Pick up your smartphone. Touch its screen. It’s smooth, crystal-clear, and amazingly resilient. Chances are your smartphone is protected by a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass. But what exactly is this Gorilla Glass? How is it fabricated and what makes it so strong?
In this “How it Works”, we’ll take you through the history, properties, and uses of Gorilla Glass, one of the most interesting pieces of technology that go into our mobile devices.
History
Gorilla Glass probably has a more interesting path than any other piece of hardware on or in your device. Much like the first edition print of any comic book hero’s tale, Corning Glass was born of a science experiment gone wrong.
In 1952, a scientist at Corning placed a piece of photosensitive glass in a furnace for testing. At some point the furnace skyrocketed from 600 degrees Celsius to 900 degrees. Expecting a ruined sample, the scientist was surprised to find an opaque sheet of material rather than a melted blob of molten mess. As the scientist removed the sample, it dropped to the floor. Rather than shatter as expected, the glass bounced.
Unbeknownst to him, scientist Don Stookey had just created a glass-ceramic hybrid.
The new material was lighter than aluminum, stronger than common glass of the era, and as hard as steel. It found it’s way into a myriad of products from missiles to microwave ovens, and would later be developed into the household staple named Corningware.
An early 60’s study named “Project Muscle” would lead scientists at Corning to research further methods of strengthening glass. Through that study, they found that placing the new glass in a potassium bath to encourage an ion exchange would strengthen the glass. But what’s ion exchange?
Ion exchange is a chemical strengthening process where large ions are “stuffed” into the glass surface, creating a state of compression. Gorilla Glass is specially designed to maximize this behavior.The glass is placed in a hot bath of molten salt at a temperature of approximately 400°C. Smaller sodium ions leave the glass, and larger potassium ions from the salt bath replace them. These larger ions take up more room and are pressed together when the glass cools, producing a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass. Gorilla Glass’s special composition enables the potassium ions to diffuse far into the surface, creating high compressive stress deep into the glass. This layer of compression creates a surface that is more resistant to damage from everyday use.
So, in short… expand the glass, force larger ions in, force smaller ions out, and when it cools it’s all kinds of tough. No wonder it’s so resilient. It’s already been beaten up more than we could during normal use! The project resulted in what was called “Chemcor”. The intent was for the product to be used in all sort of commercial applications. Everything from phone booths to car windshields, even prison glass, was imagined for the new material.
The new material simply didn’t catch on commercially. As companies examined their needs and wants, the new compound simply didn’t deliver what they were looking for at the time. Car manufacturers were impressed with the resilient glass, but hesitant to adopt it. They eyed it for muscle cars as it was strong and light, but the increased cost seemed unnecessary. The laminated glass in use since the 1930’s was doing the job just fine.
Aside from a few orders for safety glasses which were promptly recalled over concerns that the shattering nature in which they broke would do more harm than good, Chemcor was a commercial flop. The new compound showed up in a few hundred AMC Javelins, but other auto manufacturers simply didn’t see the need. Without a revenue stream for the new compound, Corning would shelve the device.
Why mobile devices?
Fast forward to 2006, when Steve Jobs and the Apple crew were testing their new iPhone prototype. They noticed normal things like keys or coins that were present in the pocket would damage the device’s plastic screen. Determined to find a suitable replacement material, Jobs sent an email to a contact of his at Corning, Wendell Weeks. He tasked Mr. Weeks with finding a suitable glass for his new device. What Jobs didn’t know that a full year prior to his request, Corning had begun exploring that concept.
In 2005, the Motorola RAZR V3 got the folks at Corning thinking. Could an industry such as mobile phones be a market for their shelved Chemcor product? The ubiquitous flip phone was selling well, and the folks at Corning were wondering if they had a place in that market. The RAZR used an ultra-thin glass rather than the impact plastic that was the standard at the time. As mobile phones were getting thinner, they could use a glass that was durable. Chemcor was great, but had it’s challenges. The specialty glass had only been manufactured to a thinness of 4mm, which simply would not do for a mobile device.
As Apple became enamored with the idea of using this type of glass, they started feeding Corning their desired specs. They needed a glass at 1.3mm, well below half of what Corning ever achieved with Chemcor. A thing Corning hadn’t shared with Apple was that Chemcor had never been mass produced. Apple also wanted this glass, which they had no idea didn’t really exist, in six months time. But Weeks took a cue from Jobs’ book — he took the risk and said yes to the project. He tasked his scientists with fulfilling a glass that could meet the demands of Apple. They named it Project Gorilla Glass.
Making Gorilla Glass
Glass is made up of sand, plain and simple. Sand, or silicon dioxide, is melted down with limestone and sodium carbonate to create crude glass. For Gorilla Glass, the silicon dioxide is first mixed with other ingredients. Mixing the silicon dioxide with aluminum and oxygen yields aluminosilicate. This gives the glass it’s sodium ions, which as discussed earlier are quite important.
