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CO054 Kevin Gosztola on Media Consolidation
Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of editor of Shadowproof. We talked about his article on the FCC under Ajit Pai relaxing the rules on cross-media ownership, and Kevin mentioned in particular this piece by John Oliver about the potential dominance of the Sinclair Broadcast Group:
Over the past couple of weeks, Bitcoin has bounced around in value, while in general surging upwards. To give you an idea of its surge, at the start of this year, in January 2017, Bitcoins were trading at less than US$1,000 each. Nine months later, by the middle of September, Bitcoin had risen to $3,000. By the end of November, less than three weeks ago, it hit $10,000, and in the last week it has traded over $18,000.
And by the way, if you’re not sure exactly what Bitcoin is, if you feel you need to learn more about it, I have just one piece of advice for you: don’t bother.
There are two types of people who are raving about Bitcoin at the moment. One of those types is the libertarians who want to remove the role of governments from backing money. If you advocate the total, or almost total, absence of state power over people’s lives, and say that this will lead to a blossoming of the economy, an obvious stumbling block is the fact that governments create and guarantee money, which is pretty important for the economy.
In case you don’t know, a Bitcoin is a type of computer file which is unique and traceable online. The Bitcoin is traceable, but its owner is not, and thanks to a bit of fancy computer mathematics, there is a limit to the total number of Bitcoins that can exist. The theory is that anything that’s scarce is valuable. Also thanks to that fancy mathematics, each Bitcoin needs some hefty computing power to be calculated, and each Bitcoin is exponentially more difficult to calculate than the last.
You might have heard of Bitcoin mining, that basically means setting a computer going to do the calculations to claim the next Bitcoin. But actually setting one computer going isn’t going to get you far right now. This isn’t like leaving your computer to defrag overnight. As I speak, there are people building warehouses full of specially-built high-spec comput...
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By William CampbellKevin Gosztola is the managing editor of editor of Shadowproof. We talked about his article on the FCC under Ajit Pai relaxing the rules on cross-media ownership, and Kevin mentioned in particular this piece by John Oliver about the potential dominance of the Sinclair Broadcast Group:
Over the past couple of weeks, Bitcoin has bounced around in value, while in general surging upwards. To give you an idea of its surge, at the start of this year, in January 2017, Bitcoins were trading at less than US$1,000 each. Nine months later, by the middle of September, Bitcoin had risen to $3,000. By the end of November, less than three weeks ago, it hit $10,000, and in the last week it has traded over $18,000.
And by the way, if you’re not sure exactly what Bitcoin is, if you feel you need to learn more about it, I have just one piece of advice for you: don’t bother.
There are two types of people who are raving about Bitcoin at the moment. One of those types is the libertarians who want to remove the role of governments from backing money. If you advocate the total, or almost total, absence of state power over people’s lives, and say that this will lead to a blossoming of the economy, an obvious stumbling block is the fact that governments create and guarantee money, which is pretty important for the economy.
In case you don’t know, a Bitcoin is a type of computer file which is unique and traceable online. The Bitcoin is traceable, but its owner is not, and thanks to a bit of fancy computer mathematics, there is a limit to the total number of Bitcoins that can exist. The theory is that anything that’s scarce is valuable. Also thanks to that fancy mathematics, each Bitcoin needs some hefty computing power to be calculated, and each Bitcoin is exponentially more difficult to calculate than the last.
You might have heard of Bitcoin mining, that basically means setting a computer going to do the calculations to claim the next Bitcoin. But actually setting one computer going isn’t going to get you far right now. This isn’t like leaving your computer to defrag overnight. As I speak, there are people building warehouses full of specially-built high-spec comput...