Even though his friends and most of his relatives questioned his enthusiasm, Groce didn’t hide his confidence. He liked to wear a T-shirt he designed that had the words “Bitcoin Millionaire” emblazoned in gold on the chest. He admitted that people made fun of him for it. “My fiancée keeps saying she’d rather I was just a regular old millionaire,” he said. “But maybe I will be someday, if these rigs keep working for me.” ♦
When a block is discovered, the discoverer may award themselves a certain number of bitcoins, which is agreed-upon by everyone in the network. Currently this bounty is 12.5 bitcoins; this value will halve every 210,000 blocks. See Controlled Currency Supply.
Feel free to ridicule me—I deserve it. I wrote my PIN code and recovery seed on the same piece of paper. I was planning to etch the seed on a metal bar and hide it, but before that happened my housecleaning service threw the paper away. Now I can’t remember my password and I have tried to guess it about 13 times. I now have to wait over an hour to make another guess. Very soon it will be years between guesses. Is there anything I can do or should I kiss my 7.5 bitcoins away?
The first hint of a meaningful challenge to the closed-protocol era arrived in 2008, not long after Zuckerberg opened the first international headquarters for his growing company. A mysterious programmer (or group of programmers) going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto circulated a paper on a cryptography mailing list. The paper was called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and in it, Nakamoto outlined an ingenious system for a digital currency that did not require a centralized trusted authority to verify transactions. At the time, Facebook and Bitcoin seemed to belong to entirely different spheres — one was a booming venture-backed social-media start-up that let you share birthday greetings and connect with old friends, while the other was a byzantine scheme for cryptographic currency from an obscure email list. But 10 years later, the ideas that Nakamoto unleashed with that paper now pose the most significant challenge to the hegemony of InternetTwo giants like Facebook.
But that dismissal would be shortsighted. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the recent history of the internet, it’s that seemingly esoteric decisions about software architecture can unleash profound global forces once the technology moves into wider circulation. If the email standards adopted in the 1970s had included public-private key cryptography as a default setting, we might have avoided the cataclysmic email hacks that have afflicted everyone from Sony to John Podesta, and millions of ordinary consumers might be spared routinized identity theft. If Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, had included a protocol for mapping our social identity in his original specs, we might not have Facebook.
To begin mining bitcoins, you’ll need to acquire bitcoin mining hardware. In the early days of bitcoin, it was possible to mine with your computer CPU or high speed video processor card. Today that’s no longer possible. Custom Bitcoin ASIC chips offer performance up to 100x the capability of older systems have come to dominate the Bitcoin mining industry.
The adviser, Rick Gates, was a deputy to Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort and stayed on as a liaison between Trump’s transition team and the Republican National Committee after the election, well after Manafort was forced to step down over his alleged ties to dirty Ukrainian money. Manafort and Gates’s arrival to the campaign team coincided with the most pivotal Russia-related episode of the election: the release of emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee by hackers working for the GRU, Russia’s premier military-intelligence unit. The GRU remained at the center of the Russians’ interference campaign, using the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to publish the hacked material in droves before the election. Gates and Manafort, meanwhile, remained in touch with the former GRU officer who the special counsel’s office believes was still connected to Russian intelligence services during the election—raising new questions about what the campaign officials knew about Russia’s hack-and-dump scheme.
This is a disruption and evolution of the agricultural process—and one to be bolstered as high as possible. Get involved with the movement today. To learn more about the KROPS ICO, go online to Agriculture Mobile App| Krops
As for ensuring your wiring is up to code, you should certainly employ the services of a qualified electrician. Given the high power consumption and considerable heat generation of mining hardware, fire is a serious potential hazard! If a fire breaks out and spreads to neighbouring properties, you could face severe legal repercussions if it can be shown to have occurred as a result of negligence.
Soon after I met Clear, I travelled to Glasgow, Kentucky, to see what bitcoin mining looked like. As I drove into the town of fourteen thousand, I passed shuttered factories and a central square lined with empty storefronts. On Howdy 106.5, a local radio station, a man tried to sell his bed, his television, and his basset hound—all for a hundred and ten dollars.