Before the process of ion exchange, the glass must be made to that all important thinness needed to be useful in cell phones and other mobile devices. The process by which Corning achieves this is called fusion draw. In this process, the molten glass is fed into a v-shaped funnel until it overflows. When it runs over the edge, the molten glass meets at the bottom and is guided away by rollers. The faster the rollers spin, the thinner the glass is.
It all sounds fairly simple, but the work wasn’t done yet. Gorilla Glass had to be different. It had to be better. Sure the new composite would be thin and strong, but it also had to have a visual clarity not yet imagined by Corning. Remember, they originally designed this glass to be clear and strong. They had no designs on glass that was thin and clear but could also take a beating.
Coming so close and not succeeding was not an option. They had the formula and process down for a thin, light, strong material… but it just needed those finishing touches. Traditionally, tempering glass takes place by cooling the outside and letting the molten inside pull the two sides together as it cools. Oddly enough, that method strengthens the glass. This takes time, and was not an option for Gorilla Glass. That cooling process leaves the finished product fairly susceptible to variations in thickness and stress. To achieve the desired results, scientists altered seven parts of the formula while adding a secret ingredient.
Corning needed a home run in Gorilla Glass, and scientists delivered. The new composite was everything they wanted. Strong, light, flexible, clear, thin, and able to hold up to the manufacturing process. Corning had risen to the challenge.
The testing process
So after the compound is mixed, melted, pulled and undergoes ion exchange, the real fun begins. Now is when we learn just how strong this stuff really is. We all know it’s scratch resistant and holds up fairly well to normal use in real world scenarios, but how fun would that be? It’s time to put Gorilla Glass through it’s paces.
In the video below you’ll see a sampling of lab testing on the flexibility of the glass. Everything from flexibility to impact situations are imagined. While the glass is not indestructible, it’s clearly leaps and bounds better than what we had been using prior to it’s application in mobile technology. Testing like this allows scientists to better understand the product and improve on it for future applications.
Beyond Gorilla Glass
Not content to be a leader in devices glass, Corning set out to improve on their original design with Gorilla Glass 2. The Corning website describes it as “up to 20% thinner” and able to enhance our experience. A thinner glass separating the device from your touch could result in better haptic feedback and enhanced response time.
The glass magicians at Corning are also working hard to make glass that is not only strong, but also flexible. The goal is to create paper-thin and flexible sheets of glass, that can be manufactured on roll-to-roll processes, thus greatly reducing the cost of the end product. But that’s not the sole benefit of flexible glass — Corning’s upcoming flexible glasses will be more resistant to shattering and also a great fit for the flexible displays that Samsung and others are currently developing.
Moreover, Corning is set to announce Gorilla Glass 3 at CES 2013 in Las Vegas. As you might expected, Gorilla Glass 3 is significantly stronger than previous iterations of the product. According to Corning, Gorilla Glass 3 is three times more scratch resistant than Gorilla 2, will show 40% fewer scratches after use, and maintain 50% more strength after the sheet of glass becomes flawed.
The future is even more exciting.
As we sprint toward the future, we’ll need a glass that can keep up. Corning is one step ahead of us.
Bitcoin. the digital currency, has been all over the news for years. But because it’s entirely digital and doesn’t necessarily correspond to any existing fiat currency, it’s not easy to understand for the newcomer. Let’s break down the basis of exactly what Bitcoin is, how it works, and its possible future in the global economy.
Editor’s Note:we want to make it very clear right up front that we are not recommending that you invest in Bitcoins. Its value fluctuates quite a bit, and it’s very likely that you may lose money.
How Bitcoin Works
In layman’s terms: Bitcoin is a digital currency. That’s a concept that might be more complex than you realize: it isn’t simply an assigned value of money stored in a digital account, like your bank account or credit line. Bitcoin has no corresponding physical element, like coins or paper bills (despite the popular image of an actual coin, above, to illustrate it). The value and verification of individual Bitcoins are provided by a global peer-to-peer network.
Bitcoins are blocks of ultra-secure data that are treated like money. Moving this data from one person or place to another and verifying the transaction, i.e. spending the money, requires computing power. Users called “miners” allow their computers to be used by the system to safely verify the individual transactions. Those users are rewarded with new Bitcoins for their contributions. Those users can then spend their new Bitcoins on goods and services, and the process repeats.
The advanced explanation: Imagine it as BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer network that you definitely didn’t use to download thousands of songs in the early 2000s. Except instead of moving files from one place to another, the Bitcoin network generates and verifies blocks of information that are expressed in the form of a proprietary currency.
Bitcoin and its many derivatives are known as cryptocurrencies. The system uses cryptography—extremely advanced cryptography called a blockchain—to generate new “coins” and verify the ones that are transferred from one user to another. The cryptographic sequences serve several purposes: making the transactions virtually impossible to fake, making “banks” or “wallets” of coins easily transferable as data, and authenticating the transfer of Bitcoin value from one person to another.
Before a Bitcoin can be spent, it has to be generated by the system, or “mined.” While a conventional currency needs to be minted or printed by a government, the mining aspect of Bitcoin is designed to make the system self-sustaining: people “mine” Bitcoins by providing processing power from their computers to the distributed network, which generates new blocks of data that contain the distributed global record of all transactions. The encoding and decoding process for these blocks requires an enormous amount of processing power, and the user who successfully generates the new block (or more accurately, the user whose system generated the randomized number that the system accepts as the new block) is rewarded with a number of Bitcoins, or with a portion of transaction fees.
