Though about the world building: he threw out a lot of neologisms on the page, and later other writers gave them meaning.

> Mean Girls demonstrate how patriarchy shapes young girls, [...]

Of course, young girls have no agency and the only thing shaping them is the mean patriarchy... /s

But a bitcoin in your vault by itself is indistinguishable from a shitcoin I just made by forking bitcoin with the same code but a new genesis block. Or even more pointed: the alternative futures of bitcoins after any route not taken by the community after any hard fork.

In any case, I agree that much of the value of gold comes from social conventions, too, yes.

Mostly the conceptual evolution was:

Knitting patterns have a lot of numbers with mathematical relations between them. You could keep track of them by hand, but spreadsheets are already an improvement. Especially when you want to make edits to earlier parts of the pattern. Well, spreadsheets aren't too bad to write, but they are basically write-only software, impossible to audit. She'd already learned programming in Haskell before, so going from there to using Haskell for making the numbers work out was a small step, conceptually.

My point was that humans don't offer any 100% guarantees either. However, an argument based on shades of grey, rather than binary absolutes, would obviously still work.

I do agree that in this particular case the lady in question seems rather nasty, and the whole woke movement seems to be quite the circular firing squad.

(Of course, we could extend the same game and deny the moniker of 'newspaper' for a rag like that. But at some point, we are drifting too far from the mainstream accepted definition of words.)

Partially due to scarcity, but also due to hype.

As a weaker point: I would expect an increase in the market capitalisation of the bitcoin float. Ie if you multiply the price of bitcoin by the amount of movable bitcoin right now and after the first Satoshi is sold, you compare with the new price of bitcoin multiplied by the newly enlarged amount of movable bitcoin.

The strong claim is that the price per bitcoin would go up, too. Not just the market cap of the float.

> It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.

Suppose I brute force cracked it to get access to the bitcoins. I would:

Quietly amass a large offsetting position in the bitcoin futures market (and wherever else you can do this), before I make any moves. Then (assuming I couldn't hedge my whole exposure at decent prices) I would use all means available to pretend that Satoshi had woken up again. Eg use specially fine-tuned LLMs to mimic his style to post on the usual mailing list etc. Some people will believe you, some won't.

I'd say post a bit in Satoshi's name to build interest. Then skeptics will say: prove it. And you 'prove' it by selling moving a few Satoshis between your own wallets back and forth. (Don't sell anything yet.) The hype will build, and you sell into it on the futures market.

The last step is important, because you can get rid of your bitcoin exposure this way, without any trace on the blockchain. So you can even vow to never release any of the stash on the market and other shenanigans. That should help the price.

Well, the futures will come due eventually, and then you can move the stash. The price might or might not crash, but you don't care, because you already locked in your profits on the derivatives.

It came out three years after Snow Crash, which already ironically referenced "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel".

I agree that Neuromancer wasn't a great novel, though it obviously had vibes that resonated with many people. The novel being otherwise a bit of a dud actually speaks to how strong the vibes were to overcome that.

Just like Knight Rider and Matlock had to deliver enough entertainment to keep you from switching channels and instead have you watch the next beer ad.

(We manage to mostly avoid that in Singapore.)

I was replying purely to 'Oh really, there was a vote?'

Most places have votes every few years. And the elected representatives can generally make and amend or keep laws. The candidates can also generally make any promises they wish to make, and if the general public wants some specific laws changed, it's often a good idea for candidates to make that a part of their platform. And if people generally don't want a law changed, candidates tend to ignore them. Basic representative democracy stuff.

But I predict that modest selling would increase the bitcoin price. Just imagine the hype from the Second Coming of Satoshi. Bitcoin would be front page news in mainstream newspapers for that week.

Someone selling single Satoshis from Satoshi's stash would herald the second coming of Satoshi. Can you imagine the hype?