Latest news with #BSV
DW
5 hours ago
- DW
UNESCO adds Bavarian palaces to World Heritage List – DW – 07/12/2025
Image: BSV, Beck UNESCO has added Neuschwanstein, along with Herrenchiemsee Palace, Linderhof Castle and the King's House on Schachen, to its list of official World Heritage Sites. We'll introduce you to those three other sites in just a moment, but we begin our tour with by far the most popular: the fairytale castle Neuschwanstein. Image: BSV, Beck Neuschwanstein Castle, which is located in the foothills of the Alps in the very south of Germany close to the border with Austria, attracted over one million visitors in 2024, according to the Bavarian Palace Administration. It is also said to have been the inspiration for Disney's world-famous Cinderella Castle. It was built between 1869 and 1892 by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Image: Peter Widmann/imago images Even though King Ludwig II died in 1886, he was still able to live at Neuschwanstein for at least six months despite it still being a building site. The Singers' Hall gives an indication of the castle's modest furnishings. King Ludwig II never wanted to open it to the public but six weeks after his death the doors were opened to visitors. Image: Stefan Puchner/dpa/picture alliance Linderhof Palace is the smallest of the three palaces built by King Ludwig II. However, it is the only fully developed palace and also the only one that was inhabited by King Ludwig II for a substantial period of time. Perhaps that is why it attracts so many visitors. With over 350,000 visitors, it ranks second — by a fair margin — to Neuschwanstein. Image: Guenter Graefenhain/imageBROKER/picture alliance A special feature of Linderhof Palace is the Venus Grotto. King Ludwig II had the largest artificial grotto of the 19th century built in just two years (1875-1877) for his sole use. In the 90-metre-long and up to 14-metre-high artificial stalactite cave, he was able to recreate faraway places and opera scenes with clever lighting effects. Image: Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture alliance From 1878 to 1886, King Ludwig II had the New Herrenchiemsee Palace built on the Herreninsel in Lake Chiemsee, which explains the name. Versailles Palace near Paris served as a model. In terms of visitor numbers, it ranks third of the four sites, with just over 300,000 visitors last year. However, it tops the list for construction costs. Image: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa/picture alliance The construction of Herrenchiemsee cost more than Neuschwanstein and Linderhof residencies combined. More than 4.5 kg of gold leaf was used in the magnificent bedroom and the other rooms. It was a rather expensive pleasure considering King Ludwig II only lived in Herrenchiemsee Palace, his last major building project, for a few days. Image: Sunny Celeste/Bildagentur-online/picture alliance King's House on Schachen is not only smaller than the three residencies, it also attracts fewer visitors: last year, there were just under 7,000 visitors to the site. This could also be due to its location: 1,866 meters up in the Wetterstein mountains. It was built from wood between 1869 and 1872. Image: Angelika Warmuth/dpa/picture alliance There are five living rooms on the first floor of the King's House on Schachen and the Turkish Hall on the upper floor. This was modeled on a hall in the palace of Eyüp. To make it look authentic, the servants were placed in the hall in oriental dress, where they had to smoke hookahs and drink tea. Every year on August 25, King Ludwig II celebrated his birthday there. Image: Frank Leonhardt/dpaweb/dpa/picture-alliance 07/12/2025 July 12, 2025
France 24
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- France 24
'Fairytale' Neuschwanstein castle becomes UNESCO heritage site
Three other royal residences, also constructed in the late 19th Century under the famously arts-obsessed King Ludwig II of Bavaria, were also added to the coveted list: Herrenchiemsee, Linderhof and Schachen. Neuschwanstein, perched on a rocky, 200m-high Alpine crag, is Germany's most visited castle, with almost 1.5 million people flocking there every year. "A fairytale comes true for our fairytale castles: We are #WorldHeritage!" Bavaria's governor, Markus Soeder, wrote on X after the announcement. Neuschwanstein combines an idealised medieval exterior with architectural techniques considered cutting-edge at the time. Its main rooms are adorned with paintings of German and Nordic legends, the same stories that inspired composer Richard Wagner, for whom Ludwig was a generous patron. Peter Seibert of the Bavarian Castles Administration (BSV) told AFP that the UNESCO listing "is a very great responsibility, but also recognition... for the work we have done so far in preservation". Philippe, a 52-year-old visitor from Canada, was surprised that the castle was not already a World Heritage Site. "We're lucky to still be able to experience this," he said, calling the listing "a very good idea". Herrenchiemsee meanwhile evokes a Versailles in miniature on a lake between Munich and Salzburg, an homage to absolute monarch Louis XIV of France, whom Ludwig admired. Indeed Ludwig nicknamed Herrencheimsee "Meicost-Ettal", an anagram of Louis XIV's alleged aphorism "L'Etat, c'est moit" ("I am the state"). 