Unlike other cryptocurrencies, which can be bought without much fuss. Buying NEO can be a huge pain in the “you know what” sometimes. Currently, the only way to buy NEO is via exchanges like Bittrex, Binance etc.
Follow the link to go to their site and click the “Sign up here” link at the top of their site and follow their step by step instructions. After you have your account set up, you will need to add a “Worker”. Basically, for every miner that you have running, you will need to have a worker ID so the pool can keep track of your contributions.
As of February 2018, the Chinese Government halted trading of virtual currency, banned initial coin offerings and shut down mining. Some Chinese miners have since relocated to Canada.[32] According to a February 2018 report from Fortune,[33] Iceland has become a haven for cryptocurrency miners in part because of its cheap electricity. Prices are contained because nearly all of the country’s energy comes from renewable sources, prompting more mining companies to consider opening operations in Iceland. However, the cryptocurrency mania might have gone a little too far in Iceland. The region’s energy company says bitcoin mining is becoming so popular that the country will likely use more electricity to mine coins than power homes in 2018.
And yet — as the venture capitalist Chris Dixon points out — there was another factor, too, one that was more technical than financial in nature. “Let’s say you’re trying to build an open Twitter,” Dixon explained while sitting in a conference room at the New York offices of Andreessen Horowitz, where he is a general partner. “I’m @cdixon at Twitter. Where do you store that? You need a database.” A closed architecture like Facebook’s or Twitter’s puts all the information about its users — their handles, their likes and photos, the map of connections they have to other individuals on the network — into a private database that is maintained by the company. Whenever you look at your Facebook newsfeed, you are granted access to some infinitesimally small section of that database, seeing only the information that is relevant to you.
Jump up ^ McCarthy, Tyler (30 November 2017). “‘Big Bang Theory’ Season 11, Episode 9 recap: The gang flashes back to find a fortune”. Fox News. Archived from the original on 7 December 2017. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
These currencies can be used in clever ways. Juan Benet’s Filecoin system will rely on Ethereum technology and reward users and developers who adopt its IPFS protocol or help maintain the shared database it requires. Protocol Labs is creating its own cryptocurrency, also called Filecoin, and has plans to sell some of those coins on the open market in the coming months. (In the summer of 2017, the company raised $135 million in the first 60 minutes of what Benet calls a “presale” of the tokens to accredited investors.) Many cryptocurrencies are first made available to the public through a process known as an initial coin offering, or I.C.O.
Jump up ^ “Blockchain”. Investopedia. Archived from the original on 23 March 2016. Retrieved 19 March 2016. Based on the Bitcoin protocol, the blockchain database is shared by all nodes participating in a system.
A more fundamental worry is that digital-currency mining, like other sorts of mining, has environmental costs: all that number-crunching uses a lot of electricity, and not all of it comes from renewable sources, as it does in Boden. The rapid development of the ASICs chips has made the machines more efficient, but even if all mining worldwide were carried out in modern facilities like Boden’s, the combined electricity consumption would be 1.46 terawatt-hours per year—the consumption of about 135,000 average American homes.
One of the most sought after reasons why so many traders are turning to Bitcoin is the fact that it’s a completely new median and is in most cases independent of the FOREX and other exchange systems. Furthermore, this currency also moves on a global scale, so it is somewhat isolated from localized risk. Events that impact the fluctuation of Bitcoin prices are usually easily traced and often predictable as long as common sense and some knowledge of economics are used. Those of who are first starting to trade Bitcoin won’t have to sift through enormous amounts of data to carefully analyze price movements of Bitcoin, in most cases you can see clear relationship between events related to Bitcoin and its value.
Bitcoin mining requires a computer and a special program. Miners will use this program and a lot of computer resources to compete with other miners in solving complicated mathematical problems. About every ten minutes, they will try to solve a block that has the latest transaction data in it, using cryptographic hash functions.
Nobody owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email. Bitcoin is controlled by all Bitcoin users around the world. While developers are improving the software, they can’t force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use. In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus.
However, when you do the math it seems that none of these cloud mining sites are profitable in the long run. Those that do seems profitable are usually scams that don’t even own any mining equipment, they are just elaborate Ponzi schemes.