In this way, the very process of moving Bitcoins from one user to another creates the demand for more processing power donated to the peer-to-peer network, which generates new Bitcoins that can then be spent. It’s a self-scaling, self-replicating system that generates wealth…or at least, generates cryptographic representations of value that correspond to wealth.
How Are Bitcoins Spent?
In layman’s terms: Imagine you’re buying a Coke at the supermarket with a debit card. The transaction has three elements: your card, corresponding to your bank account and your money, the bank itself that verifies the transaction and the transfer of money, and the store that accepts the money from the bank and finalizes the sale. A Bitcoin transaction has, broadly speaking, the same three components.
Each Bitcoin user stores the data that represents his or her amount of coins in a program called a wallet, consisting of a custom password and a connection to the Bitcoin system. The user sends a transaction request to another user, buying or selling, and both users agree. The peer-to-peer Bitcoin system verifies the transaction via the global network, transferring the value from one user to the next and inserting cryptographic checks and verification at many levels. There is no centralized bank or credit system: the peer-to-peer network completes the encrypted transaction with the help of Bitcoin miners.
The advanced explanation: The technical side of things is a bit more complex. Each new Bitcoin transaction is recorded and verified onto a new block of data in the blockchain. (The two parties in the exchange are represented by randomized numbers that make each transaction essentially anonymous, even as they’re being verified.) Each block in the chain includes cryptological code linking it to and verifying it for the previous block.
In the conventional sense, Bitcoin transactions are incredibly secure. Thanks to complex cryptography at every step in the process, which can take quite a lot of time to verify (see below), it’s more or less impossible to fake a transaction from one person or organization to another. However, it is possible to “steal” bitcoins by discovering someone’s digital wallet and the password that they use to access it. If that information is found, via hacking or social engineering, a digital Bitcoin stash can dispensary without any way to trace the thief. Since Bitcoin isn’t regulated or secured in the same way your bank account or credit account is, that money is simply gone.
How Do You Turn Bitcoins Into “Real” Money, and Vice-Versa?
First of all, Bitcoin is real money, in the purely economic sense. It has value and can be traded for goods and services. It’s unlikely that you can pay your bills or buy groceries totally in Bitcoin (though those services do exist and they are growing), but you can buy a surprising amount of online goods with your Bitcoin wallet. At the moment, the biggest companies accepting Bitcoin include online computer hardware retailer Newegg, digital video game seller Steam, the social network Reddit, and even more general retailers like Overstock.com or Subway restaurants. Here’s a list of companies currently accepting Bitcoin payments directly or through gift cards.
But as interesting as it is and as fast as it’s growing, Bitcoin simply can’t replace conventional, government-issued currency right now: your landlord probably won’t take a Bitcoin payment over a rent check. Even if you happen to have dozens of Bitcoins available and you’d like to spend the profit you’ve made on them on a new car, the car dealership probably doesn’t have the infrastructure to accept them as payment (although a private seller might!). So, if you have Bitcoins and you want cash in your country’s currency, or you have currency and you want to convert it to Bitcoin for buying, selling, or investing, you’ll need a conversion service.
Broadly, converting Bitcoin into more standard currencies like US Dollars, British Pounds, Japanese Yen or Euro is very much like converting any of those currencies from one to the other when you’re traveling. You start with one currency, state your desired amount, give the value of the first currency plus a transaction fee, and receive the value in the converted currency in return. But since Bitcoin has no cash component and isn’t available to be accepted by conventional credit or debit transactions, you need to find a dedicated market exchange.
Coinbase is the most popular market and exchange in the United States. (Note: this is not an endorsement.) It offers buying and selling services for Bitcoin and other, similar cryptocurrencies, and will exchange US dollars and other standard fiat currencies for Bitcoins, as well as buying Bitcoins for USD and 31 other national fiat currencies. The company doesn’t charge for exchanges between cryptocurrencies, but exchanging Bitcoins for dollars deposited to a US bank account will cost the user a 1.49% transfer fee. So, to move $10,000 worth of Bitcoin from your own wallet to your bank account would cost 1.74 Bitcoins for the actual value, plus either $14.9 USD or .00259 Bitcoin for the transfer fee. This is a fairly standard transfer for most of the verified markets and exchanges.
There are other options for turning Bitcoin into conventional money. Coinbase and other markets can trade Bitcoin for USD and other currencies deposited directly to single-use debit cards or gift cards, or even into more flexible systems like PayPal, generally for a much higher fee. You can trade Bitcoins directly to another person for cash, though this is much more dangerous than going through an established system. (On the same note, be cautious of individuals wanting to trade Bitcoins directly for cash, goods, and services. The untraceable nature of the system makes it susceptible to fraud—see below.)
