Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

waxy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 451 posts

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#301

Post by pmontra »

dullcrisp wrote: post #166
ChickeNES wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "Attention Is All You Need"?

The Bitcoin whitepaper was the “Attention Is All You Need” of 2019.

The first surge towards 20k was at the end of 2017. It was down to about 4k in the first half of 2019 and up to about 10k in the second half of 2019. It went up and down between 30k and 60k in 2021. It's almost 30k now.

So 2019 was a good time to buy but maybe the mind share moment for bitcoin was 2017, when even TV news were talking about it every night.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#302

Post by thaumasiotes »

mehlmao wrote: post #176
crazygringo wrote: post #87

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've used the sheet music for 'Still Alive' from Portal whenever I need a test PDF. The original blog post linking to it is gone, but Valve has kept it up on their CDN: https://steamstore-a.akamaihd.net/public/images/whatsnew/Sti...

> the sheet music for 'Still Alive'

Dang. That's just an arrangement for voice and one guitar (or ukulele?). The song pretty clearly includes accompaniment from a cymbal and some kind of metallic pitched percussion too.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#303

Post by [deleted] »

EamonnMR wrote: post #179
alwillis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most important inventions That seems unlikely.

[deleted]

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#304

Post by yieldcrv »

INTPenis wrote: post #267
Animats wrote: post #9

Is there a Bitcoin miner somewhere in there, too?

Valid questions for any consumer. I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard worki…

the fascinating thing about observers of the crypto world is that they assign the same level of importance to an individual's phishing attack as to a 10 billion organization as to the entire 500bn commodity that powers them.

imagine doing that to the rest of the tech industry. "my friend lost money in an email! duh 'puters r scam!" come to think of it, there were people in the 90s like that.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#306

Post by slim »

detrites wrote: post #285
chucknthem wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2009*

That's when it was released but it was not widely-known until years later. So maybe you're both kind of correct.

wtf, I remember using bitcoin back 1999, and now wikipedia says it began in 2009

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#307

Post by ngcazz »

eru wrote: post #299
alex_sf wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Whitepaper was released in 2008. Genesis block was in 2009. In 2007 we had Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems [0]. Prior to both the whitepaper and the genesis block, we had Distributed Double Spending Prevention [1]. These are all particular subsets of distributed consensus problems, which have been studied in the context of CS for at least 30+ years ( Consensus in the Presence of Partial…

Thanks! Do you have a pet theory on why bitcoin was the first such system to take off? Why not earlier?

the great recession of 2008

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#308

Post by jxf »

monero-xmr wrote: post #22

The Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the top 100 impactful non-literary documents of all time. Makes sense to be used

Of all time? This almost certainly isn't true. Many treaties, laws, RFCs, and so on would be more impactful than Bitcoin.

Do we really think the Bitcoin white paper is more impactful than, say, the Magna Carta or Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses? I think you might be inadvertently succumbing to recency bias.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#309

Post by alex_sf »

eru wrote: post #299
alex_sf wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Whitepaper was released in 2008. Genesis block was in 2009. In 2007 we had Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems [0]. Prior to both the whitepaper and the genesis block, we had Distributed Double Spending Prevention [1]. These are all particular subsets of distributed consensus problems, which have been studied in the context of CS for at least 30+ years ( Consensus in the Presence of Partial…

Thanks! Do you have a pet theory on why bitcoin was the first such system to take off? Why not earlier?

I think it depends on what you consider to be the first such system.

The earliest ones I personally recall using were Liberty Reserve and E-Gold, which were basically fine, I guess. It was a good way to send money around with less eyes on it. Before that there were things like DigiCash, but I don't know much about that one. There was a whole bunch of random ones during the 90s, but most of them were ponzis and rugpulls (some things never change).

In my opinion, BTC took off in a way that others didn't for a bunch of reasons:

1) It was the first usable system that was decentralized, AFAIK. This is a pretty desirable characteristic, of course.

2) It had (and has) flaws, but there was no obvious means of it being a rug-pull or complete scam. E.g., it wasn't supposedly backed by gold/silver/whatever that didn't really exist.

3) You were able to get some bitcoin to use for 'free' by mining. Prior systems you had to buy into. The threshold to participate and profit was much lower.

4) The protocol is simple enough for those first few points to be trivial to verify.

5) It entered a sort of 'spiral' relationship with darknet markets and more general cybercrime. As those surged in popularity, the demand for bitcoin surged, which fueled interest in bitcoin, which fueled interested in markets, which.. etc.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#310

Post by yieldcrv »

Skyy93 wrote: post #41
louison11 wrote: post #32

It’s a convenient way of backing up the document that can be used to re-create this impactful technology from scratch… may a disaster take place. Think like sending backups of human civilization into space. There are probably now hundreds of millions of copy of this file, pretty cool.

Currently the only impact Bitcoin had is burning a large amount of electricity. I would not say this is a particular worthy technology to safe. There would be far better ideas like Transformers in AI or 5nm chip technology.

okay, someone give me a cloud development platform where I can host anything and do arbitrary executions for

a) single one time cost.

b) no list of approved or unapproved uses

c) unlimited free read bandwidth

d) all my users pay to change the application

I've looked at AWS, GCP, Firebase, bare metal and none of their offerings have the same pricing structure of blockchain nodes. Additionally, the target audience for non-blockchain applications require a much larger funnel and friction to get users to for anything, while the overhead costs of getting them into the funnel soar. Free tiers are okay but can't handle a spike in traffic. Whereas audiences in the blockchain space have already crossed all the friction and have an insatiable demand for 1-click payment funnels.

This perspective doesn't really seem to arise in these conversations. But perhaps there is a counterpoint that I missed about some other cloud platform? This is very high impact for me and I can see many developers continuing to bring their audiences to this development platform.

Post reply on HN