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.

The parent of my comment here should get upvoted, to counter the nonsense of the grandparent who suggested the obvious staging that has already been done.

I logged in (for the first time in like a year) to upvote it, but apparently I don't know how to do that anymore.

In January 2007, GM unveiled the Chevy Volt concept car, the one you may recall looking like a Camaro. Because the range-extending gas generator allowed the gas engine to be decoupled from the wheels, GM said that the range extender could be any kind of engine, *including turbine*. The enthusiastic response to that concept car led to GM greenlighting the car for production, and then they got serious about the design. Rather quickly they determined that a turbine engine actually SUCKS (ha) for this application because of terrible emissions -- high NOx as I recall.

Power output and weight are not the only parameters to worry about in gas engines.

See other comments for discussion of hydrogen.

Hey can someone get the attention of a moderator / editor to alert them to the fact that they didn't actually link to the article? See parent of this comment for link. (facepalm)

Posting my first comment IN A DECADE to say yeeesssss ^^^THIS^^^. What this guy said. Wireless charging on the move (in roadways) absolutely only exists to soak up VC, government and institutional grant money. It's just the most awesome slow-motion fraud.

STATIONARY wireless charging is absolutely a thing, and I look forward to the J2954 standard finally arriving as a factory installed option, although I'm starting to worry that it won't ever. But in-road wireless? Not happening. Big batteries and DC Fast Charging have already mooted it.

It's like those partisans for cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. They don't even know that they've already lost the battle with battery electric vehicles. Or, more specifically, their funders don't know it.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.