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.

I was working for Broadcom when Avago swooped in. Hock Tan came in to present his vision of the future, and it all centered on "harvestable IP." That was all the incentive I needed to take a severance package rather than take the job they were offering. It was a cool place back in the day. It's too bad.

I regularly used some flavor or another of Pascal from the start of the 1984 school year until I left a company which used Pascal as its primary language in 1992. At nearly 8 years, that was a pretty solid run, and probably the second longest I've used a language. Naturally I learned other languages, and most of my upper level classes were K&R C, but I never quite got away from Pascal.

In 1984 Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC with DOS was pretty awesome. For its time, nothing was better. I was sorry to see the Turbo line loose out to the Visual line.

I agree. There is too much diversity for any sort of mean/median to be useful. Especially as humans shift so much. But I applaud any attempt to try. Who knows, maybe someday someone will actually come up with a human based system that makes sense and stands the test of time. I wouldn't bet on it, but that is no reason to not want it.

You get it. In the 1790s they might not have thought much about glacial melting, but they understood tides and mountains. They might have even known about equatorial bulge as it is just an application of centrifugal force, although I doubt if it could have been measured before satellites. And today we know about internal deformation due to lunar gravity, so the baseline of "sea level" is increasingly bogus.

"Arbitrary" means "someone just made it up". At the time, humans were thought to be more consistent then we have turned out to actually be. I don't like making fun of people in the past for trying and getting it wrong because that is just "ignorance shaming", which isn't cool.

How is F more arbitrary than C? The goal of F was that 0 is when human blood froze and 100 is the normal body temperature of a healthy adult human. While it easy to say that humans are too variable to be a good measurement baseline, use of a brine rather than human blood for the measurements was sloppy, etc. None of that is bad science, even if it is bad engineering. It certainly isn't more arbitrary that using water at Earth's sea level, which varies by atmospheric conditions so STP ends up being a bit arbitrary.

Plus 1/10000th the distance from the pole to the equator has always seemed pretty arbitrary to me as it is constantly shifting. And is measured as badly as Fahrenheit. But that is distance, not temperature, so technically a different topic.

I would be happier with metric if the standard unit of distance (a meter) cubed to form the standard unit of volume (a liter) and the mass of something inside that would be the standard unit of mass (gram). Make the meter much shorter, and switch from water to air (how ever you want to define that - perhaps pure Nitrogen to be consistent) would have worked better. Or maybe pure Hydrogen as it is the most common element in the universe.

BTW: I used to live in Europe, so I'm comfortable with both systems. They both suck. But Imperial is more human centric, and I prefer to keep us (humans) front and center. But I might be willing to switch the the French Revolutionary Calendar just for the fun of it. 10 day weeks. Awesome.

I agree with most of what you said, but not the bit about Golarion. It is a great setting, certainly one of my favorites, but it isn't top tier. You should look into Glorantha. As much as I admire James Jacobs, Erik Mona, and the rest, they're not in the same class as Greg Stafford.

Comparing it to JRRT's Middle Earth is difficult because the needs of a literary setting are different than a gameable world. The Silmarillion certainly is a tour de force, but it is more inspiration than usable content.

Not true. Lets imagine a kickstarter to create a paper book. I doubt if the margin on of that would be 20%, so if the book is successful, all sales above $750k have a 20% fee (25% for non-kickstarter), so there is now a loss per book. The only thing to do is to jack the price from day one, or cap the sales.

Had it been 20%/25% of profit rather than revenue, then I wouldn't have been bothered by that part of the OGL 1.1. Getting a percentage of costs is abusive. I do agree that few make it to the $750k mark, but it could happen.

BTW: Even without this profit sharing rule, there are other reasons to dislike OGL 1.1.

Are they? I'm in the camp that thinks a lot of this is to drive folks to D&D Beyond and other WotC web platforms, with the ultimate goal of getting control of VTTs and charging microtransactions. They don't want another Paizo to popup, but existing Paizo isn't big enough for them to care about. They want to make sure that Foundry VTT, roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc are always struggling.

Paizo created Pathfinder 2nd Edition and intentionally did a clean-slate rewrite. They removed the legacy D&D content then. So you are correct, but a few years late.

Replays have been in place for years, and I think arguments between the coaches and umpires have probably gone way down in response to calls that aren't about the strike zone. Since they can't get rid of bad umps because of the umpire union, they'll have to do this to minimize the PR impact of certain bad umps. Unfortunately, it won't improve MLBs problems which are teams focusing on winning by taking more pitches, and their decision to put their product on expensive cable networks which bring more product but prevent younger fans from being exposed to their product, reducing the number of people interested in their product, ensuring that fewer people will care about baseball in the generations to come. Eventually, immigration from countries that care about soccer more will probably lead to MLS being the second-largest sport in the US.

I think the NFL, for now, has the right idea, because every Sunday, most of the country can watch 4 games on CBS, Fox and NBC, meaning most fans can watch 25% of NFL games without a significant financial investment. It also helps that Football has 269 games, meaning a full season of football has about 810 hours of action. If I watch 2 games a week, (many fans quite easily watch 5 (3 on Sunday - early afternoon, late afternoon and evening, plus Monday and Thursday), I'm watching 12% of the action in a season, and somebody watching 5 games is getting around 30%. To do the equivalents in baseball, for 12%, you'd have to watch 2 games a day, at 6 hours, and for 30% you'd have to watch 5 for about 15 hours per day. The ability to consume more of a football season with less of a time commitment probably leads to more interest because of familiarity with the game and players.

This is the next internet mania of the dotcom boom & bust and bitcoin mania of 2017, maybe with that virtual world video game thrown in. I've been watching cryptocurrency videos for the last year, and I think the rich are preparing something some think will be big as the industrial revolution, the digitization of money. Most transactions are already done without handing over money, so soon they could replace the transfer of cash between banks with cryptocurrency instantaneous transfers. There is a very expensive amount of settling that has to be done behind the scenes when you do business through the banking system. What if that went away, and retailers got to keep the money they currently give Visa etc.?

Bitcoin is hugely expensive and slow, controlled by Chinese miners (also a problem with Ethereum), and cannot be fractionated into small enough units to be a replacement for money, so I don't think it will be the winner. On the other hand, XRP is fast (less than 5 seconds to settle) and cheap (10,000ths of a penny for transactions) and has a 0% error rate while the Swift system takes days to settle international transactions, is also expensive, and prone to errors (6% is a number I hear alot).

There is a lot of talk on YouTube about CBDC (central bank digital currencies) taking over economies in place of the current monetary systems meaning you would have your bank exchange your money for the digital currency, and you would continue doing every thing like you have for decades. If you want to send money internationally, they will convert it to XRP, send that to the destination bank who would convert it to the local currency and hand it over less than a minute after it was sent.

The next big idea is ownership tracking/verifying real world statuses, and several tokens are heavily focused on this. VET, ADA, Ethereum, and Spark are some that I'm aware of. People are experimenting with various ideas. Maybe instead of paper tickets or a reservation kept in a private database, you'll get a digital token instead. These stunts are people experimenting with the various tokens. Some may get rich in the process, many will get scammed, people will have to learn which systems are trustworthy. In the end, progress will happen, and I think this will happen because those who have money want it to, and they'll drag us along for the ride. was not found on this server.

Any chance AmaryllisGardener lives in Highlands, NC?