Bitcoin Mining Has Diminishing Returns
A few years ago when the Bitcoin system was new, individual users “mined” for new Bitcoins at a rapid pace. Bitcoin mining software used local processors, and even extra processors like a computer’s graphics card, to calculate hashes for the next block in the blockchain. While the number of people using and “mining” Bitcoin was low, each user doing the mining would randomly confirm the next block at a higher pace, generating new Bitcoins for his or her account quickly.
But this boom in generation couldn’t last. The Bitcoin system is designed to make each new block more difficult to find than the last one, reducing the amount of randomized Bitcoins that are generated and distributed. That means that as time goes on, each individual mining for them has to work harder and harder (in a figurative sense—it’s the computer that’s working harder and using more electricity, and thus, costing more conventional money). As the number of individual Bitcoins grows, the amount of Bitcoins rewarded for a successfully completed hash is diminished. In fact, “whole” Bitcoins are no longer generated by a single user all at once, they’re rewarded with fractions of Bitcoins (which are still quite valuable).
Initially, users created customized “mining rigs” that used relatively cheap clusters of off-the-shelf CPUs and GPUs to increase their chances of generating Bitcoin. Now the system is so popular and so distributed that an individual user can no longer simply buy a screamin’ fast GPU and expect to make back enough Bitcoin to cover its value in conventional money. Custom-designed “miners” are now sold for this purpose, with software and hardware designed for the sole purpose of supplying the maximum amount of computational power to the peer-to-peer system, and thus creating better odds of completing blocks. More processing power, more hardware, more chances of getting that payout…but at the same time, you’re spending more and more of your actual resources on hardware and electricity.
As a result, those hoping to earn conventional wealth via Bitcoin would be better off trading for it or selling goods and services rather than trying to make a mining system and run it constantly.
A custom-designed Bitcoin miner, sold commercially on Amazon. At the current rate of generation, it takes months of mining runtime to earn back the value of the hardware in Bitcoins generated, plus the cost of the electrical power to run it.
At the moment, there are between twelve and thirteen million Bitcoins in existence. They’ll become harder and harder to mine as more are generated. The system has an upper limit: after 21 million Bitcoins are generated, no more can be mined. Based on current trends, the last whole Bitcoin will be mined sometime in the 2040s, with the final portion of fractional coin rewards continuing for about 100 years. Once the upper limit is reached, the value of the currency will fluctuate almost entirely on supply and demand, though “miners” will still be able to earn Bitcoins by lending their processing power to the transaction system and receiving transaction fees.
Bitcoin’s Value Fluctuates More Than Standard Money
If you’re reading this guide, it’s probably because you’ve heard that Bitcoin is valuable. And it is. But that value changes rapidly, much more rapidly than any currency from a stable economy or even most stocks and bonds. The shifts in the value of Bitcoin can be huge, too: as a function of its total value, Bitcoin fluctuates more than ten times faster than the US dollar.
In 2010, each whole Bitcoin was worth less than a 25 cents in USD. In late November of 2017, each Bitcoin was valued at over $11,000 (before dramatically spiking downward to $9,000 almost immediately). Obviously that’s a huge rate of growth and a massive opportunity for anyone who got on board early—initial Bitcoin miners might be millionaires now if they’ve held on to their Bitcoins long enough. But those two points of data don’t tell the whole story: Bitcoin has gone through various dips and “crashes,” initially in a volatile period in late 2013 and early 2014. Each time the value recovered, but there’s no assurance that the current climb will continue, or that the entire cryptocurrency market won’t collapse.
The value of Bitcoin has grown and fluctuated wildly, much more so than conventional currencies, stocks, or commodities.
This makes Bitcoin a questionable method for investment. While it’s true that many people have made huge amounts of conventional wealth by mining and trading in Bitcoin, that wealth is just as volatile as the market itself, unless it’s transferred to more stable currencies or investments. The ups and downs of the Bitcoin market appear to be coming much faster and more frequently than fluctuations in major stock markets and exchanges. The current high price of Bitcoin might be just the start before an even larger boom, or it might be a temporary “bubble” with an upcoming crash followed by a recovery…or the entire Bitcoin market could implode tomorrow, leaving millions of people with nothing but worthless cryptographic sequences. There’s no way to know.
Bitcoin’s Strengths
That doesn’t mean Bitcoin won’t have its place in the future, however. Let’s talk about some advantages and disadvantages to Bitcoin over traditional currency.
Anonymity and Privacy
Bitcoin purchases between individual users are entirely private: it’s possible for two people to exchange Bitcoins or fractions of coins between wallets simply by exchanging hashes, with no names, email addresses, or any other information. And because the peer-to-peer network uses a new hash for each transaction, it’s more or less impossible to link concurrent purchases to a single user. The nature of the peer-to-peer encrypted network makes it secure from the outside, as well: no one else can see your personal purchases or receipts without first getting access to your wallet.
No Required Transaction Fees (For Now)
Conventional non-cash purchases include transaction fees: pay with a Visa credit card, and Visa will charge the merchant a few cents to verify the transaction. And of course, the cost of that charge is passed on to you in the form of higher prices for goods and services.
