ChunkHost Blog

You're not an idiot -- the things you described are very real. I've heard about tons of scams and quite a few dead-end ventures. The 21inc thing sounds pretty bizarre to me as well, but there is more going on in the bitcoin world than just that.

I'm involved with a VPS hosting company called ChunkHost, and we've accepted bitcoin for many years. We're not criminals, and we don't tolerate criminals on our network, and nonetheless bitcoin has served us well as a means of payment. We've written on our blog[1] about how bitcoin payments are 20-30% of our revenue.

Another interesting company is purse.io -- they let you get something like a 20% discount on your Amazon purchases by paying in bitcoin. coffee.foldapp.com lets you get 20% off your Starbucks purchases by paying with bitcoin. Again, this is not a scam -- I use it and it works. Don't you think this is a real benefit that real people could appreciate?

I'm curious how long you've been following bitcoin. I've been interested in it since 2009/2010, and have seen the goalposts move a great deal: every time a goal is reached, the critics change it so they can declare bitcoin a failure. First it was that "you can't buy anything for it," which was true until a pizza was sold for 10,000 bitcoins in mid-2010.

Then it was "no store accepts it" -- which was true until a few months later when you could buy things like web hosting from tiny bitcoin-only companies. Then it became "no large company will ever accept it." That remained…

It seems your focus is not on productivity (e.g. build a good website, quickly) but rather working hard, from the basics in order to build a strong foundation for the future. Learning from the "ground up" is no easy task, so I would suggest a divide and conquer strategy rather than trying to attack all the problem at the same time. For that reason I'll split the learning in a few different buckets, that you can choose to attack whenever you feel ready for it. I think the methodology below works best if you have a simple project in mind to work through (But remain stay realistic/minimalistic for now).

1. Front-end layout: html/css

Here, think about the website layout you would like to have. Feel free to wander the web and get inspired by other design you like, and try to recreate them. At this point, you might need to brush up your Photoshop skills (for minor things). Look at css frameworks in terms of what they have to offer, and recreate it. (You can even look at their code to understand better).

I would highly recommend using Firebug at this stage, to inspect page elements and css properties for websites you visit. As far as html is concerned, learn about good practices, and standards (quickly, don't become a fanatic). Use w3c validator at the end and try to make it down to zero errors/warnings.

2. Front-end UX: javascript

While html/css focus on presentation, and creating a layout. Client-side Javascript will give life to it. Here I would suggest doing basic things…

Found the blog post referenced by the article:

https://chunkhost.com/blog/15%2Fhuge_security_hole_in_sendgrid

> However, it turns out that [SendGrid's security] policy was ignored this weekend, and someone managed to convince Sendgrid over the phone to change the email address on the account. We got an email from them, but by that point it was already too late. The hacker had logged into Sendgrid and taken control.

> He had registered a domain, chunkhost.info, and “Would you please change our email from support@chunkhost.com to support@chunkhost.info?” sounded convincing enough that Sendgrid went through with it without bothering to verify anything.

http://chunkhost.com/faq

How long will the beta be free?

At least 5 weeks. Sometimes longer, depending on capacity.

When your beta chunk's time is up, we email you asking you to take a survey about the experience. At the end of the survey, you can choose to keep your chunk and begin paying for it or let it be shut down.