$BTC On October 1, 2021, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele posted a screenshot of a mining account on social media. The numbers on the screen were small: 0.00483976 BTC marked as "pending payment," and another 0.00599179 BTC as "expected to be mined," totaling 0.01083155 BTC, worth just over 500 USD at the time. For a country, this income is not even enough to cover many government meeting expenses. However, its significance far exceeds the amount itself. Bukele later wrote that the equipment was still being tested and installed, but this was the first batch of Bitcoin officially mined by the "volcano node." This made El Salvador the first government to publicly use national geothermal facilities for Bitcoin mining. x.com The date is undisputed. Bukele's original post, local media, and international reports all record it as October 1, 2021; The Block published a report at 04:27 Eastern Time on the same day, corresponding to 4:27 PM Taiwan time, also October 1. The Block's so-called "volcano mining" does not mean placing mining machines inside a volcano. Underground rock layers heat water sources, producing steam or high-temperature fluids, which geothermal power plants use to drive turbines to generate electricity. After the power is connected to ASIC miners, the equipment continuously performs hash calculations, competing with miners worldwide for the right to record new blocks and earn Bitcoin rewards. The volcano provides heat energy, and the miners complete the computations, "Volcanode"

On April 13, 1953, the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City held the only solo exhibition of Frida Kahlo's life in Mexico. Doctors had ordered her to rest in bed, and her friends thought the star of the show would have to be absent. After the exhibition opened, an ambulance stopped outside. Kahlo was carried into the gallery on a stretcher and laid on a four-poster bed that had been set up in advance. She wore vibrant Mexican clothing, drank, sang, and told jokes from the bed, surrounded by paintings of spines, blood, plants, miscarriages, marriage, and her own face. This attendance carried a heavy reality. Her body had severely deteriorated, and her right leg was amputated below the knee due to gangrene a few months later. The bed in the gallery was both a stage and the boundary of her real life. At that time, Kahlo was forty-five years old, had held exhibitions in New York and Paris, and the French government had collected her works; yet in her own country, she was still often introduced as the wife of muralist Diego Rivera. She did not wait for her body to recover, nor did she wait for art history to assign her a central place. She brought the bed into the exhibition hall and personally attended under her own name. Seventy-three years later, she has long since moved beyond that sickbed. In 2025, "The Dream (Bed)" sold for $54.66 million, setting a public auction record for a female artist's work; in 2026, Tate Modern held a major exhibition discussing how she transformed from a painter into a global cultural and commercial icon. Her compound interest is full of contradictions: pain turned into works, works turned into recognition, recognition

$ETH $USDT On September 30, 2021, at 9:38 AM, a transaction was recorded on Ethereum. The initiator neither deposited a large amount of funds into Compound nor took on a corresponding scale of borrowing, yet received about 91,000 COMP from the protocol. At that time, it was worth approximately $27 million, with a gas fee of only about $155. This was not an attacker secretly modifying the ledger. The smart contract checked the conditions and then, according to its own code, normally issued the tokens. A few hours earlier, Compound had just executed Governance Proposal No. 62. Compound is an on-chain lending protocol. Users can deposit assets like ETH and USDC to earn interest, or borrow funds by collateralizing assets. To attract depositors and borrowers, the protocol also issues COMP governance tokens as rewards. Previously, COMP rewards for each market were fixed, split evenly between suppliers and borrowers. Proposal No. 62 aimed to make this mechanism more flexible, allowing the community to set reward speeds separately for both sides, while also fixing several issues left by the old version. The proposal received 729,781 votes in favor and zero against, then was executed after a time lock. Unfortunately, the new Comptroller contract introduced a reward calculation bug. Addresses that interacted with markets like cTUSD, cMKR, cSUSHI, cYFI, cAAVE, and cSAI began accumulating COMP far beyond normal levels. There is a time zone difference regarding the incident date. Co

