welcome to publishing 2. last week i actually rigged the site up and got everything running, including the publishings system. this week, it's time to take full advantage of that and use the publishing system for its intended purpose, which is vomiting out about five hundred words on a certain topic and then pushing that to the site and forgetting it exists for another week or so. this week's focus is cryptocurrency. i'd figure most people reading this already know what cryptocurrency is and how it works on the backend, and that's great! but for the few who don't, i'll explain the simplest form of cryptocurrency with the first and biggest, which is bitcoin. bitcoin is a system of money that uses a digital ledger to record every transaction. a copy of this ledger resides on every computer that has the core wallet installed, and this ledger is called a blockchain, with the groups of transactions inside called blocks. blocks are pushed to the chain by miners, which are devices using their computing power to solve math problems, and whoever solves the big problem and gets the block onto the blockchain earns a block reward. at time of publishing (5/5/26) this is 3.125 btc, and this reward halves every 4 years. at time of publishing we're about halfway through this cycle. what i've described is called proof of work; note that other cryptocurrencies can work through other methods, such as the proof-of-stake system used in coins like ethereum.
now it's time to explain the more economic side of this amazing tool of exchange. cryptocurrency has had myriads of exchanges over the years, one of the first being mt. gox. it was doing pretty well for itself but soon shut down leading to one of the first brutal bitcoin crashes. but bitcoin as an institution perservered, and more exchanges cropped up all around, giving rise to the broader crypto market and the birth of what are today called altcoins. some of the first were litecoin, dogecoin, and ethereum. ethereum in particular is very interesting in its capability to deploy smart contracts, which can be used to create decentralized applications and also deploy tokens, which are like coins, but on another coin's network, in this case being ethereum's. smart contracts are an amazing thing but they've been used for incredible evil, with coins like safemoon destroying lots of trust in decentralized finance, and these rugpulls have only been getting more prevalent because it's far easier to scam someone when the government doesn't know your face.
so where do i see cryptocurrency going from here? i'd say probably still steady growth. certainly slower than the explosive growth we've seen in years past, but the train has no plans to stop. with more coins coming into existence every day, existing blockchains receiving upgrades, and people pouring unmatched fervor into making the space a better place. join us next week, where we'll go over steam and how every other gaming company went so, so wrong.