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.

Patronage typically leads to at least a public "thanks to...", unless you want to remain anonymous. NFT does nothing here in either case.

But if it convinces some more people to give you a patronage... well, again, it's useful for that.

But they don't. NFT adds nothing here. It guarantees nothing here. Only by assigning shared ownership (via copyright law) and contractually agreeing on payout terms do you get that. And then, you don't need NFT to do it.

Just like every other use of "the blockchain" and related "technology;" the only actual use is convincing someone else to give you money. So ask yourself: are you convinced, or are you the one making the money?

Also, why has no one made PtbarneumCoin?

That's like 1 more than Windows 95! That's how you can tell it's better.

E3 was pretty relevant in 2000. It was still fairly relevant in 2013 when the stumblings of Microsoft with the XBox One (that is, the first XBox One, not the XBox One S or X, or the original XBox) lead to Sony's wildly successful "this is how you share" video a day before E3 and their press conference, and them basically dominating the generation.

Its relevance has been going downhill since, though, since everyone realized they didn't really need E3 to have a conference or communicate with fans, etc., given this newfangled Internet thing all the kids were watching videos on anyway.

I mean, when we were kids, it was child actors peddling goods on TV, in movies, magazines, or whatever. Commercials, movies, shows... anything for kids was basically to sell merchandise after the fact. Remember video game magazines? Saturday morning cartoons? Unless you lived under a rock, had no TV, were permitted to see no movies, read no magazines, etc (I knew a few kids like this), your entire childhood was steeped in targeted commercialism.

Surely you realized this at some point. Which is why I have to ask: why this? The medium and format changed a bit, but little else.

Google: usually takes you where you want to go, unless your search happens to include a single trending term in which case you will never what you're after.

Bing: takes you to the knockoff of where you want to go, with a bunch of extra "features" thrown in; if you use Microsoft products, tends to sneak in like a creepy landlord

Apple: would take you to one of 3 curated sites, and that's where you want to go; if you don't think so, no, that's where you want to go; it would be impossible to ensure privacy and security and comply with the CCP otherwise

DuckDuckGo: takes you to the 4th page of Google search results

I meant to add: This assumes this is a problem anyone (who can) actually wants to solve. I would not. With "CODB" fines, the company makes money, the government makes money, the people in charge can claim they've done something, people who otherwise don't care can reassure themselves something has been done, and the few left aren't enough to matter.

Anything else would cost those-involved money. The thought of implementing the above would likely scare the crap out of everyone involved.

There's a wonderful 2-part solution:

1. Halt stock trades for 3-6 months
2. Directly fine all investors

The first prevents this from turning back into "cost of doing business" where you can sell a bit of stock to pay for your profits. If you put everyone making money suddenly on the hook, you can bet change will happen fast, as people dump stock on reports companies are misbehaving (as they-personally will be liable), or sue the company for damages.

If you just want a device you can slap up, click a button, and use.. well, that's what you're paying extra-plus-privacy for.

However if you want to do a bit of legwork (fingerwork?), this stuff is actually amazingly accessible. Grab yourself some Pi Zero 2 W (or Pi 4 depending on reqs), something from like the camera department or some kind of speaker/mic board or whatever you want. (There are plenty of sources and plenty of hardware variety for this stuff.. adafruit is just recognizable.)

Want a custom voice assistant? You might think Mycroft, but they want signup for most of their stuff.. try Rhasspy instead; a bit of work but actually surprisingly easy to set up, and surprisingly easy to customize. Want a security camera? Search for "raspberry pi camera motion detection" and you'll get articles and videos all over.

With the relatively low cost of the hardware, in a weekend or few you're likely to end up with a better, private network of gear that works how you want, than you would have off-the-shelf anyway.

When was this mythical era? They've had different stuff basically every version, different trainwreck UI, fotm API, and the "stability" (or lack thereof) has been a running joke for decades. Though your post does apply pretty well if you replace "Microsoft" with "Apple," especially regarding the mobile/desktop UI stuff.

They'll cram as much battery in there as possible, as well as the fastest CPU, and all the crapware and bloaty new updates they can. It'll feel about the same as it always did, act basically like it always did, but with exciting new monetization schemes for freemium apps.

They need a new marketing angle to keep the pyramid scheme going.

To change the direction of even a single industry would be a great achievement for any individual. But to change the direction of multiple industries? Thatâ(TM)s so rare as to defy belief. If this was written into a book you would think it was fiction. And of course he didnâ(TM)t personally invent the EV or space travel or internet commerce. That criticism is so misguided. The history of Tesla is well-known; Musk invested in an existing EV company and then ousted the founders. But what this criticism misses is that Musk saw the potential to change the world whereas the founders only saw an expensive toy for the rich. And not only did Musk have a vision to change the world he also managed to convince 1000s of engineers, designers, mechanics, to get behind his vision and implement it. Elon also sold the idea to the public and arguably thatâ(TM)s an even more impressive achievement. That is the rare quality that Elon Musk has which makes him so influential; the ability to lead. Itâ(TM)s so rare a quality that I can think of only a handful of people like him; Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs. These people also strode into existing industries, kicked over the tables, declared the status quo to be bunk and showed them the future. Watching the reaction of the car industry go from denial to acceptance has been so goddamn sweet. Especially on slashdot where most of the denizens are programmers or engineers, its easy to forget that your work means nothing if nobody uses it. The ability to see a vision for the future, bring several disciplines together to achieve that vision, give them direction and funding, and keep pushing until the vision is realised, too many people underestimate how difficult that is, how insanely rare that is, and how important it is to recognise and celebrate the few individuals who are capable of doing it.