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How Was Bitcoin Created? A Look at Its Performance Since

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How Was Bitcoin Created? A Look at Its Performance Since
Bitcoin rallied to an all-time high in April and brought a windfall to early investors. Those who had not invested in it until then began seeing a hope that they could pump their wealth securely and rapidly. But the early investments were also risky, as not much was known about digital assets then. However, those risk-takers were rewarded handsomely. That brought unmatched popularity to Bitcoin, which already had the distinction of being the world’s oldest cryptocurrency. And despite being a volatile currency, it appears to have stabilised around $40,000 (roughly Rs. 29.7 lakhs), at least for now. Let’s have a look at Bitcoin’s more than a decade-long journey.

How and when was Bitcoin created?

There was a lot of mystery around Bitcoin after it was first proposed in 2008, the most prominent being its creator: Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous person whose real identity is still unknown. Nakamoto posted a paper, entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, on a mailing list on cryptography. This attracted a lot of attention and a huge discussion ensued about it. Bitcoin price in India stood at Rs. 29.18 lakhs as of 7pm IST on August 2.

In 2009, the Bitcoin software was made available to the public. Its mining, the process through which new Bitcoins are created and transacted on the blockchain, began.

The valuation of Bitcoin took place the next year. Until then, Bitcoin was only mined, nobody had traded it so the real value of the coin was undetermined. On May 22, 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 Bitcoins to buy two pizzas. Had he controlled his pizza craving, those Bitcoins would have been worth $389 million (roughly Rs. 2,890 crores) today. A least the episode gave us the “Bitcoin Pizza Day”.

In 2011, the dominance of whatever market Bitcoin had captured by then was first challenged. Some alternatives to Bitcoin — such as Namecoin and Litecoin — began emerging. These rival coins offered improved services like better transaction speed, among some other claims. Today, there are more than 11,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation, according to CoinMarketCap, a market research website.

Bitcoin’s middle years

These years were some of the most volatile periods in Bitcoin’s history. In 2013, three years after Bitcoin was first valued, its price crashed for the first time. Bitcoin had breached the $1,000 (roughly Rs. 74,380) mark by then, but the price began to quickly slide to around $300 (roughly Rs. 22,310). In January 2014, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox, suddenly went offline. With it, 850,000 Bitcoins too vanished and those who owned them never found out what happened to their Bitcoins. On 20 March 2014, Mt. Gox reported that it found 199999.99 Bitcoins in an old digital wallet, which brought the total number of bitcoins the firm lost down to 650,000, from 850,000. Investigation into the matter is still on.

In 2015, Bitcoins regained the $1,000 (roughly Rs. 74,380) value again. The next year, Ethereum posed a serious threat to Bitcoin’s market leadership. However, Bitcoin had gained so much popularity that by 2017 it was getting closer to the $10,000 (roughly Rs. 7.4 lakhs) mark. More people were joining the ecosystem and putting money into it. This year, the market cap of all cryptocurrency coins rose from $11 billion (roughly Rs. 81,820 crores) to over $300 billion (roughly Rs. 22,31,640 crores). Ethereum price in India stood at Rs. 1.9 lakhs as of 7pm IST on August 2.

Bitcoin now

At the start of 2018, Bitcoin price again crashed and it lost more than 80 percent of its value as several countries took steps to tighten regulatory oversight around cryptocurrency. Even in India, the RBI issued a note to regulate banks from trading or facilitating cryptocurrency transactions. Also this year, one of the biggest cryptocurrency heists took place. The BitConnect scam siphoned off $2 billion (roughly Rs. 14,880 crores) by duping investors.

The year 2019 started off quiet. But Bitcoin neared $8,000 (roughly Rs. 5.9 lakhs) by May. Then it lost nearly $1,000 (roughly Rs. 74,380) in June only to reach $14,000 (roughly Rs. 10.4 lakhs) by July. This year was relatively good for Bitcoin. The next year, the pandemic year, Bitcoin was still considered a fringe investment by the likes of Warren Buffet, who said it has “no value.” By the end of the year, however, Bitcoin nearly quadrupled, reaching an all-time high above $28,000 (roughly Rs. 20.8 lakhs). The Supreme Court of India set the RBI circular aside on cryptocurrency in May 2020.

This year, Bitcoin has had a roller-coaster ride so far. During the initial months, it had the backing of the tech tycoon Elon Musk, who later began supporting Dogecoin after environmentalists raised concern about Bitcoin mining driving up energy consumption. Also, after reaching its lifetime high of $65,000 (roughly Rs. 48.3 lakhs), Bitcoin crashed massively. It has now recovered to some extent and was trading around $40,000 (roughly Rs. 29.7 lakhs) on Monday, August 2. Dogecoin price in India stood at Rs. 15.11 as of 7pm IST on August 2.


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Microsoft Partners With Inworld to Bring AI Game Development Tools to Xbox

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Microsoft Partners With Inworld to Bring AI Game Development Tools to Xbox


Microsoft is teaming up with Inworld AI to create game development tools for Xbox, enabling developers to create characters, generate entire scripts and quests, and more. The multi-year deal brings an AI design copilot and an AI character runtime engine to the forefront, both of them being totally optional to use and to varying degrees. Of course, the use of AI in art has been criticised by many for simply lacking originality, in addition to running the risk of fewer jobs for artists — a growing fear among many considering the alarming number of layoffs seen at game studios this year in an attempt to cut costs.

“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”

The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.

Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.

Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.


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BSNL Offers Free 4G SIM Upgrade: Here’s How to Get It

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BSNL Offers Free 4G SIM Upgrade: Here’s How to Get It


BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) is a state-owned telecommunication company in India. Earlier this year in May, the government said that the firm started rolling out 4G services in the country. By December, the networks were said to be upgraded to 5G. However, at the India Mobile Congress, BSNL chairman P K Purwar said that the company will launch 4G services in December and then roll it across the country by June 2024. The chairman added that the 5G upgrades will take place after June next year.

In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.

To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.

Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.

The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.


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Realme GT 5 Pro Teased to Feature 3,000 Nits Display; More Details Revealed

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Realme GT 5 Pro Teased to Feature 3,000 Nits Display; More Details Revealed


Realme GT 5 Pro’s launch date is not far away. The Chinese smartphone brand on Tuesday (November 7) confirmed the arrival of the new GT series smartphone in its home country. The Realme GT 5 Pro is teased to come with a display with over 3000 nits of peak brightness. It is also confirmed to pack a larger heat dissipation area for thermal management. The handset will ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come as a successor to the Realme GT 5 that debuted in China in August.

Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.

The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.

For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.

The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.


The Motorola Edge 40 recently made its debut in the country as the successor to the Edge 30 that was launched last year. Should you buy this phone instead of the Nothing Phone 1 or the Realme Pro+? We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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