At the moment, there are no mandatory transaction fees for Bitcoin. Individual users and merchants can submit their purchases to the peer-to-peer network and simply wait for it to be verified on the next block. However, this process can take time (and it takes more time the more the network is used). So to speed up transactions, many merchants and users add a transaction fee to increase the priority of the transaction in the block, rewarding users on the peer-to-peer network for completing the verification process faster.
As the global supply of Bitcoins reaches its 21 million coin limit, transaction fees will become the primary method for miners to earn Bitcoins. At this point, presumably most transactions will include a small fee simply as a function of completing the purchase quickly.
No Central Governing Authority or Taxes
Because Bitcoin isn’t recognized as an official currency by any country, buying and selling Bitcoins themselves and using them to purchase goods and services isn’t regulated. So anything you buy with Bitcoins is not subject to a standard sales tax, or any other tax that’s normally applied to that item or service. This can be huge economic boon if you’re wealthy enough and interested enough to do a lot of business exclusively in Bitcoin.
Without being subject to most monetary laws, Bitcoin is effectively a barter system. Imagine your current supply of Bitcoins as a gigantic stack of potatoes: if you trade ten thousand potatoes for a new TV, the government won’t ask for a sales tax in the form of eight hundred potatoes. It simply isn’t equipped to handle any transactions not performed in its own currency.
However, you should be aware that any conventional earnings you receive from dealing in Bitcoin will be treated in the usual way. So if you transfer $10,000 worth of Bitcoins to your bank account via a Bitcoin market, you will need to report it as income on your taxes. Dealing in Bitcoin doesn’t nullify other standard requirements for taxation, either: even if you purchase a new car via Bitcoin from a private seller, you’ll still have to register that car with the government and pay taxes based on its market value.
Bitcoin Weaknesses
So if Bitcoin is so great, why isn’t everyone using it? Well, obviously, it has some drawbacks too, especially at the current time.
Possible Government Interference
Any time something new comes around and challenges the status quo, the government is going to get involved to make sure that things remain the way they are supposed to be. The fact is that the US government, and other governments, are looking into Bitcoin for a variety of reasons. Just in the last few days, the US government has started seizing some accounts from the biggest Bitcoin exchange. More is likely to come in the future.
No Monetary Sovereignty
Perhaps the biggest weakness of bitcoin is that it is not a “recognized” sovereign currency—that is, it is not backed by the full faith of any governing body. While this could be seen as strength, the fact that Bitcoin is a fiat currency which is accepted only on the perceived value of other bitcoin users makes it highly vulnerable to destabilization. Simply put, if one day a large number of merchants who accept bitcoin as a form of payment stop doing so, then the value of bitcoin would fall drastically.
The current high value of Bitcoin is a function of both the relative scarcity of Bitcoins themselves and its popularity as a means of investment and wealth generation. If confidence in the Bitcoin market is suddenly and drastically reduced—for example, if a major government declared Bitcoin use illegal, or one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges was hacked and lost all of its stored value—the value of the currency will crash and investors will lose huge amounts of money.
The United States Treasury does not recognize bitcoin as a conventional currency, but does recognize its status as a commodity, like stocks and bonds. Similarly, the US Internal Revenue Service considers bitcoins property and taxes them as such if they are declared. No other country has declared bitcoin to be a recognized currency, but engagement with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies varies from place to place. Some countries are investigating bitcoin as a growing commodity market, some take the same stance as the US declaring them assets, and some have explicitly banned their use for transfer of goods or services (though the means of enforcing those bans are limited).
Lack of Protections
The Bitcoin network has no built-in protection mechanisms when it comes to accidental loss or theft. For instance, if you lose the hard drive where your Bitcoin wallet file is stored (think corruption or drive failure with no backup), the Bitcoins held in that wallet are lost forever to the entire economy. Interestingly, this is an aspect which further exacerbates the limited supply of Bitcoins.
Additionally, if your wallet file is stolen or compromised and the Bitcoins contained within it are spent by the thief before the rightful owner, the double spending protection mechanism built into the network means the rightful owner has no recourse. Unlike if, for example, your credit card is stolen, you can call the bank and cancel the card, bitcoin has no such authority. The Bitcoin network only knows that the bitcoins in the compromised wallet file are valid and processes them accordingly. In fact, there is already malware out there which is designed specifically to steal Bitcoins.
Bitcoin markets are vulnerable to attack or fraud. Major exchanges like GBH and Cryptsy have been shut down with all the Bitcoin entrusted to their care presumably stolen by the operators. Japan-based Mt. Gox, formerly the handler of over half the Bitcoin transactions on the planet, was shuttered after a theft of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins. The 2014 incident caused a huge (but temporary) drop in the value of Bitcoin worldwide.
Limited Concurrent Transactions
The Bitcoin block system requires connection and confirmation from the peer-to-peer network to be verified. Because each block contains a limited record of transactions and an upper limit to the amount of new transactions that can be written, there’s a limit to how many people can buy and sell with the system at any given time. As more and more vendors and individuals use Bitcoin to do business, the number of transactions per second increase, and the peer-to-peer network is becoming congested, with some operations without transaction fees taking hours to clear. Whereas conventional payment systems like credit cards can simply expand their connections and processing power to speed up processing, the isolated peer-to-peer nature of bitcoin doesn’t allow it to scale with the global financial system.