To add a new block to the chain, a miner has to finish what’s called a cryptographic proof-of-work problem. Such problems are impossible to solve without applying a ton of brute computing force, so if you have a solution in hand, it’s proof that you’ve done a certain quantity of computational work. The computational problem is different for every block in the chain, and it involves a particular kind of algorithm called a hash function.
Jump up ^ Staff, Verge (13 December 2013). “Casascius, maker of shiny physical bitcoins, shut down by Treasury Department”. The Verge. Archived from the original on 10 January 2014. Retrieved 10 January 2014.
If you do want to take a look at cloud mining I suggest using Genesis Mining – the only cloud mining company that has been around long enough to prove it’s not a scam. But make sure to do the math before putting your money into any of these plans.
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Online currencies aren’t exempt. In 2007, the federal government filed charges against e-Gold, a company that sold a digital currency redeemable for gold. The government argued that the project enabled money laundering and child pornography, since users did not have to provide thorough identification. The company’s owners were found guilty of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and the C.E.O. was sentenced to months of house arrest. The company was effectively shut down.
Jump up ^ Commission, Ontario Securities. “CSA Staff Notice 46-307 Cryptocurrency Offerings”. Ontario Securities Commission. Archived from the original on 29 September 2017. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
The blockchain evangelists behind platforms like Ethereum believe that a comparable array of advances in software, cryptography and distributed systems has the ability to tackle today’s digital problems: the corrosive incentives of online advertising; the quasi monopolies of Facebook, Google and Amazon; Russian misinformation campaigns. If they succeed, their creations may challenge the hegemony of the tech giants far more effectively than any antitrust regulation. They even claim to offer an alternative to the winner-take-all model of capitalism than has driven wealth inequality to heights not seen since the age of the robber barons.
Bitcoin mining with anything less will consume more in electricity than you are likely to earn. It’s essential to mine bitcoins with the best bitcoin mining hardware built specifically for that purpose. Several companies such as Avalon offer excellent systems built specifically for bitcoin mining.
To prevent the basic cryptography-related mistakes that have plagued Bitcoin, Ethereum has recruited academic experts to audit its protocol. Shi and Juels are looking for ways that Ethereum could be abused by criminals8. “The technology itself is morally neutral, but we should figure out how to shape it so that it can support policies designed to limit the amount of harm it can do,” says Juels.
Generally, the fees related with trading through CFDs are usually very low when compared to other market trading methods. However, they are higher than if you were to trade direct Bitcoin instead of CFDs. Additionally, it is vital to understand that CFDs are perfectly suitable for a short term trader but are not a good choice for those seeking to make long term investments, because of the daily premium of 0.1% that most charge for using CFDs. Then there is the all-time hated “margin call.” This is a system put in place to prevent the client balances from going deep into negatives. Since Bitcoin offers high volatility and most exchanges give you high leverage, the possibility of negative balances is a real risk and a threat to the exchange. Lastly, CFDs require regulations and regulations come with fees. This is exactly why many Bitcoin exchanges choose to operate outside of the US, where these fees are astronomical.
My guess is that in the long run you could make a profit from Bitcoin mining but only if you invest a considerable amount of money in a good mining rig (e.g. Antminer s9). If you don’t have the time or the money – stay away from mining and just invest in buying Bitcoins for the long run.
Electricity Rate – Operating a Bitcoin miner consumes a lot of electricity. You’ll need to find out your electricity rate in order to calculate profitability. This can usually be found on your monthly electricity bill.
Jump up ^ Allison, Ian (28 April 2017). “Ethereum co-founder Dr Gavin Wood and company release Parity Bitcoin”. International Business Times. Archived from the original on 28 April 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2017.
