Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a bitcoin.

I made a chrome extension to replace all instances of “bitcoin” and “blockchain” with “money laundering”/”financing terrorism”/”fraud” depending on its function in the sentence. I wanted to see how difficult it would be to determine noun functions using a JS language processor.

Labeling parts of speech is easy, determining context is hard. Source code here. I suppose it would have been more useful for me to release a chrome extension that identifies the parts of speech of a sentence without messing up the web page, but that would have been less entertaining to build.

Here it is in action:

Screen Shot 2015-06-27 at 3.02.05 PM

I don’t dislike Bitcoin, of course. For my personal version of the extension, I replace “bitcoin” with “democratizing the banking system” and “market-liberating currency”.

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