171–180 of 451 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And facilitating organized crime, terrorism, and investment scams.
And also to fight oppressive governments. Compiled some examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 Though those governments would love people like you who paint all the use cases as "organized crime, terrorism" etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. We're talking in the hundreds of millions of people who either make a 1040 PDF themselves or have one made for them, and every year. The number of people who have used a cryptocurrency is probably larger than but within one order of magnitude of the number of people who have filled out a US 1040. But the number of people who have intentionally downloaded the original Bitcoin whitepaper? That's a tiny, tiny fracti…
Even if only half the people in China or India did that, they would be double the numbers of the US for such tasks. They have taxes, work and PDFs too. For Google search numbers, that would be different considering PDF searches in China wouldn't be done using Google. But perhaps taxes aren't done using PDFs either, that important detail I don't know.
Well, no, because each is more than double the US population, and only half the US population files tax forms (2021 had 165 million individual filers, on 332 million US population.)
This reminds me of the (encrypted) copy of Microsoft Bob shipping with every Windows XP CD ever https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
404 not found
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can confirm the PDF is not present on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. So it was added some time between 10.10 and 10.14.
It was almost certainly added around the hype in 2019.
Check out the actual directory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there including a cover image that does show up in the interface of Image Capture. In two minutes of testing I haven’t quite figured out where to click to get it to preview the Bitcoin white paper but decent chance they needed a “simple document” PDF for something at some point and it came down to “why not the Bitcoin white paper?”
Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior.
Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF". If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF". If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.
I can think of nothing more important and famous than chicken.pdf https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really though? I’m confident there are 100 RFCs alone that were more impactful.
We’ve seen many instances of documents that weren’t highly thought of at the time of their publication, with that changing radically later. Vannevar Bush‘s essay “As We May Think” in 1945 is a visionary document that describes technologies we take for granted today more than 70 years ago. It’s possible the Bitcoin white paper will be looked at in similar ways, especially if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most im…
That seems unlikely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alan Turing's 1950 article in Mind proposing the Turing Test (Computing Machinery and Intelligence) IRS Tax Form 1040 The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence The Treaty of Versailles The Paris Treaty The Kyoto Protocol The Bible, King James Version Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech Martin Luther's 95 Theses The Communist Manifesto
The shitstorm using the communist manifesto would cause would be glorious.