Jump up ^ “Federal Council report on virtual currencies in response to the Schwaab (13.3687) and Weibel (13.4070) postulates” (PDF). Federal Council (Switzerland). Swiss Confederation. 25 June 2014. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 December 2014. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
Since the difficulty of Bitcoin mining is very high now people will pool their miners together to have a better chance of creating a block and having it confirmed before other miners for a share of the current mining reward which is 12.5 Bitcoin, plus any transaction fees. We will cover pool mining later in the guide. Continue Reading ➞
Jump up ^ “Here’s The Problem with the New Theory That A Japanese Math Professor Is The Inventor of Bitcoin”. San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on 4 January 2015. Retrieved 24 February 2015.
But none of that happened, for a simple reason. Geolocation, like the location of web pages and email addresses and domain names, is a problem we solved with an open protocol. And because it’s a problem we don’t have, we rarely think about how beautifully GPS does work and how many different applications have been built on its foundation.
That was Russell Simmons, responding to a lawsuit, filed last week, that accuses him of rape—the 16th allegation of sexual misconduct that has been made against the mogul since November. Adam Grandmaison, better known as Adam22, the founder of the hip-hop podcast No Jumper, recently addressed the accusations of rape and assault made against him with a similar reference to the lie detector: “I’m taking a polygraph this week fuck it,” he tweeted. The statements came not long after the actor Jeremy Piven, in an attempt to defend against his own #MeToo accusations, took—and passed—a polygraph test. As part of the lead-up to Stormy Daniels’s 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, her attorney, Michael Avenatti, claimed that his client had submitted to a polygraph in 2011 and given what that test found to be truthful answers to such questions as, “Around July 2006, did you have vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump?” and, “Around July 2006, did you have unprotected sex with Donald Trump?”
This gives the pool members a more frequent, steady payout (this is called reducing your variance), but your payout(s) can be decreased by whatever fee the pool might charge. Solo mining will give you large, infrequent payouts and pooled mining will give you small, frequent payouts, but both add up to the same amount if you’re using a zero fee pool in the long-term.
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Jump up ^ “Federal Council report on virtual currencies in response to the Schwaab (13.3687) and Weibel (13.4070) postulates” (PDF). Federal Council (Switzerland). Swiss Confederation. 25 June 2014. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 December 2014. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
Monero not only bakes anonymity features into the cryptocurrency itself, but implements a few features that Bitcoin still can’t offer. It uses a technique called “stealth addresses” to generate addresses for receiving Monero that are essentially encrypted; the recipient can retrieve the funds, but no one can link that stealth address to the owner. It employs a technique called “ring signatures,” which means every Monero spent is grouped with as many as a hundred other transactions, so that the spender’s address is mixed in with a group of strangers, and every subsequent movement of that money makes it exponentially more difficult to trace back to the source. And it uses something called “ring confidential transactions,” which hides the amount of every transaction.
While the rare ICO captures the attention of investors and raises the cryptocurrency it requires, many will inevitably fail,. Studying the market is not complicated and gives one a good idea of how the coin will fare.
Some countries explicitly permit the use of bitcoin, including Canada and Australia. It is prohibited in Iceland, which has had strict capital controls since the collapse of its banks during the 2008 financial crisis. China allows private individuals to hold and trade bitcoin, but participation by banks and other financial institutions is prohibited. The European Union does not have an overall position but may become restrictive in the wake of the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris.
Perhaps it is a good thing that the breakneck growth of a year ago has ended: had it continued, the system would soon have hit the limits of its capacity. The bitcoin protocol in its current form can only process seven transactions per second—nothing compared with the capacity of conventional payment systems such as Visa, which can handle 10,000.
Dash is very much similar to Bitcoin is many ways, one of the main reasons being because they both use block chain as a database to run between updates of value with individuals that may not be 100% valid. The core difference with these systems is based on the government model, for example Dash is governed by owner Masternode, and Bitcoin is governed by third party via black chain. With Dash private transactions can be made with no connection to a person identify much like Bitcoin and other similar platforms.
Jump up ^ It is misleading to think that there is an analogy between gold mining and bitcoin mining. The fact is that gold miners are rewarded for producing gold, while bitcoin miners are not rewarded for producing bitcoins; they are rewarded for their record-keeping services.[53]
Then all Bitcoin mining is done remotely in the cloud. This enables the owners to not deal with any of the hassles usually encountered when mining bitcoins such as electricity, hosting issues, heat, installation or upkeep trouble.
