Wild Tale Of An Entity Called Blockchain, Cryptocoin

Dear fellow netizens, please do not get blinded by greed or delusions of becoming rich without earning it yourselves.

When bitcoin and blockchain first got invented, it was originally touted as the world's first decentralized digital currency...as a system that works without a central bank or single administrator.

It was "supposed" to be an alternate form of "money" that could be used to "buy" products and services in real life.
It was "supposed" to be "quick".
It was "supposed" to be "cheap" (in terms of transaction fees incurred).

But come years later, now, thousands of cryptocoins have sprouted.
And these forms of digital "currencies" are instead being passed off as something that you "hodl" (at least in the current mania)?

No, seriously!?

From what measly knowledge that I have "acquired", you need some form of a "wallet" that supports the digital coin(s), an "address" or more than one (that you obtain after creating your wallet), from which you then send and receive (transact) them digital coin(s) with.

Some kind of backend, technical voodoo (proof of work, proof of stake, proof of importance or some hybrid forms of them) then happens and "computers, processors or miners" (that people own) then processes these "transactions" onto the "blockchain" and the digital coin changes hands.

Naturally, for processing these transactions, the "miners" will get rewarded with some "fees" (usually also in the form of the digital coin that they are processing), of course.

Ideally, so long as there are "transactions" to process and "miners" to process these "transactions" (for their "fees"), this sounds like a pretty swell system right?

However, trouble comes when there are too many "transactions" awaiting in queue to be processed onto the blockchain.

In order to be processed, "transactions" have to be written into "blocks" and then passed onto the blockchain to be recognized. But with the current existing technology, there can only be this many "blocks" generated per duration (second/minute), and in turn, that many "transactions" which can "occupy" onto the "blocks" generated.

So what do you do in order to ensure that you get onto a "block" as fast as possible?

You "entice" the "miners" to pick up your "transaction" first.

How?

By paying them more (in terms of "fees"), of course.

And when the digital coin gets increasingly popular, more and more people use them, more and more "transactions" occur and correspondingly, you will need to pay the "miners" more and more of that digital coin in order to get your "transaction" processed first.

Have you noticed that I've not even talked about the price of the digital coin yet?

If we factor that in, then you can more or less guess where the "cost of a transaction" goes right? Yes, up. And all this while, those who can't afford to pay that much will have to wait longer and longer and longer to get their "transactions" confirmed (or worse...never).

Unless this gets solved, there can be no feasible way for us to use them in our daily lives...to pay for our food, coffee and whatnots.

At present, the technology is still too "young" (so as to speak).

Next, let us talk about the "hodlers".

These are people that "buy" into the cryptocoins (as most of them are "limited" in supply) and look at them as some form of an "investment and/or speculative tool" (to further enhance their individual networth). They are neither in it for the technology behind the blockchain, nor for the possibility in enabling the exchange of "assets" across the digital void.

By some way or another, they've amassed a massive amount of these cryptocoins into their "wallets". You can easily identify them (no not their real life identities of course) via their "addresses" in the various blockchains (of the respective cryptocoins).

But the important thing to take note of is that...all they have amassed is a bunch of still "valueless" digital coins. So long as no one "pays" them for those digital coins, they are just regular peeps like you and I. However, once someone does pay them (for whatever fiat value per coin), these "hodlers" will then turn into your "ultra rich", "filthy rich" people.

Now at the same time do remember...our day-to-day lives still revolves around fiat money.

It is presently quite impossible to pay for our healthcare, government income tax and other whatnots using these digital coins. In other words, the cryptocoins are still not recognized by our present countries' governments. Unless and until that changes, they are just a bunch of "valueless" digital coins.

The only way to turn these cryptocoins into fiat...is to "find" someone willing to buy them. This could be either via person-to-person trade or through the various cryptoexchanges currently available.

So now the question becomes...how to "attract" people to buy these cryptocoins?

What better way than to "pump" up the value of one and make sure that the media gets wind of it!

Which is where we are at right now. The present "mania".

Word of advice?

So long as you have not "cashed out" yet, whatever value that you have right now is still "paper value". Be sure that you are not putting in more money than you can afford to lose...for the present technology is still too "young".

So what are you? A user of cryptocoins or a hodler?

A Tale of Two Firefox.exe

Today, by chance, I went to open up my "Windows Task Manager".

Under processes, I found out that there were two instances of 'firefox.exe' running.

Being surprised by it, I immediately did an antivirus and a malware scan, but both of them came up with nothing...so I went googling for answers instead. However, most of the articles I've read through stated that one of them might be a malware or a virus.

So to check out that theory, the next natural thing I tried to do was to "observe" them and see how they would react to my "tamperings".

Contrary to how it was stated in those posts, that they would appear on bootup and stayed there despite killing it, these 'firefox.exe' of mine didn't appear when I restarted my cpu and would only surface when I started the firefox browser (and disappears whenever I closed it).

If I "End Task" the one which hogged "less" memory, one (or more) of the tabs would crash. But if I end the one which hogged "more" memory, my entire browser would close...together with all the tabs...and a short while later, the other firefox.exe would disappear (from my task manager) as well.

