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.

Amazing how quickly morons adopt the terminology propagandized by their party's political officers. "Insurrectionists" indeed.

Though I did enjoy your Beautiful Mind-level tapestry of innuendo, projection, and theorizing utilized to support it.

I'm no fan of corporate welfare, but $50B is cheap.

Half of the federal budget is actual welfare, about $2T, which doesn't exactly go into the pockets of Americans either. It's a big trough where lots of other corporations feed, and millions of middlemen wet their beak.

Returning the silicon to Silicon Valley (or, more likely, Texas) is a good thing all around for America and Americans. If we can keep our chips from even having a whiff of NSA fingers, that's a competitive advantage to the rest of the world. And it makes a home for the technically inclined so they have a career path that doesn't end in yak shaving in the bowels of some high-frequency trading company to gain an extra nanosecond. Offshoring our manufacturing is 100% the worst thing our leaders, both corporate and government, has done to the country.

What is the endgame of these transparently partisan articles? Do they really think that people are so gullible they'll read the headline and say, "I guess Trump is the worst thing in the entire world. Literally Hitler."?

It's all so tiresome.

That's daft. Entering into the search market when Google did is a completely different animal than entering into the search market now. Google's one good idea--PageRank--was so much better than the other methods that it quickly dominated. From that it built a market valuation with very few rivals. During that time, the Internet grew exponentially, and the technology required to keep up has grown commensurately. Google may have started as a box under Sergei's desk, but you can't do that now. There's simply too much.

Even if you have a killer idea to revitalize Internet searching, good luck getting the kind of funding you would require. Your best bet is to bootstrap it, hope Google doesn't patent-troll you to death, and have getting bought out by Bing (or Google) as your exit strategy.

In any event, the quality of Google's primary product (that isn't slurping your personal data) isn't what it used to be. Trying to find something using Google is no longer the go-to. You have to use Google, Bing, DDG, whatever else you can find in order to get what you're looking for. Google's taken their dominant platform, and using political correctness as cover, to mold reality. Search terms for things Google doesn't like aren't suggested. Sites that Google determines are "untrustworthy" are deranked. And Google likes it that way.

If your instinctive reaction to anything Google touches isn't "how is this bad for my personal data and good for Google," you have to turn in your nerd card. Google is worse than '90s Microsoft on every metric, with the added insult that they think they're still an upstart with noble goals.

You know this is true from the fact were now in day 1 billion of open rioting in the streets by mobs of conservatives smashing windows, attacking people, and looting stores.

If Trump, or conservatives, or anybody else you hate who's to the right of Che were half as bad as your fevered dreams imagined them to be, you'd be in a gulag. You're not. Major, multi-national corporations, the entire Democrat party, half the Republican party, and the entire media apparatus of this country all bend over backward to accommodate your hurt fee-fees, and yet you still think you're oppressed. It's so astonishing it can only be explained by some kind of mental illness.

It's almost like allowing Google to become a single point-of-failure for the Internet is a bad idea.

Citation needed.

Machine learning is largely being used to acquire data to serve advertising. Server automation is being used to aggregate hardware under the control of a handful of huge corporations. VR technology is used for porn and games.

To be fair, the most productive and forward looking uses for these technologies would be in medicine, which is hampered by our byzantine patient privacy regulations. And even so, progress is being made, i.e. automatic scanning of xrays and remote surgery. But short of a radical new paradigm that doesn't involve hoovering up data so Granny will get ads for blood pressure meds instead of Viagra, technology has stalled.

It's also an example of hyperbole.

I won't copy/paste a definition because I assume you know what the word means, but I also assume you missed the point.

If Apple's TOS includes a provision whereby your liver may be made available to Tim Cook, should he require it, that is completely legal.

A corporation may define how you are allowed to use their services. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to use it!

Simple! I don't see why so many people misunderstand this.

I, for one, am glad to see that giant tech corporations will finally get some representation at the top levels of our government.

YES! They are monsters defacing digital propery--as opposed to the people spray painting "All Cops Are Bastards" on public buildings, smashing windows, and setting fires. Those people are peaceful protesters! Heroes, even!

I too am happy about this. If it weren't for corporations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the people of the world would be subjected to unrestrained access to the President's speech. Without corporate gatekeepers to filter what we see or read, we would all be influenced by whatever propaganda the President posts online. We need more corporate control of the Internet to prevent these things from ever happening again.

I call on the Republicans and Democrats in Congress to put aside their petty partisan politics and work together to ensure that the Internet remains in the control of private corporations. We cannot let this travesty happen again. Not one more time!

I tried telling that to Ilhan Omar and I got put in Internet Jail for racisms.