Posts

Finite Fields - Bitcoin & Haskell

Bitcoin’s price has gone crazy up, and now I’m really responsible for learning it. I found the book Programming Bitcoin by Jimmy Song, it looks good enough to give it a try. It uses Python to teach, which is uninteresting and I end up only skimming over it, which leads to low retention. Learning necessitates inefficiencies, trial and error, solving problems and sharing. Thus to learn I need to throw an extra challenge. I’m going to learn another programming language(Haskell) to solve the book’s problems.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
| 4 min read | Bitcoin Haskell

Why swim in a river at 0°C?

There are plenty of reasons: Get out of your comfort zone, build character, discover your limits. There are plenty of justifications: Simply crazy, settling a bet, religious penitence/purification. All those might apply, however for me it was a CELEBRATION. A celebration of how well I’m doing nowadays. I was born in a big city, I grew up surrounded by the grayness of concrete. The river in my city was so polluted that already its smell would keep you away. Going into nature implied a family trip, implied planning, implied getting everyone to agree and then traveling far away until we could reach a clean river, a waterfall a lake. Only then could I jump into those waters, and I did no matter how cold they were.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
| 1 min read | Personal

Getting started with bitcoin

Bitcoin is all over the news, this time with big investors pouring money into it, a global pandemic that put the economy on hold, and governments printing money like crazy. Price raises, it is a bubble again. Maybe it is responsible this time to at least try to learn about Bitcoin without rushing to get it like everybody else seems to be doing again. The only way to learn about it, benefit from it and clear the doubts from the healthy skepticism is to test the technology by yourself. This is my experience setting up a node.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
| 4 min read | Bitcoin