The Bitcoin "Price"

Jemima Kelly writes No, bitcoin is not “the ninth-most-valuable asset in the world” and its a must-read. Below the fold, some commentary.

Two Million Page Views!

Woohoo! This blog just passed two million all-time page views since April 21^st 2007.

The New Oldweb.today

Two days before Christmas Ilya Kreymer posted Announcing the New OldWeb.today. The old oldweb.today was released five years ago, and Ilya described the details in a guest post here. It was an important step forward in replaying preserved Web content because users could view the old Web content as it would have been rendered at the time it was published, not as rendered in a modern browser. I showed an example of the difference this made in The Internet is for Cats.

Below the fold, I look at why the new oldweb.today is an improvement on the old version, which is still available at classic.oldweb.today

Michael Nelson's Group On Archiving Twitter

The rise and fall of the Trump administration has amply illustrated the importance of Twitter in the historical record. Alas, Twitter has no economic motivation to cater to the needs of historians. As they work to optimize Twitter's user experience, the engineers are likely completely unaware of the problems they are causing the Web archives trying to preserve history. Even if they were aware, they would be unable to justify the time and effort necessary to mitigate them.

Over the last six months Michael Nelson's group at Old Dominion University have continued their excellent work to evaluate exactly how much trouble future historians will have to contend with in three new blog posts from Kritika Garg and Himarsha Jayanetti:

• Twitter Was Already Difficult To Archive, Now It's Worse!
• New Twitter UI: Replaying Archived Twitter Pages That Never Existed
• Twitter Added Labels On Its Old User Interface

Below the fold, some commentary on each of them.

Stablecoins

I have long been skeptical of Bitcoin's "price" and, despite its recent massive surge, I'm still skeptical. But it turns out I was wrong two years ago when I wrote in Blockchain: What's Not To Like?:

Permissionless blockchains require an inflow of speculative funds at an average rate greater than the current rate of mining rewards if the "price" is not to collapse. To maintain Bitcoin's price at $4K requires an inflow of $300K/hour.

I found it hard to believe that this much actual money would flow in, but since then Bitcoin's "price" hasn't dropped below $4K, so I was wrong. Caution — I am only an amateur economist, and what follows below the fold is my attempt to make sense of what is going on.

RISC vs. CISC

The architectural debate between Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) and Reduced Instruction Set Conputers (RISC) really took off in the 1980s:

In particular, two projects at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. Stanford's MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley's RISC gave its name to the entire concept and was commercialized as the SPARC.

For the last decade or more the debate has seemed frozen, with the CISC x86 architecture dominating the server and desktop markets, while the RISC ARM architecture dominated the mobile market. But two recent developments are shaking things up. Below the fold, some discussion.

737 MAX Ungrounding

My post 737 MAX: The Case Against Boeing is a year old and has accumulated 58 updates in comments. Now the aircraft is returning to service, it is time for a new post. Below the fold, Bjorn Fehrm has two interesting posts about the ungrounding.