The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

Waiters in the exurbs were giving me opinions on bitcoin in 2015

And I’m sorry but I just can’t fathom the controversy. The cropped version is the only one I’ve ever seen used in the context of a sample image. It is utterly unremarkable unless you’re aware of the image’s provenance, (which I bet most people didn’t). Even the uncropped version, which I have only ever saw because of the controversy, isn’t any more racy than many historically important paintings hanging in art galleries.

I’m not saying this is an appropriate canonical test image. But I am saying that it’s disingenuous to single it out as a problem. There is so much of mainstream culture that is orders of magnitude more degrading of women than this image.

I am certainly not equating the two, but I do see parallels in the hysterics around “Lenna” and hysterics around David of Michelangelo’s little noodle.

"The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture."

In the US*. The Bitcoin paper has surely been distributed far wider than any US-specific tax forms.

(I was actually shocked the mobile app is so poorly optimized that I needed a new phone to run it at full speed...)

Amazing site, even if it was only targeted at the true enthusiasts!

Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.

Yes.

> one mankind’s most important inventions

to merely

> useful consequences

Sure, maybe there are useful consequences, especially if you need to defy governments or whatever. But surely not something in the same league of importance as, say, fire, the wheel, writing, powered flight, the hammer, steel, math, or even Quicksort.

For absolutely everything else, blockchain is a worse solution than technology that already existed before.

The interesting part of bitcoin was the “permission-less BFT algorithm” (because other algorithm at the time required to know the list of nodes up-front) through proof of work and game theory”.

The game theory part is only applicable to Austrian-style (scarce money) crypto-“currencies”, not to other cases of byzantine generals problem (it only works because everybody has financial incentives in the robustness of the system), and even in that specific niche, the proof of work scheme has been abandoned by pretty much everybody else in favor of proof of stakes (which isn't really a permission-less system anymore).

Based on the simple reality that bitcoin wouldn't exist without them, we can find a couple seminal papers of cryptography that had way more impact than this white paper. To name a few :

Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf

Diffie and Hellman's New Direction in Cryptography: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf

And that's the first three that come to my mind.

It's like building a bridge that can withstand the earth being swallowed by the sun. Sure the bridge will survive but that's pointless, and the energy and material being spent on that bridge has a billion better uses.

And really, the RFC comment is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The idea that the bitcoin whitepaper is some holy document, or even anywhere near the "top 100 non-literary" documents created by humans is profoundly stupid.

If someone genuinely believes that, I need to talk with them synchronously to try and figure out where, exactly, it ranks. Obviously ahead of the Rosetta Stone and the Treaty of Versailles, but does it beat out the Magna Carta?

Though it’s not small amounts.

wait you can't

- People living abroad who are completely debanked because local banks refuse to open banks accounts for people who are merely suspected of being US citizns, despite them not being US citizns, with no path to resolve their predicament. This is a real problem that is effecting real people right now.

- Any legal activity that the banks and payment processors don't like for one reason or another; onlyfans, "right-wing" websites (whether actual or merely alleged), ...etc.

We no longer live in a world where you can live a dignified life with cash alone. Cryptocurrecy is a net positive to humanity, even if the technologies behind it may currently be more wasteful and make the lives of criminals a bit easier. There is simply no alternative for a lot of honest people in financial dead-ends the government can't or won't help.

Thank you Satoshi and anyone who works to support this technology for making the world a slightly better place.

Every time you cheer for sanctions, you're cheering for the suffering and death of the most vulnerable people in the world under the guise that somehow a miracle will arise and the malnourished and starving will topple an already oppressive regime. Bitcoin has saved countless many from ruin from within these totalitarian states, despite their attempts at enforcing bans. It also doesn't help that marionettes echo propaganda created by media organizations, and those companies are owned by billionaire elites that benefit the most from Western sanctions.

Anyone supporting this is the enemy of the people and deserves everything that comes of them.

Sure but if it wasn't significant, they wouldn't have mentioned it.

> so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea

It seems you have no idea how bitcoin works then. All you have to do is memorize 12 words. You can then take your wealth to many corners of the world, some of which will be free from the tyranny of your government and still have an ecosystem which will let you cash out your bitcoin for the local currency. A good example - Dubai, where a lot of real estate is being purchased in crypto by the Russians fleeing the war.

No, most are not. (I'd go as far to argue that even monero is not specifically designed to evade regulation.)

It is impossible (without finding a SHA collision) to rewrite a commit in git.

And before you say “yeah but how do you know which SHA sums are the right one if you don’t trust branch names”, please reread the final paragraph of the post you replied to.

To be fair, very few other racy pictures of women have been canonicalized like that, either; about the only pictures I can think of are paintings, specifically the Mona Lisa, which is hardly racy, and Boticelli’s Birth of Venus, which I suppose you might look at as racy, though I wouldn’t particularly. There’s a couple other non-picture works of art that are canonicalized in that way, but aren’t themselves pictures – Michaelangelo’s David as mentioned in a sibling comment is a good example. But then, even though the canonicalization makes them into something else, it is usually based on upon perceived artistic importance, the Lenna is a different and arguably sui generis phenomenon.

If you had a point, you wouldn't need to behave this way. (As opposed to some other people who disagree with me in this thread, who do have a point, and don't feel compelled to do this.)