Black Market Appeal
A central principle to the design of the Bitcoin system is that there is no single transactional processing authority. As a result, no single user can be locked out of the system. Combine this with the inherent anonymity of transactions, and you have an ideal medium of exchange for nefarious purposes.
Bitcoin has become an ideal means for commerce in illicit goods and services. The quintessential case is the Silk Road, a dark web site that allowed users to anonymously trade items like drugs and fake identification, all bought with Bitcoin thanks to its untraceable nature. The story of Silk Road’s illegal trade didn’t even stop after the US Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Justice shut down the site and seized its digital holdings in 2013. A Secret Service agent was charged with stealing over $800,000 of bitcoin from the investigators, who had held the seized digital currency to be auctioned off for the benefit of the law enforcement agencies.
While this is not exactly a weakness in Bitcoin (after all, drug dealers using cash doesn’t undermine the value of the currency itself), the unintended consequence of its usage for dubious purposes could be considered one. In fact, the US Treasury Department recently applied money laundering rules to bitcoin exchanges.
Subjects of Debate and Controversy
Lastly, let’s indulge a bit of controversy surrounding Bitcoin. While these topics of conversation are interesting, most everything in this section is conjecture and should be taken with a grain of salt—we just think they’re worth noting to get a full picture of the Bitcoin story.
Enigmatic Developer
The primary designer of the bitcoin specification is a “person” named Satoshi Nakamoto. Person is put in quotes here because Nakamoto has not connected “his” identity with a publicly known person. Satoshi Nakamoto could be an individual man or woman, an internet handle, or a group of people, but nobody actually knows. Once their work of designing the Bitcoin network was complete, this person or persons essentially disappeared.
Multiple individual people and teams of developers have been theorized to be the “real” Satoshi Nakamoto, with no conclusive proof for any one of them at the time of writing. Whoever he, she, or they are, Satoshi Nakamoto is estimated to be in possession of billions of US dollars worth of Bitcoin at current market rates.
Resistance From Conventional Investors
Many experts in standard money markets and investments consider Bitcoin a poor choice for investing money. The extreme volatility of Bitcoin versus investments like stocks, bonds, and standard commodities makes larger and older institutions wary. In addition, some investors and investigators consider Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to be either a passing fad (an economic bubble) and thus an extremely risky means of investment, or a fraud in and of itself, a “Ponzi scheme” for the benefit of Satoshi Nakamoto and other early investors.
On the other hand, it’s possible that some of these statements are made specifically to manipulate the value of Bitcoin: JP Morgan Chase has been accused of publicly calling the worth of Bitcoin into question via CEO statements while investing in it at the same time. As stated above, use caution when dealing in Bitcoin either as a means of purchasing goods or services or investing.
Bitcoin Cash Fork and Other Cryptocurrencies
On August 1st, 2017, long debates between bitcoin proponents and disagreements on how to solve its problems resulted in a currency split. The Bitcoin standard was broken in two, with the original system unaffected and the new Bitcoin Cash standard added. This was less like a stock market split and more like a software fork. Every person or organization who owned Bitcoin in any amount immediately owned an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash, with sales and transfers of both currencies occurring normally after the split. Like the original Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is entirely digital and has no real-world physical component (despite the name).
The split is a hard fork in software terms. The separate Bitcoin Cash peer-to-peer system allows for eight times more transactions per block, making it a better (but not necessarily equal) competitor to credit and debit cards for constant online and in-person sales. The operators of Bitcoin Cash hope that it will become a more widely-accepted currency for standard purchases, like coffee shops or supermarkets.
Because of the newer system, Bitcoin Cash has not benefited from the explosive growth of value that the original Bitcoin Cash has experienced. At the time of writing, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is trading at approximately $325 per unit, less than 10% of the value of the original Bitcoin. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for the new standard: a currency with a smaller range of market fluctuation and a slower, more steady growth rate may be appealing to businesses. But at the moment, Bitcoin Cash transactions aren’t supported by any notable merchants, aside from existing cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets.
Without major support from large online or physical retailers, Bitcoin Cash seems unlikely to become as successful as the original Bitcoin. It’s more likely that the forked standard will join the ever-expanding list of competing cryptocurrencies without any notable application beyond the cryptocurrency market itself. These competing currencies use peer-to-peer systems similar to the original Bitcoin, but with significant changes in cryptographic methods and terms. Examples include Litecoin, Ethereum, and Zcash.
None of the competitors to Bitcoin has reached any notable fraction of its current value, and support from retailers outside of the growing and somewhat speculative niche of cryptocurrency exchanges is minimal.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are fascinating developments, a mark of the desire for participants in the information age to lessen their dependency on the economic and legal systems that prop up institutions from before the 21st century. It’s certainly made plenty of fortunes in its brief existence…and lost more than a few as well. The long-term viability of Bitcoin as a medium for wealth has yet to be determined.