The makers of mining computers benefit from the way the bitcoin system adjusts the difficulty of the puzzles, every two weeks, according to how much computing power is hooked up to the system. In theory the difficulty can be adjusted in both directions: upwards, to ensure that the system does not get swamped by an excess of prize-seeking machines; and downwards, to encourage miners to keep their machines online when things get too quiet. But until now the difficulty has mostly gone upwards: since the first ASIC chips were introduced in early 2013, it has increased by a factor of 10,000. As a result, new mining computers, which each cost several thousand dollars, have been becoming obsolete in a matter of months.
Bitcoin is not a fiat currency with legal tender status in any jurisdiction, but often tax liability accrues regardless of the medium used. There is a wide variety of legislation in many different jurisdictions which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains, or some other form of tax liability to arise with Bitcoin.
Even decentralized cryptomovements have their key nodes. For Ethereum, one of those nodes is the Brooklyn headquarters of an organization called ConsenSys, founded by Joseph Lubin, an early Ethereum pioneer. In November, Amanda Gutterman, the 26-year-old chief marketing officer for ConsenSys, gave me a tour of the space. In our first few minutes together, she offered the obligatory cup of coffee, only to discover that the drip-coffee machine in the kitchen was bone dry. “How can we fix the internet if we can’t even make coffee?” she said with a laugh.
“The creation, trading or usage of VCs including Bitcoins, as a medium for payment are not authorised by any central bank or monetary authority. No regulatory approvals, registration or authorisation is stated to have been obtained by the entities concerned for carrying on such activities,” the central bank had said.
The relocation of Bitfinex from Taiwan to Switzerland would lead to two of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges leaving Asia to Europe within a single month. If leading cryptocurrency businesses continue to move out of Asia due to impractical regulations to Europe, it could lead to Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong losing their dominance over the global market, and could trigger competition amongst global economies to house cryptocurrency businesses.
This is a reference to a Times of London article that indicated that the British government had failed to stimulate the economy. Nakamoto appeared to be saying that it was time to try something new. The text, hidden amid a jumble of code, was a sort of digital battle cry. It also indicated that Nakamoto read a British newspaper. He used British spelling (“favour,” “colour,” “grey,” “modernised”) and at one point described something as being “bloody hard.” An apartment was a “flat,” math was “maths,” and his comments tended to appear after normal business hours ended in the United Kingdom. In an initial post announcing bitcoin, he employed American-style spelling. But after that a British style appeared to flow naturally.
At this stage of Bitcoin’s development, it’s likely that only major corporations or states would be able to meet this expense… although it’s unclear what net benefit, if any, such actors would gain from degrading or destroying Bitcoin.
As for ensuring your wiring is up to code, you should certainly employ the services of a qualified electrician. Given the high power consumption and considerable heat generation of mining hardware, fire is a serious potential hazard! If a fire breaks out and spreads to neighbouring properties, you could face severe legal repercussions if it can be shown to have occurred as a result of negligence.
Jump up ^ “Federal Council report on virtual currencies in response to the Schwaab (13.3687) and Weibel (13.4070) postulates” (PDF). Federal Council (Switzerland). Swiss Confederation. 25 June 2014. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 December 2014. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
The best way to do this is through the use of a Bitcoin mining calculator. Just enter the data of the Bitcoin miner you are planning on buying and see how long it will take you to break even or make a profit. However, I can tell you from the get go that if you don’t have a few hundred dollars to spare you probably won’t be able to mine any Bitcoins.
Despite the slump in bitcoin’s value—last year it performed even worse than the Russian rouble and Ukrainian hryvnia—the combined mining power on the network is still increasing, and some miners are still investing in upgrading their machines, making this one of the fastest-moving parts of the IT industry.
The blockchain/crypto space right now is still in its infancy, therefore, I think the best investments you can make right now are in infrastructural and protocols projects, which will help foster the development ecosystem of the entire industry. More devs = more growth and more projects.