'Part of Bavarian identity' The third site in the UNESCO listing is the small castle of Linderhof, completed in 1878, the only one to have been finished in Ludwig's lifetime. It mixes elements of French Baroque architecture from the reign of Louis XIV with touches of the Rococo style developed in southern Germany. Its park boasts an artificial cave inspired by Wagner's opera Tannhaeuser, 90 metres long and up to 14 metres high, which houses a grotto of Venus and was designed as a personal retreat for Ludwig. The electric lighting system used in the cave was state of the art at the time, with glass discs used to illuminate the grotto in different colours. The last of the four sites on the list is Schachen, a royal house in the style of a large Swiss chalet, where Ludwig liked to celebrate the saint's day of his namesake St Louis on August 25. It is located at 1,800 metres above sea level, not far from Neuschwanstein. The four castles have become "part of Bavarian identity" says Seibert, "iconic and perfectly embedded in a beautiful landscape". Ironically, while Ludwig's architectural legacy is today a source of pride in Bavaria -- not to mention tourist revenue -- they were part of the reason for his own downfall. The ruinous construction costs of the lavish residences led the Bavarian government to depose him, declaring him insane. Interned in Berg Palace, he died shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances at Lake Starnberg.
Local Germany
8 hours ago
- Local Germany
'Fairytale' Neuschwanstein castle becomes UNESCO heritage site
Three other royal residences, also constructed in the late 19th Century under the famously arts-obsessed King Ludwig II of Bavaria, were also added to the coveted list: Herrenchiemsee, Linderhof and Schachen. Neuschwanstein, perched on a rocky, 200m-high Alpine crag, is Germany's most visited castle, with almost 1.5 million people flocking there every year. "A fairytale comes true for our fairytale castles: We are #WorldHeritage!" Bavaria's governor, Markus Soeder, wrote on X after the announcement. Neuschwanstein combines an idealised medieval exterior with architectural techniques considered cutting-edge at the time. Its main rooms are adorned with paintings of German and Nordic legends, the same stories that inspired composer Richard Wagner, for whom Ludwig was a generous patron. Peter Seibert of the Bavarian Castles Administration (BSV) told AFP that the UNESCO listing "is a very great responsibility, but also recognition... for the work we have done so far in preservation". Philippe, a 52-year-old visitor from Canada, was surprised that the castle was not already a World Heritage Site. "We're lucky to still be able to experience this," he said, calling the listing "a very good idea". Herrenchiemsee meanwhile evokes a Versailles in miniature on a lake between Munich and Salzburg, an homage to absolute monarch Louis XIV of France, whom Ludwig admired. Indeed Ludwig nicknamed Herrencheimsee "Meicost-Ettal", an anagram of Louis XIV's alleged aphorism "L'Etat, c'est moit" ("I am the state"). Advertisement 'Part of Bavarian identity' The third site in the UNESCO listing is the small castle of Linderhof, completed in 1878, the only one to have been finished in Ludwig's lifetime. It mixes elements of French Baroque architecture from the reign of Louis XIV with touches of the Rococo style developed in southern Germany. Its park boasts an artificial cave inspired by Wagner's opera Tannhaeuser, 90 metres long and up to 14 metres high, which houses a grotto of Venus and was designed as a personal retreat for Ludwig. The electric lighting system used in the cave was state of the art at the time, with glass discs used to illuminate the grotto in different colours. The last of the four sites on the list is Schachen, a royal house in the style of a large Swiss chalet, where Ludwig liked to celebrate the saint's day of his namesake St Louis on August 25. Advertisement It is located at 1,800 metres above sea level, not far from Neuschwanstein. The four castles have become "part of Bavarian identity" says Seibert, "iconic and perfectly embedded in a beautiful landscape". Ironically, while Ludwig's architectural legacy is today a source of pride in Bavaria -- not to mention tourist revenue -- they were part of the reason for his own downfall. The ruinous construction costs of the lavish residences led the Bavarian government to depose him, declaring him insane. Interned in Berg Palace, he died shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances at Lake Starnberg.