If you’d like to get involved in Bitcoin or any of its competitors, make sure to do your research and use caution. Bitcoin can be a lucrative hobby and an exciting investment, but as with any other kind of investing, it’s always best to diversify for safety. If you’d like to read more about Bitcoin, we recommend checking out Bitcoin.org, the Bitcoin Wiki, and the Bitcoin Wikipedia page.
Who owns the Internet? The answer is no one and everyone. The Internet is a network of networks. Each of the separate networks belongs to different companies and organizations, and they rely on physical servers in different countries with varying laws and regulations. But without some common rules and norms, these networks cannot be linked effectively. Fragmentation – meaning the end of the Internet – is a real threat.
Some estimates put the Internet’s economic contribution to global GDP as high as $4.2 trillion in 2016. A fragmented “splinternet” would be very costly to the world, but that is one of the possible futures outlined last month in the report of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, chaired by former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. The Internet now connects nearly half the world’s population, and another billion people – as well as some 20 billion devices – are forecast to be connected in the next five years.
But further expansion is not guaranteed. In the Commission’s worst-case scenario, the costs imposed by the malicious actions of criminals and the political controls imposed by governments would cause people to lose trust in the Internet and reduce their use of it.
Image: Statista
The cost of cybercrime in 2016 has been estimated to be as high as $445 billion, and it could grow rapidly. As more devices, ranging from automobiles to pacemakers, are placed online, malicious hackers could turn the “Internet of Things” (IOT) into “the weaponization of everything.” Massive privacy violations by companies and governments, and cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure such as power grids (as recently happened in Ukraine), could create insecurity that undercuts the Internet’s potential.
A second scenario is what the Commission calls “stunted growth.” Some users capture disproportionate gains, while others fail to benefit. Three or four billion people are still offline, and the Internet’s economic value for many who are connected is compromised by trade barriers, censorship, laws requiring local storage of data, and other rules that limit the free flow of goods, services, and ideas.
The movement toward sovereign control of the Internet is growing, and a degree of fragmentation already exists. China has the largest number of Internet users, but its “Great Fire Wall” has created barriers with parts of the outside world.
Many governments censor services that they think threaten their political control. If this trend continues, it could cost more than 1% of GDP per year, and also impinge on peoples’ privacy, free speech, and access to knowledge. While the world could muddle along this path, a great deal will be lost and many will be left behind.
In the Commission’s third scenario, a healthy Internet provides unprecedented opportunities for innovation and economic growth. The Internet revolution of the past two decades has contributed something like 8% of global GDP and brought three billion users online, narrowing digital, physical, economic, and educational divides. The Commission’s report states that the IOT may result in up to $11 trillion in additional GDP by 2025.
The Commission concluded that sustaining unhindered innovation will require that the Internet’s standards are openly developed and available; that all users develop better digital “hygiene” to discourage hackers; that security and resilience be at the core of system design (rather than an afterthought, as they currently are); that governments not require third parties to compromise encryption; that countries agree not to attack the Internet’s core infrastructure; and that governments mandate liability and compel transparent reporting of technological problems to provide a market-based insurance industry to enhance the IOT’s security.
Until recently, the debate about the most appropriate approach to Internet governance revolved around three main camps. The first, multi-stakeholder approach, originated organically from the community that developed the Internet, which ensured technical proficiency but not international legitimacy, because it was heavily dominated by American technocrats. A second camp favored greater control by the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations specialized agency, which ensured legitimacy but at the cost of efficiency. And authoritarian countries like Russia and China championed international treaties guaranteeing no interference with states’ strong sovereign control over their portion of the Internet.
More recently, the Commission argues, a fourth model is developing in which a broadened multi-stakeholder community involves more conscious planning for the participation of each stakeholder (the technical community, private organizations, companies, governments) in international conferences.
An important step in this direction was the US Commerce Department’s decision last month to hand oversight of the so-called IANA functions – the “address book” of the Internet – to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN, with a Government Advisory Committee of 162 members and 35 observers, is not a typical inter-governmental organization: the governments do not control the organization. At the same time, ICANN is consistent with the multi-stakeholder approach formulated and legitimated by the Internet Governance Forum, established by the UN General Assembly.
Some American senators complained that when President Barack Obama’s Commerce Department handed its oversight of the IANA functions to ICANN, it was “giving away the Internet.” But the US could not “give away” the Internet, because the United States does not own it. While the original Internet linked computers entirely in the US, today’s Internet connects billions of people worldwide. Moreover, the IANA address book (of which there are many copies) is not the Internet.
The US action last month was a step toward a more stable and open multi-stakeholder Internet of the type that the Global Commission applauded. Let’s hope that further steps in this direction follow.
Living on the digital edge where typing is almost an everyday necessity, learning the ways of proper keyboard usage are crucial. Not only are you able to be more productive and get things done quicker with a keyboard, typing faster can enable you to keep up with your brain; that little voice in your head that has great ideas might only last for a few seconds before it’s forgotten.
In this article, we’ll give you 5 tips to get you started typing faster and proper. Some of the tips are quite obvious ones, but we’ll provide you with a few apps to help you practice and learn faster.
