Narrative economics is “the study of the viral spread of popular narratives that affect economic behavior” (3) — spending, investing, starting a business, hiring staff, etc. Economic narratives influence government policies and the formation of institutions. Economist Robert J. Shiller introduces his book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by…More
Tag Archives: cryptocurrency
Bitcoin City
In 2021, the the president of El Salvador in Central America declared Bitcoin legal tender. So businesses had to accept the digital currency as well as US dollars. The country had already abandoned its own currency, the colón, in 2001. By many accounts, the move to Bitcoin has not gone well. Vendors are reluctant to…More
Greening the blockchain
While the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 takes place in Glasgow this week, attention turns to the energy waste of cryptocurrency transactions. A substantial part of the cost resides with the “proof of work” (PoW) process by which validating nodes on a blockchain compete to solve a numerical puzzle the solution to which…More
An anti-hacker puzzle
Following on from my previous post … Here’s a simple puzzle challenge. The SHA256 hashing algorithm (see earlier post: Immutable data) converts any string of text (integers or letters) into a (near) unique 64 character long string of numbers and letters. Using this algorithm the string “301253” (someone’s birthdate) translates to the string of characters…More
Why hackers have to work hard
A 4 digit mechanical combination lock is designed so that a person trying to break into your locker (a padlock hacker) would have to try on average 5,000 combinations (104/2). That’s about 2-5 hours work, which is a big investment in time, and before the hacker exhausts all iterations he or she may well be…More
Immutable data
An application on the exorbin.com website can convert any block of data into a near unique 64 character string of characters. Fun with SHA256 So “abc” converts to ba7816bf8f01cfea414140de5dae2223b00361a396177a9cb410ff61f20015ad My name, “Richard Coyne”, converts to ba7c5c9e90f05540084e798effd0389b60ec98677662017065d34a0b880778a7 Here’s some Shakespeare “To be, or not to be — that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to…More