On July 27, 2021, during the women's gymnastics team final at the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles rushed toward the vault. She originally planned to perform a Yurchenko double pike, but after takeoff, she suddenly lost her spatial awareness in the air. She downgraded the move to a one-and-a-half twist, barely landed, and took a large step forward. Minutes later, she withdrew from the team final and subsequently gave up on the individual all-around, vault, uneven bars, and floor exercise finals. Gymnasts call this loss of spatial awareness the "twisties." The body has left the apparatus, but the brain cannot confirm the rotation position; moves practiced thousands of times suddenly lose their coordinates. To ordinary viewers, that jump looked like a mistake; to the gymnast flipping in midair, continuing could have ended with a head, neck, or spine injury upon landing. Tokyo had no live audience, but the TV cameras broadcast her decision worldwide. Some called her brave, others labeled her a "quitter." She once thought the entire United States hated her. A week later, Biles returned to the balance beam, replaced the dismount requiring a twist, and won a bronze medal. She later called it one of her most important medals. That bronze did not prove she had fully recovered; it recorded another ability: knowing what she could safely complete that day. Three years later, she won three gold medals in Paris for team, individual all-around, and vault, plus a silver in floor exercise. A person who once lost direction midair stood again on the highest podium. The real compounding happened during her two-year hiatus, weekly therapy, restructured training, and finally being able to say, "Today"

At 10 a.m. on September 29, 2017, a cross-departmental meeting on cryptocurrency began in the Seoul government office building in South Korea. The meeting was chaired by Kim Yong-beom, Vice Chairman of the Financial Services Commission of Korea. Representatives from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Justice, Bank of Korea, National Tax Service, National Police Agency, and Financial Supervisory Service sat at the same table to discuss the hottest fundraising method at the time: ICO. After the meeting, the Financial Services Commission announced one sentence: Regardless of the technology used or the name adopted, South Korea will ban all forms of ICO. According to time zone conversion, the meeting time corresponded to 9 a.m. that day in Taiwan, with no date crossover. Reuters published a report at 05:14 UTC that day, corresponding to 1:14 p.m. in Taiwan. Therefore, this issue uses the regulatory meeting and policy disclosure date of September 29, 2017. ICO stands for "Initial Coin Offering." The project team first writes a white paper explaining the blockchain, platform, or application they plan to develop, then sells their issued Tokens to investors, usually accepting ETH or BTC. This model eliminates underwriters, equity negotiations, and lengthy reviews typical in traditional financing. A small team, as long as it has a story, a website, and a smart contract, can potentially raise tens of millions of dollars from global investors within weeks. In 2017, ICOs rapidly became the most crowded track in the crypto market. Investors feared missing out on the "next Ethereum," and projects competed to shorten fundraising time. Some tokens represented future service usage rights, some promised profit distribution, and others

On August 31, 2015, Angela Merkel stood at a summer press conference in Berlin, facing hardly any easy questions. The Syrian war was still expanding, and large numbers of refugees were crossing the Mediterranean and Balkan routes into Europe. Local German governments worried that beds, schools, and administrative systems could not cope, conservative allies demanded setting a cap on numbers, and TV screens constantly showed borders, train stations, and temporary camps. Merkel spoke the phrase that would later become associated with her: “Wir schaffen das.” We can do this. Initially, this phrase was just a practical judgment for handling the problem: Germany had resources, society could mobilize, and Europe had to bear humanitarian and legal responsibilities. A few days later, facing refugees stranded in Hungary, Germany and Austria agreed to let them in. This decision provided safety for many and pushed Merkel into the most dangerous political moment of her sixteen years in office. Supporters held up welcome signs at train stations, local governments and volunteers began resettlement; opponents believed she had lost border control, and some within her party openly challenged her. In the 2017 federal election, Merkel’s conservative alliance’s vote share dropped from 41.5% in 2013 to 32.9%, and the anti-immigration AfD entered the federal parliament for the first time with 12.6%. This time, she did not hide difficulties behind technical language, nor did she wait for everyone’s agreement. A person known for caution made the most irrevocable choice. Before fame: inside the walls, first training herself not to express opinions lightly Angela