Coin Geek
2 days ago
- Business
- Coin Geek
Kurt Wuckert Jr. goes to Boulder
Homepage > News > Editorial > Kurt Wuckert Jr. goes to Boulder Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Time for a travel Vlog! Is 'vlog' still a word? Either way, we're going with it! Let's walk through the journey. title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen=""> The premise If there's one thing the BSV economy needs more than anything else, it's not more Twitterati or hobbyists. It's more entrepreneurs and more investors: more builders who see Bitcoin not as a speculative asset to HODL until the next cycle, but as a protocol that can actually power real businesses every second of every day forever! Last month, I packed my bags and flew to Boulder, Colorado. Because if you're serious about attracting smart money and serious operators, sometimes you've got to get out of your echo chamber. And Boulder has quietly become one of the best places in America to do just that. It's not just the clean mountain air or the local startup coffee shops (though I'll admit, both are pretty great). It's that Boulder, unlike so many cities still clinging to the ghost of the last tech bubble, has evolved into a true ecosystem of practical, product-focused builders. Entrepreneurs there don't waste time pontificating about the 'future of money.' They're busy solving customer problems, raising capital, and shipping real things. The guru And no one embodies that ethos better than Brad Feld. Feld's not just another VC in a Patagonia vest chasing the next hype curve. He's been investing in technology companies for more than 30 years, through multiple crashes, and all the way to today. He co-founded Techstars in Boulder, helped scale the Foundry Group into one of the most respected venture firms in the country, and has backed hundreds of startups. But more than that, he's built a philosophy around what makes startup communities thrive. It's simple, deceptively so: give first. I saw Feld speak at the launch of his new book, Give First , where he shared stories from decades of building companies and ecosystems. The idea is that the best founders, investors, and local economies succeed when people lead with generosity, not extracting value at every turn, but looking for ways to support others, with no immediate expectation of financial payback. If that sounds quaint, spend five minutes in most blockchain circles today. Memes, speculation, and zero-sum thinking still dominate everything. 'Buy this coin so it pumps. Stake it. Dump it. Move on.' Meanwhile, almost no one is focused on what it means to actually build long-term value and create products that serve customers, generate revenue, and justify their existence beyond a white paper and a trading pair. The opportunity BSV, more than any other blockchain I've ever touched, desperately needs a boost of energy. We have the protocol. We have the scalability. What we don't have (at least not yet at the scale we should) are investors and entrepreneurs laser-focused on using Bitcoin to solve complex commercial problems. People who care more about margins and business models than about Twitter likes and pumpy charts. That's why Boulder was refreshing. I had conversations with founders and small business owners who didn't care much about coin price, but cared about cash flow, paying customers, and how technology could help them do more. It was a reminder that this is who we should be talking to if we want BSV to grow into what it was always meant to be: a robust, unbounded network for global commerce, not just a speculative playground. And yeah, it was a pretty great time. We shot a highlight video so you can see it yourself: Brad, Boulder, startup chatter, even a little local color from taco joints that accept BSV. If you want to understand the kind of entrepreneurial spirit we should be courting, watch the video. If you're building on Bitcoin, or thinking about it, I hope it convinces you to think bigger. Think like a founder. Think like Brad Feld. And maybe, just maybe, give first. Watch: Bitcoin is Green Tech with Dr. Owen Vaughan title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">
Coin Geek
4 days ago
- Business
- Coin Geek
Bitcoin tradeoffs