1. Get Rid Of Bad Habits
Getting rid of your bad typing habits is probably the hardest thing to do. You’ve probably been using the same typing method since you started using a keyboard, right down to where you place your palms. If you’re an FPS (First Person Shooter) gamer you’re probably used to placing your left hand on the WASD keys, and may have stronger fingers on your left hand than your right (speaking from experience here).
Others may type only with two fingers, hovering over ten (or more) keys each, always having to keep their eyes on the keyboard to get the right keys. Although you might be typing fast with only half of the needed fingers, you have to put down your foot (or your hands) and break that habit immediately.
2. Use All 10 Fingers
The next step is to relearn the correct finger placement on the keyboard. If you take a closer look at your keyboard, you’ll notice raised bumps on each of the F key and J key. This is to help you find the correct finger placement without having to look at the keyboard.
Ideally, your index fingers should rest on the F and J keys and the other fingers will fall into place naturally.
In the picture below, you’ll notice color-coded areas showing the keys covered by each finger. You’ll notice that the middle fingers and ring fingers are used for only a few keys on the keyboard, while your index fingers cover the middle section of the keyboard. Navigational, punctuation and function keys are controlled mostly by the little finger.
If this confuses you, head over to websites like the TypingClub or Typing Webwhere they take you through each step to familiarize yourself with the keyboard. Some of their exercises only involve 2 fingers and as you go through their program, you’ll slowly master the way of faster and proper keyboard typing.
3. Learn To Touch Type
Next up: Touch typing. It’s when you type without having to look at the keyboard. In fact, for seasoned typists, looking at the keyboard actually slows them down.
To get there takes practice, and we’re not talking about hours here. It could be weeks before you condition your fingers to take control of the keys ‘they’ are responsible for. Even if it slows you down, do not revert to how you used to type.
Now, try typing sentences without looking at the keyboard, and try to remember the position of each letter. If you have to sneak a peek at the keyboard, you can, but give the same word or sentence another run, this time without looking at the keyboard. It takes a while but if you are determined, it gets easier every day.
Eventually, you will know where each key is and from then on, it’s just a matter of picking up in terms of speed.
4. Navigate With Basic Keyboard Shortcuts
It’s no surprise why Windows and Mac OS have many keyboard shortcuts. Since both your hands are already on the keyboard, why spend time using a mouse to navigate? You don’t have to remember every shortcut, just the more common ones.
Common shortcuts below are mostly used in word processing programs:
Shortcuts
Descriptions
Ctrl + C
Copy
Ctrl + X
Cut
Ctrl + V
Paste
Ctrl + Z
Undo
Ctrl + S
Save
Ctrl + F
Search for word
Ctrl + A
Highlight everything
Shift + Left Arrow or Right Arrow
Hightlight next letter
Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow or Right Arrow
Highlight next word
Ctrl + Left Arrow or Right Arrow
Navigate text cursor to next word without highlight
Home
Go to beginning of line
End
Go to end of line
Page Up
Scroll up
Page Down
Scroll down
You can also use shortcut keys while browsing the web. Here are some shortcuts you could use to navigate in web browsers.
Shortcuts
Descriptions
Ctrl + Tab
Switch to next tab
Ctrl + Shift + Tab
Switch to previous tab
Ctrl + T
Open new tab
Ctrl + W
Close current tab
Ctrl + Shift + T
Open previously closed tab
Ctrl + R
refresh current webpage
Ctrl + N
Open new web browser window
Backspace
Go back one page
Shift + Backspace
Go forward one page
Finally, here are some common keyboard shortcuts for more general (Windows) navigation.
Shortcuts
Descriptions
Alt + Tab
Switch to next opened window
Alt + Shift + Tab
Switch to previous opened window
Alt + F4
Close current window
Using these shortcut keys will require the little finger a lot as many of the modifier keys like Ctrl, Alt and Shift are closest to your little finger.
5. Practice With Apps
Practicing typing on a keyboard need not be stressful (although it may feel like it at times). You can practice with a lot of typing games. Here are a few websites where you can learn how to conquer the keyboard and have fun at the same time.
TypeRacer is a simple and fun game where each player is represented by a car. You’ll be given a passage of text from a book or lyrics to a song, you then type it out to move your car in a ‘race’ with other players. Whoever finishes typing the passage first wins.
Typing Maniac is a Facebook game that will get you addicted as you can compete with friends to see who can earn the most points. As words appear on your screen, type them out to make them go away before too many land on the ground and cause you to lose the game! Earn points and get a better score if you achieve each level without missing or misspelling a word.
Keybr generates readable random words where some words are spelt incorrectly to help you remember common letter combinations better rather than typing random letters. It’ll give you statistics to tell you which area of the keyboard you are weaker in. It also offers words in different languages as well as different keyboard layouts.
The exercises in this site get you comfortable with the finger placement by repeatedly asking you to type those letters with the correct finger. It is also offered in different languages.
Learn typing is a basic looking website that has a ton of explanation good for beginners learning to touch type. Once you’ve gone through the basics, there are also more advanced exercises which you can do.
