Tokyo Tower 📷

January 10, 2019

Tokyo Tower looked especially beautiful tonight.

How to Replace Text in WordPress with functions.php

January 8, 2019

This snippet can be used in a WordPress theme’s functions.php file to dynamically replace text on a specific part of the page. This example replaces text strings in the_content and nowhere else.

function replace_text($text) {
	$text = str_replace('<hr>', '<hr class="hr-small">', $text);
	$text = str_replace('<hr />', '<hr class="hr-small">', $text);
	$text = str_replace('>^<', 'class="rs">^<', $text);
	$text = str_replace('<sup>', '<sup class="rs-sup">', $text);
	return $text;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'replace_text');

Substratum discusses “blockchain content delivery” →

January 7, 2019

Jason Burns for Substratum:

Hi guys, I’m here to drop a quick video update for today to talk about how Substratum is speeding up blockchain content delivery with machine learning. Now, as most of you know from being involved in crypto, the blockchain is an intriguing decentralized approach to content storage with many benefits. However, the one area blockchain is weak, and thus one of its biggest problems is network latency.

What the f*** is “blockchain content delivery”? Blockchain is not a “decentralized approach to content storage”. Blockchain is a decentralized approach to record keeping through an immutable ledger with the storage component as a tradeoff for traceability and security. Network latency is simply a measure of the time that it takes for data to be sent between two network nodes. It doesn’t make blockchain “weak” because it’s only an issue if your blockchain project is too sh**ty is attract users.

So, why does blockchain have latency? Good question. The same feature that makes the blockchain so powerful is the feature that slows it down. The data that servers deliver, in this case the web content, needs to be verified by other nodes on the blockchain before it’s served to the end user. That involves more queries and responses, and those add up to significant amounts of time from an initial query to the final response, in some cases, servers need to communicate with servers across the world for authentication before reporting and responding to the end user.

This is an outright lie. Substratum’s networking layer uses standard TCP/IP and encryption technologies and does not use blockchain whatsoever. Web content is not “verified by other nodes” – that’s just a terrible idea. Substratum used this video to hype up ICO investors by showing them the glorious power of the blockchain and how it can be used to verify web content to create a “free and fair Internet”. In reality, the only blockchain that Substratum used is Ethereum’s ERC-20 protocol to create SUB, the company’s fundraising vehicle and monetization currency.

Our goal is to eliminate every barrier to widespread adoption of blockchain technology and high latency is one of the major barriers we’re addressing. Our solution uses machine learning or artificial intelligence to optimize server response times by incorporating geo-location data into our querying process. Our blockchain system will cut latency by working with only those nodes closest to the end user.

What blockchain system?

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Substratum’s missing ICO funds

January 6, 2019

During its ICO, Substratum accepted BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC. Below are the total contribution amounts for each cryptocurrency. These numbers are sourced from Substratum’s whitepaper.

Continue Reading →

Substratum discusses team expansion, infrastructure scaling, and Bittrex listing →

January 6, 2019

Jason Burns for Substratum:

Your contributions have enabled us to scale our teams, so that we can move rapidly and scale up to our private beta in December and our first production version in January. Now, we are bringing on some awesome people. We’re bringing on additional software developers and high end cryptographers to assist us as we go forward.

Since the conclusion of its $13 million ICO, Substratum has expanded its team to 27 full-time members – good news. Unfortunately, the statement regarding the private beta in December and first production version in January turned out to be lies. It’s now January 2019, and the production version of SubstratumNode is still nowhere to be seen.

Hopefully you saw the news yesterday that we released. We received a $5 million investment from a partner company and we are using this money to scale our infrastructure of supernodes. Now this will ensure that on day one, the Substratum network will be lightning fast. I know that’s a huge deal. And it will only improve as nodes continue to grow on each of your machines.

I assume this statement refers to the $5 million investment from Render Payment. This money was supposed to be used to scale Substratum’s network infrastructure to give its network a decent level of baseline operation around the world. Since this announcement, Substratum has not given an update regarding the status of their network infrastructure upgrades.

Our top target is still Bittres and that will happen. However in the interim, we are working to launch on Binance, Liquid, and Huobi.

When Bittrex?