Jump up ^ Sidel, Robin (22 December 2013). “Banks Mostly Avoid Providing Bitcoin Services. Lenders Don’t Share Investors’ Enthusiasm for the Virtual-Currency Craze”. Online.wsj.com. Archived from the original on 19 November 2015. Retrieved 29 December 2013.
The above chart is just for background. If you are mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that 64-digit number (the hash). I repeat: You do not need to calculate the total value of a hash.
Hello Crypto Investors, Are you looking answers for your question “What is the best cryptocurrency to invest in right now?” Since the launch of Bitcoin the cryptocurrency is growing very fast and every day a lot of new cryptocurrency or coins or tokens are launched. Built on the Blockchain Technology these crypto currencies are creating their own independent […]
I watched Saleem’s video again, this time writing down the Linux commands he’d used into a text file so I could copy and paste them into the terminal window. At one point in the video, Saleem had reset his Trezor by shorting two pins on the circuit board using a pair of tweezers and pushing the Trezor’s two buttons at the same time. The PINs were tiny, and I knew my hands would be shaking too much to use tweezers. Instead, I rigged together a couple of wires and a pushbutton to make it easy to reset the Trezor.
The Bitcoin network can already process a much higher number of transactions per second than it does today. It is, however, not entirely ready to scale to the level of major credit card networks. Work is underway to lift current limitations, and future requirements are well known. Since inception, every aspect of the Bitcoin network has been in a continuous process of maturation, optimization, and specialization, and it should be expected to remain that way for some years to come. As traffic grows, more Bitcoin users may use lightweight clients, and full network nodes may become a more specialized service. For more details, see the Scalability page on the Wiki.
To the best of our knowledge, Bitcoin has not been made illegal by legislation in most jurisdictions. However, some jurisdictions (such as Argentina and Russia) severely restrict or ban foreign currencies. Other jurisdictions (such as Thailand) may limit the licensing of certain entities such as Bitcoin exchanges.
The system was first launched in 2012 and has become popular since with many investors interested in these types of system, especially digital currency. Ripple is one of the first currency based platforms to be able to a working functional system that allows exchanges. Ripple teamed up with the best of the best, who had experience in digital currency and knew what this field was about.
“Many cryptocurrencies are murky, overhyped, and vulnerable to crashes. The market desperately needs the clarity that only robust, impartial ratings can provide,” Weiss Ratings founder Martin Weiss said earlier this year.
The key is that if somebody modifies an accepted block—one that already has a proof-of-work solution pinned to the end of it—she can’t reuse that same solution. She has to find a new one. And that’s why proof of work is needed—to guarantee that she can’t just surreptitiously modify a block and thus corrupt the ledger.
From Bitcoin’s failures, we have learned how digital communities shouldn’t operate. We have seen how ledger systems can be hijacked. And we have seen the wastage in a mining system that consumed gigawatt–hours of electricity and spawned giant server farms in China solely to crunch numbers to “mine” Bitcoins.
As you can see, there are many different cryptocurrencies out there and each one of them offers something different. They were all created with certain criteria or functionality in mind, and many more developers continue generating new and improved functions amongst the existing cryptocurrencies, as well as generating new ones to satisfying the ever demanding users.
The main goal of this post was to create awareness among new investors. For a newcomer in the field of cryptocurrency, it can be quite frustrating. I have encountered many people who have the money to invest in cryptocurrencies. But they are confused beyond believe and keep the money stacked in their bank accounts instead.
For most critics, the solution to these immense structural issues has been to propose either a new mindfulness about the dangers of these tools — turning off our smartphones, keeping kids off social media — or the strong arm of regulation and antitrust: making the tech giants subject to the same scrutiny as other industries that are vital to the public interest, like the railroads or telephone networks of an earlier age. Both those ideas are commendable: We probably should develop a new set of habits governing how we interact with social media, and it seems entirely sensible that companies as powerful as Google and Facebook should face the same regulatory scrutiny as, say, television networks. But those interventions are unlikely to fix the core problems that the online world confronts. After all, it was not just the antitrust division of the Department of Justice that challenged Microsoft’s monopoly power in the 1990s; it was also the emergence of new software and hardware — the web, open-source software and Apple products — that helped undermine Microsoft’s dominant position.