Homepage > News > Editorial > Bitcoin tradeoffs Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Spend enough time in the blockchain world, and certain dogmas begin to sound like laws of physics. Everyone should be able to run their own node. Initial sync times should be quick. The more nodes, the better. Your wallet should 'just work,' pulling balances from thin air the moment you enter your seed phrase. Scratch beneath that elegant surface, though, and you'll find these assumptions are anything but universal truths. They're artifacts of a very specific set of trade-offs; decisions made years ago by a handful of developers on one branch of Bitcoin's family tree. And they've so thoroughly imprinted themselves on the industry that anything diverging from them looks like heresy. Take the most famous of these: the belief that it's more important for poor people to run nodes than for poor people to transact. The people who hijacked bitcoin sold this concept to the world: The poor must be able to validate the BTC payments of the rich, but only the rich can afford payments on the network. Also, hijackers have custodial solutions available for the poor to make 2nd class payments. BTC made that explicit bargain. Block sizes were throttled to an absurdly small 1 MB, which is roughly one low-resolution JPEG per block or seven transactions per second globally. So any hobbyist could download and validate the chain from a spare laptop. But what was sacrificed? Throughput. Utility. The very capacity of the network to handle global commerce. In BTC, transaction fees spike whenever 'congestion' hits, making simple payments costly or even infeasible. But that was the deal: cheap nodes, expensive transactions. It locked Bitcoin into a model where only the well-heeled could rely on the network day-to-day, and everyone else could use some kind of custodial system or a vaporware L2 like Lightning Network. These trade-offs, in my opinion, are profoundly regressive. And once you accept that premise (that keeping nodes dirt cheap matters more than serving billions of transactions), you start building expectations around it. Wallets that simply derive a seed phrase, query a lightweight index, and instantly show balances only work because the UTXO set is tiny. BSV deliberately challenges this. When your ledger is designed to scale without artificial ceilings, the set of unspent outputs balloons. A wallet restoring from a mnemonic alone, without additional proof structures, starts to look quaint. For small blockers, they would argue that this is irresponsible. Right but how will wallets work in the teranode ecosystem? Because from my understanding and it was @ProjectBabbage who first brought this to my attention, that it's no longer possible to restore a wallet from just a private key alone. The issue is that with massive blocks,… — Eric Chennells (@EricChennells) July 5, 2025 That's why BSV wallets increasingly incorporate Merkle proofs alongside private keys, pinpointing funds directly with cryptographic receipts. It's an elegant solution if you can clear the mental hurdle that things shouldn't always work the way BTC taught us. Luckily, there is an official Wallet Toolbox, and lots of unofficial ways to store the UTXO set with Merkle proofs, and I foresee GorillaPool (and possibly other miners) offering UTXO sync and wallet restoration as a simple, paid service on the network. You are completely correct, amd you are one of the very few people who actually have a very good understanding of this. You deserve a massive shoutout for being an informed participant in the ridiculous thing is that your post was only seen by 23 people. You MUST… — Babbage (@ProjectBabbage) July 6, 2025 Other Dogmas: Initial sync time and 'the' mempool BTC folks boast that spinning up a full node should be quick. They can promise that because they capped the block size years ago. But if your network's goal is to become the data layer for global trade, finance, Internet of Things (IoT), and public records, that promise becomes a relic quickly. On BSV, initial sync is naturally longer. That's not a flaw, thought. It's a market opportunity. I foresee companies like GorillaPool shipping a fully synced disk image at the latest block height. Need a new archival node? Pay a modest fee, spin up in hours, and join the network with minimal downtime. It's simply a commercial solution to a commercial-scale problem. Of course, cypherpunks who want to run a node on their wife's boyfriend's computer will be upset, but opportunity waits for no one! Or consider the mempool: Bitcoin's dusty, dimly lit waiting room where your transaction sits, tapping its foot and checking its watch, awaiting the next block. In BTC, this feature is designed to create opportunities for 'important transactions' to bid higher for block