VICE TECH

This Is How Bitcoin Could Die

While the bitcoin platform is theoretically sound—the decentralized blockchain makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit—vulnerabilities do exist at a few key junctures. Continuing Motherboard's bitcoin guide, here's some crucial ways the whole thing could unravel. Full story

How Humans Will Respond to Immortality: A Chat with John Fischer

I chatted at length with the University of California–Riverside philosophy professor about living forever. As expected, the conversation got pretty meta. Full story

How Deep-Sea Mud Found Off a Tiny Japanese Island May Change the Gadget Economy

China pretty much dominates the world market for rare earth elements, but a huge find underneath Japan's seas may now help break that stranglehold. Full story

Cody R. Wilson Is Doing an AMA on Reddit Right Now

When he isn't working toward a law degree at the University of Texas, you can find Cody using 3D printers to manufacture gun parts. It's a move that's drawing the ire of a growing crowd of antigun advocates, and it's something Motherboard explored in their new documentary, 'Click… Full story

Philip K. Dick's 4-Dimensional Gun

3D-printed guns? Please. Here's what the late sci-fi master had to say about the ultimate weapon. Full story

Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: A Chat With Yifo Guo

Guo's company, Avalon, shipped the ASIC-based bitcoin miners, custom-built rigs with specially-designed chips for efficiently printing the market’s hottest commodity. We recently caught with him on all things bitcoin, mining, and the future. Full story

To Combat China's Hacker Army, the US Is Copying Its Methods

The US government wants hackers, and it wants them young. In the face of a growing number of cyber attacks from China's hacker army on American companies and government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security is the latest to ramp up its recruiting efforts. These days the D… Full story

The ATF Isn't Yet Convinced That 3D-Printed Guns Compare to the Real Thing

I called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to get a better idea for what it takes to make a gun "consistently reliable," and program manager George Semonick said the guns should be "made to last years or generations." In other words, because 3D-printed guns Full story

Motherboard

Click, Print, Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement

Cody R. Wilson is a 25-year-old University of Texas law student who is working to build semiautomatic weapons using a 3D printer. Cody is an articulate and tech-savvy mouthpiece for the fight against gun control. I flew down to his home base of Austin, Texas, with a Motherboard f… Full story

Why Bitcoins Are Just Like Gold

A lot of people have difficulty wrapping their heads around what Bitcoin is or why it even has value, especially as the virtual cryptocurrency continues to scale record heights. How isn't this a Ponzi scheme? A good way to look at it is to compare Bitcoin to gold. Full story

Motherboard

'Click. Print. Gun.' (Trailer)

Cody R. Wilson has figured out how to print a semiautomatic rifle from the comfort of his own home. Now he's putting all the information online so that others will join him. Our documentary 'Click. Print. Gun.' investigates this groundbreaking technology and how it is changing th… Full story

Abu Dhabi Built the World's Largest Solar Power Plant with Oil and Mirrors

Leave it to the United Arab Emirates to show us all how to do high-tech solar the right way. Full story

Toyo Ito's Biggest Building: A Stadium That's Secretly a Solar Power Plant

2013 Pritzker Prize winner Toyo Ito began his career with luminous and transparent houses in his native Japan. But a sports stadium put him on the map. Full story

Deoptimized

As experts and amateurs analyze the trends between online content and metrics, they are coming to the same conclusion: High metrics are irrefutably linked to cognitive laziness, i.e., dumbing down. The internet is pandering to the channel-surfing consumers who refuse to stay in i… Full story