Curious, I booted up my brother's CPU to check and see if his firefox does the same. But interestingly enough, his had only one instance of 'firefox.exe'.

Remembering that his CPU wasn't booted for quite some time now, I went to check his firefox version. It was only 49.x something (can't remember) whilst mine was 50.0.

Sure enough, upon updating his to 50.0, there were now two instances of these 'firefox.exe' in his task manager as well.

So moral of the story?

I do not believe that these two 'firefox.exe' have anything to do with a virus or a malware, but rather its something added by the developers to prevent a full crash of the browser or something like that.

Oh ya...

Coincidentally, Internet Explorer also has something like this as well.

If you start up the IE browser, you will have two instances of 'iexplore.exe'. If you then open up another tab, one more copy of this 'iexplore.exe' will pop up.

Closing the tab will result in one of them disappearing after a while and end tasking one of them would either crash and reload the tab or close the IE browser entirely...depending on which one it is that you've ended.

- BuLaDiFu -

Are Expired Instant Noodles Edible?

As circumstances would have it, I happened to land myself with a couple of packs of instant noodles...some about a year past its expiry date while some are over two years (beyond its best before date).

If it were your typical "sane" person, I would bet that he or she would have immediately disposed of the said noodles on the spot. Right there and then.

However...somehow...some silly idea crept into my head.

If it had been the end of the world, an apocalypse or some hideous instance whereby you were left to scavenge for food.

What then...are the sort of human-made "processed" food that you could still consume, despite it being past its expiry/best before date?

With that line of thinking in mind, I proceeded to judge and hence deemed that these packs of instant noodles, past its expiry date, might be still edible. Might...just might...

But since I'm still not "that" insane, I decided to try it out on the "about a year past its expiry date" ones.

Opening them up, visual inspection came up with nothing striking in particular. It looks as if its brand new...much like any other instant noodles.

Sniffing them, however, ended up with some faint (but distinct) "stale" smell...that kind of reminds you that the noodles are a year past its "safe to consume date".

As for the cooking part, sad to say that despite having rinsed it twice, I've failed to get rid of that "stale" smell. And what's worse, it becomes even more drastically striking when you remove the cover of the cooking pot and have the hot steam vapor rushing up into your nose.

In the taste-testing session, you also have this weird sense of taste...in those cooked noodles...that refuses to be masked over by the packets of "seasoning" that you've added.

Overall, its not something that I would recommend you to try. And quite frankly, its not something that I would have the pleasure of ever wanting to try out again.

Hopefully...just hopefully...nothing goes wrong with my stomach.

But only time will tell.

The Thing With Country Redirects

Although I do understand the need to implement country redirects in order to comply with a country's regulations, but it is also undeniable that it poses some tough challenges for amateur bloggers, such as myself, whom may not necessarily have much knowledge about templates and coding.

Having wanted to do away with some inherent flaws found in my free template's coding for the comments section, I decided to swap it out with the one provided by "Disqus".

However, after fumbling about and somewhat getting it installed in my blog successfully, I found that my previous comments were all gone...despite being able to see and moderate them still on the Disqus platform.

Eventually, I found out that it had got something to do with this "country redirect" thingy and how Disqus syncs a blog's comments via its unique url.

Being left without much of an option, as the coding provided by Disqus seems too hard to modify, I'm literally forced to use some "no country redirect" (ncr) script I've found on the internet to ensure that all of the comments get pointed to my canonical url.

Hopefully I won't get into trouble for this. Hopefully.

My Bad Experience With Digi Prepaid

Just yesterday night, my handphone suddenly switched to "emergency calls only" mode. Initially, I had thought that it might be some network problem or something so I ignored it until this morning.

However, morning came...but its still showing emergency calls only. Rebooted my handphone, switched to a different one...still no results.

(And it was only just yesterday morning that I've checked my phone balance...
Balance: RM3X.XX, Last Reload: 15/10/2015)

Having a bad premonition, I popped down to the nearest digi service store and asked.

Bam...got hit with the "I'm sorry, but your phone number just got terminated". Reason being, it was over 75 days since you've last reloaded.

(¬_¬ ;)

I mean seriously....WTF? Wasn't it supposed to be 90 days? And where's that god-damn SMS that's supposed to remind you of your phone number being about to be terminated? Even my brother's phone number had received that.

But mine didn't.

Anyway, the bottom line is...once they've terminated your phone number, there's no way that you can get it back. Any amount of money that's in the balance is theirs to keep. No recourse. No buts.

Moral of the story: Don't keep too much money within your handphone prepaid card. That money is yours "technically", but never yours (under their TnCs).

How Much Of A Cheat Can The World Be

How much of a cheat can the world be?
Extremely and despicably so, I'm afraid.
So long as its stated or written vaguely enough.
So long as you don't ask thoroughly and clear all doubts.
Any and all attempts to implicate it will be futile.
It will worm its way out of them with ease.

- BuLaDiFu -