space. Small blocks mean your payment often lingers in the mempool for hours, maybe days, until there's room to squeeze into a block. This is framed as decentralization at work, as the network politely queues your transaction in a traffic jam and calls it secure. On BSV, this entire dynamic changes. The mempool is typically empty. Transactions flow straight through and settle as abundant block space swallows global throughput without congestion pricing. And soon, even this concept will evolve. Under Teranode, the mempool itself starts to disappear. It's replaced by an unconfirmed transaction store inside a dedicated block assembly microservice. Nodes coordinate by exchanging massive subtrees of unconfirmed transactions, optimizing for speed, parallelization, and truly industrial-scale propagation. Instead of a dusty waiting room, it's more like an express terminal: transactions get batched, sorted, and pushed toward confirmation at a velocity that makes the mempool model look medieval. Dogma, The Third: Muh node Perhaps the most overlooked distortion is the notion that more nodes always means better decentralization. It's an easy sell at cocktail parties with Larry Fink and Jack Dorsey, but it's to the detriment of network health, and it's built on a false premise. Small blockers believe miners should always be presumed malicious, so they believe they must have lots of non-mining 'nodes' with copies of the chain ready to fork away from the chain the miners run, which is a crazy premise. So when BTC 'Muh Node' crowd says they will enforce the rule set that doesn't comply with the law, they're saying they will run a chain that isn't trading anywhere institutional anymore. Miners will follow the legal chain, and NodeBros spend a year looking for the next block. — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) November 14, 2019 Furthermore, a blockchain's security doesn't magically improve by bloating its edge with thousands of underpowered nodes. In fact, managing propagation across countless low-bandwidth peers introduces fragility. BSV's approach (fewer, highly robust nodes operating as industrial data centers) emphasizes throughput and reliability. The trade-off? Fewer players are in the backbone, but a network is actually capable of supporting billions of daily transactions. It's simply a different calculation of who the end user is. In BSV, it's not the node hobbyist; it's the merchant, the app developer, the billions of ordinary people paying for coffee, querying smart contracts, or timestamping invoices. None of this is inherently more righteous. But it is honest. BSV doesn't pretend that everyone must personally validate the entire chain for a payment system to be trustworthy. It leans on cryptographic proofs and competitive commercial services like the rest of our economy. You could argue that this restores Bitcoin to Satoshi's vision of a peer-to-peer cash system where trust is engineered through incentives, not socially policed by enthusiasts running Raspberry Pis. But, there's always a but… This all poses a thorny education challenge. People have been taught for 15 years that certain UX flows are normal because they grew from BTC's assumptions. Put in your seed phrase, and watch your coins appear. Fast sync times. Small chain, lightweight everything. But that's only one vision. It was never the only one. And ironically, it's the version that scales the least. Under pressure, that UX fails the common user, too. It just doesn't happen very often because aside from the 2017 bull run and the 2023 Ordinals craze, BTC gets very little real use from real people, so the congestion doesn't get experienced by many. In BSV, we will have to keep explaining why some wallets might ask you to track Merkle paths, why your node might take longer to sync, and why there's professional infrastructure where you expected hobbyist tinkering. These trade-offs aren't bugs. They're intentional, designed to support a network that can shoulder the world's economic data. In a way, it's poetic. The same debates echo from Bitcoin's earliest days: how many nodes should there be? How big can blocks get? Who is this system for? BTC's answers to those questions hardened dogma into gospel. BSV simply dares to answer differently. And as the world starts hunting for a data ledger that can carry actual commerce rather than speculative cycles, maybe we should reconsider who made the wiser bargain. Time will tell. Watch: Lessons on Triple Entry Accounting from Malta's TEA Conference
