It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

It's time to sell the company to Elon and retire.

Just be remembered for Facebook and amihotornot, as opposed to a dystopic VR system with Nintendo 64 graphics, and retire with your reputation as intact as it will ever be.

The Business School does it's own thing, it doesn't dictate what the rest of the University does and often doesn't go along with the rest. The Business School is unusual in that it gives students accounts on Exchange, most of the rest of the University uses Exchange for only faculty/staff, not because the B-School did but because a University is an "enterprise" and Exchange is useful enterprise software.

And for many years, the Exchange instances I was aware of did have SMTP and IMAP gateways enabled, no need to set up one's own. I configured pine as an email client to Exchange, just to see if I could.

I don't think you need a Harvard email address to use any of the exploited platforms, you just need an active account in the single-sign-on system called HarvardKey.

Harvard email addresses are not all @harvard.edu, most include the School in the domain name, as your university did. I know faculty/staff can get @harvard.edu aliases, I don't know if any students can.

Anyone taking an Extension School course can request a Google Apps for Harvard account, which includes a @g.harvard.edu Gmail address, but it's only active while you're registered for a course (semester ends, account access ends unless you're registered for a course in the next semester).

Faculty, staff, and students in some other parts of Harvard can also have a @g.harvard.edu account in addition to their School account. Some may prefer to use it because they prefer Gmail over Outlook and/or because it integrates better with Google Calendar, Drive, etc. This fact makes the email address domain name not a great way to differentiate people signed up for one Extension course from "real" students or people employed by the University. So what? An email address is not a validation tool and attending or working at Harvard does not mean someone is great, or even good.

I don't think you need a Harvard email address to use any of the exploited platforms, you just need an active account in the single-sign-on system called HarvardKey.

This guy helped me write all the code I ever stole from Stackoverflow.

The people who buy electric cars are hip urban professional types. The people who support Brexit are pensioners and skin-heads.

Dyson's public support for Brexit meant that most people in his target market wouldn't ride in a Dyson car, let alone buy one. And of course buggering off to Singapore because the Brexit he campaigned for would make assembly in the UK a disaster only made things worse.

It was a stupid idea anyway. Musk was there ten years ahead of him and was already churning out electric cars as a new entrant. It is far from clear Tesla can survive as VW and the major manufacturers enter the EV market. Dyson stood no chance. Sticking an electric motor in a vehicle instead of a petrol engine is not a huge feat of engineering. There are significant design differences but the bulk of the design and assembly technology is unchanged.

Electric vehicles still have doors, monocoque, windows, seats, suspension, in car entertainment, etc. Ford, GM and the rest only need to change one small part of the package. Sure, they have been slow to adapt. But nobody is making EVs at a profit yet. VW and BMW look set to change that this year.

I don't know about these new cards but "A1" and "A2" cards have higher IOPS than others. SanDisk Extreme microSD Cards with A2 IOPS are at least 4000 read and 2000 write.

You should acquaint yourself with the basic facts of the story instead of relying on Reason Magazine. The "learn to code" shit was included in a barrage of death threats from 4chan users. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/t...

Only it will automatically update itself unless you stop it.

This is irritating as it upsets my plans for end-to-end Web encryption. By which I mean encryption of the data on the server so that the server has no access to it. The only things that are on the server are encrypted data blobs and a pile of random numbers.

By end-to-end Web I mean that you will be able to set up comment forums like slashdot, read email in a Web browser and everything else you are accustomed to doing on the Web but without any of the plaintext content being accessible to the server.

The technical basis for this scheme was worked out in the 1990s and then patented by a completely unrelated company which merely sat on the patent till it expired last year. It uses meta-cryptography which is a property of the Diffie Hellman schemes that if you add two private keys, the corresponding public key is the product of the public keys, etc. Matt Blaze, Torben Pedersen and others worked out how to apply these effects to achieve an effect they considered interesting but insufficient. My contribution is merely to show that the simple scheme is more than enough to do interesting things.

So now I need to work out how to hook into the browser. One possibility is to present the decryption module as a new compression scheme. It looks like a compression scheme in other respects. It just requires the host to have access to a private key capable of completing the decryption.

Any help would be appreciated: hallam@gmail.com

The project site is mathmesh.com but that is of the previous approach which has been superseded in the reference code but not yet documented.

[Oh and yes, I do know what I am doing sort of, I have probably considered the corner case you have just thought up. This has been in discussion for many years with serious protocol design people.]

No, there are things the Americans don't do.

The Russian government requires all software companies there to include whatever code they give them. You should never run closed-source software on your machine if a Russian company was involved.

Unless Windows 10 arrives and sends your laptop into an infinite boot loop.

I think he means turning CO2 into methane and then releasing the methane.