So, what happens if you take say the EML expression for addition, and invert the binary tree?

But recorded music was a crisis. And it did tempt a lot of people into supporting fabulously abusable, rich-enriching "intellectual property" law as a means of financing art.

Rich people are lobbying to capitalize on this crisis as well.

But for aerospace, the customer probably knows pretty well what they want.

For what good it does, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook aren't that yet (the Metaverse might have been borderline though, haha)

"Git should get a room!"

That's a bit like a mathematician trying damn hard to prove something, proving it for most cases, and then be totally unaware of the proof six months later, relying on his own proof and proving it for all cases. That doesn't sound like it happens very often, especially not for heavily online academics.

Are you sure he wasn't just politely nodding along to the entrepreneur explaining his invention to him?

And it seems also the thing you mention about taking money on bad terms should be independently verifiable, which the journalist writing this article should probably have checked.

I have trouble believing Satoshi would pursue a venture capital startup founder life in his personal life, assuming he didn't burn his wallets. I would find it a lot more likely that he pursued an academic career at his own tempo, writing a paper here and there, maybe teaching undergraduates even, etc. But that's a lot closer to my dream life, so maybe I'm biased there as well!

But interesting as this is, there are others who fit at least as well. That bit gold was the closest proposed scheme to Bitcoin is well known, and we know the proposer of bit gold (Szabo) was actively soliciting partners to help implement it as a real system right before Bitcoin appeared.

Also, people leave mailing lists and come back randomly months later all the time. Adam could have simply been unlucky, and busy with other projects at the time of the launch. Lots of people were, and kicked themselves for it (which honestly, it seems Adam did too!).

Adam Back is credited in the Bitcoin whitepaper as the inventor of Hashcash. W. Dai is credited as the inventor of b-money. But Nick Szabo is not credited as the inventor of bit gold, by far the most mature of these ideas floating around at the cipherpunks mailing list at the time. That's a conspicuous absence.

Ha, that may be technically true but when did you ever find a billionaire who would be OK with it?

I'm sure you can tell us, and I'm sure you all will attest it, but is it true though?

You probably wouldn't "out" Satoshi if it was one of you working on anonymous payment systems on the mailing list, and it very obviously is - there were like ten people at most, if we're generous, who were working on what was at the time an extremely nice cryptography topic.

Which is fine I guess, bit the attestation doesn't mean much.

A man in the middle attack would maybe work in rare cases, at great cost, and then you'd get one or two messages and immediately make people aware that they'd been attacked. It's not worth it. I'm confident the TLAs never bothered to do it against anyone with public keys on a key server, the minimum effort you could make to guard against MITM attacks.

Either way, why can't they just deal with it the way other obscenely rich people deal with it?

But I've also not seen anything suggesting he wasn't good enough of a coder to make it himself. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Please don't just shake links out of your sleeve, and talk to me instead. Do you think the Athenians acted like they were chosen by the gods when their number came up?

Don't you see a difference between the situations where chance could clearly have been used simply as a mechanism for fairness / avoiding a biased choice, and things like reading the movement of the birds or interpreting the shape of molten lead thrown into water?

Even in things like the goat choice in the bible you link above, I think it may be more about fairness than divination. Because as far as I know, the priests actually got to eat the sacrificial goat, but not the scapegoat they chased into the wild. So was it really about divining which goat God hated more, or was it maybe about "don't cheat by keeping the juicy goat for yourselves and chasing away the mangy one!"?

Athenians selected through sortition didn't seem to act much like they believed they were chosen by the gods, and they defended their institutions mainly as wisdom, not as revelation.

And the apostles, being Jews, had a big taboo about using chance to determine God's will, but apparently not against using chance to fill vacancies.