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I am the King of Bedford

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Chapter 3 - Good Airs

The quarter-life crisis arrives a few years into your career.

‘Is this it?’ You think.

‘I’m supposed to do this for the next 40-45 years? Maybe if I redouble my efforts, forgo avocado toast forever, and marry a countess, we might be able to afford a two-bedroom flat above a betting shop in a commuter town called something like Wallythorpe or Pynchbottom-on-Thames.’

I left for South America.

Travel makes you live in the moment. The only looking back you do is to organise your experiences into a coherent blog for your family and friends — you know, so they remember to be jealous.

My site was called Tall Travels.

I wrote weekly. Raw, sarcastic, and poorly edited posts.

I had all the tools I needed to create something great — a sharp observer’s eye, creativity, unlimited time and energy, inspiring people, and formative experiences.

I particularly fell in love with Argentine culture in Buenos Aires — midnight dinners, literary discussions, film festivals, rock music, street art — I drank it all in… especially ‘yerba mate’, which I drank before the Hollywood celebrities. I learned Spanish, played 5-a-side football with locals, and wrote songs on a faulty steel-stringed guitar.

Tall Travels was self-expression. I still believe that your primary audience should be yourself. However, that does confuse potential readers of your travel blog. They expect ‘10 Cozy Cafes in Buenos Aires’s Upmarket Palermo Neighborhood’, not ‘A Conversation Between Overweight Farmers on a 14-Hour Bus Journey’.

My travel blog never looked attractive. In fact, I’ve always been against taking pictures. It feels like an alternate version of reality, and pressing your face to an SLR eyepiece and clicking the shutter means you are not really looking at life. You’re not really experiencing your trip. I took a few shots on a clunky digital camera — Machu Picchu, the expansive Bolivian Salt Flats, the grassy Pampas of the Andean foothills — but they never felt like mine. One time, I watched hundreds of tourists scramble to take the same photo at Iguazu Falls, then I wrote about it in the hostel.

The posts were rants. I needed to process why everyone seemed to act so differently. This formed part of my ‘write a million words of garbage’ training.

Writing comes easy when you are feeding your soul with so many new experiences. When everything is the same, you have to trick yourself to draw the words out.

Like many forms of writing, travel blogs aren’t very honest. But, I captured the landscapes in the camera of my mind. The characters of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina told the kinds of stories I’d never heard before. I wrote those stories later, after I processed what they meant.

Mexico would be the next place to feed my writing journey. And luckily, I like spicy food.

#unphiltered

✍️ via simpleX chat- https://smp15.simplex.im/a#NWh78YjBxnjT9AmhRu-t5m5MC81V_JhIgmvuZnzabm4

Only For those looking to reach me personally for all things related # bitcoin

✍️ via simpleX chat- https://smp15.simplex.im/a#NWh78YjBxnjT9AmhRu-t5m5MC81V_JhIgmvuZnzabm4

Only For those looking to reach me personally for all things related # bitcoin

✍️ via simpleX chat- https://smp15.simplex.im/a#NWh78YjBxnjT9AmhRu-t5m5MC81V_JhIgmvuZnzabm4

Only For those looking to reach me personally for all things related # bitcoin

✍️ via simpleX chat- https://smp15.simplex.im/a#NWh78YjBxnjT9AmhRu-t5m5MC81V_JhIgmvuZnzabm4

Only For those looking to reach me personally for all things related # bitcoin

Replying to Avatar techfeudalist

Have you ever wondered about the math behind bitcoin’s private and public keys?

Here’s how it works.

Imagine that you have a shoebox.

At the bottom of the box is a piece of graph paper.

Now, you go get a bundle of wire and tangle it up in a big messy ball. Like a bunch of tangled cables.

Now, inside the box you put an ant that will walk the wire and follow your instructions.

Now, you put the ant on its starting point on the wire. Then you pick a random number (say 1,078) and tell it to walk that number of waypoints.

How far to the next waypoint? The ant uses its handy maps app. At each waypoint, the app says how far to go to the next.

The ant starts walking along the wire, up, down, crisscrossing back and forth on the tangled wires in the box. A little while later, the ant completes the 1,078 waypoints and stops. You ask the ant to look down at the graph paper and tell you its position above the grid.

It tells you coordinates, say (15, 9).

That’s it! Your private key is 1078 (number of steps) and your public key is (15, 9).

Someone who has your public key (15, 9) has no idea how many waypoints the ant took to get there.

This is the cool thing about the encryption (maps app). When the ant looks forward, there is only one next waypoint. However, if the ant looks backwards, there are two waypoints that could arrive to where the ant is standing.

This means that for any malicious ant on the public key (15,9) trying to walk back to count the number of waypoints to the starting spot (secret key), there are many forks in the road that the ant must navigate when making the return trip. This makes the journey back impossible to do as a single ant. But maybe not for a vast colony of ants (quantum computer).

The real Bitcoin encryption uses vast distances and seemingly infinite points within a massive mathematical box.

To illustrate the vastness of the true scale, if each ant waypoint was roughly was the width of a human hair, the box would be almost 5 times the Milky Way galaxy (475,000 light years square) and the tangled wire would wrap around the visible universe uncountable trillions of times. It’s uncountable because there are almost as many waypoints for the ant to stop as there are atoms in the universe.