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.

Permits, Drawings, restoration, meeting the requirements for the right-of-way access and dealing with the glacial deposits of rocks etc, trenching can take over a year to return to the original condition, not accounting for the fact that the soil may not settle back the same way if there's any moisture.

I can tell you that boring is the standard by which you optimize many of these items.

Pole attachment costs can be the same or more than underground/boring if you need to upgrade or replace the poles, and it can take up to 180 days to get all the utilities on a pole to relocate, hence why google wanted one-touch make-ready rules to become the norm. They're not wrong, but the issue also is many people are illegally attached to poles, and in some of these rural areas the poles are actually the ORIGINALS from the REA expansion dating prior to the 1940s.

The goals of the county gap project and funding was to provide service to these areas. The problem is the tower may be 2-3 miles away and to hit these speeds, it requires more spectrum than is available, even if you use the RF Elements horn based antennas.

If the farm properties along the way are subdivided they can be connected for much lower cost in the future with this.

Not really, there's a few WISPs in the area already, there are logistical issues when it comes to terrain and tree cover that make it impractical.

Hard to remember things from nearly 30 years ago, but I do apologize for that.

There's also this thing known as a "pole denial" - aka no, you can't attach to that pole, which requires then doing something else, either setting your own pole or doing something alternative as a result. Just like mixing technology or environments (eg: Ubuntu vs Debian, or worse a RPM vs DPKG or Windows vs *BSD) having a mix of construction types can make your life more complex. I'm trying to optimize a lot of variables at once.

I'm glad you consider my plan smart.

It costs $7/foot in labor to install the conduits underground in a rural area. add another 50c-$2/foot for permitting and engineering and $1/ft for conduit and fiber and then multiply by road miles in the US and you have your answer on how much is needed.

(Citation: I own a Competitive Access Provider and do this type of work)

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 WFH and have the entire network on UPS + now have 22kW generator as well so can survive blips without the network burping and longer outages without issues. I can tell when the speakers and printer go offline and come back, but otherwise I may not even notice when the power goes out unless the furnace is running. Otherwise no, I only shut down when rewiring or when doing a hardware swap/upgrade that requires it.

There is absolutely a first-mover incentive. My friends and colleagues who are building fiber say that when there is new construction if you're building fiber the incumbents will say "Oh, this area is covered" and will not build as there's no requirement to build since people aren't getting things like POTS anymore. If they're facing competition, they won't build in that area (for now). The construction managers will spend their budget someplace else.

The goal of the municipalities is to make the cost lower vs higher with permitting costs, etc.. Right now they're 15-50% of the costs between permits, engineering, etc.. much of it depends on where you are building.

microtrenching isn't the solution either, it's one method if an approved method. Commercial folks will quote $8-12/ft, and most people won't talk to you for less than a 250k or $1m project. Mine is less than that so while the distance is far (~13k feet) it's still not enough. You also can't do this yourself, to do a bore requires at least 2 people and a CDL because of weight of equipment, etc..

self funded. Going to cost me about 90-120k in direct or indirect costs to get started. It's necessary for my WFH options and does have a ROI, but it's also not a quick ROI. The alternatives are to move, but we're reasonably happy with the home. Some people do a remodel, this is my variant of it.