371–380 of 451 posts
Don’t mind me, I’m here just for the conspiracy theory comments :-)
Interesting to see this discovery today on Satoshi's birthday (April 5th, 1975). Also the 90th anniversary of Executive Order 6102.
It's possible that the test file is for an end user to verify function, not an Apple dev, I guess, but then in that case Id expect Apple to provide something much more clear (say, Apple logo with "if u can read this, great" rendered in multiple languages") that supported their aims of branding, lack of legal encumbrance, and international support.
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.
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As am I. The top 100 wouldn’t even scratch the surface of any scientific or non-literary domain.
I guess some scientific work would make it into the list owing to their profound impact on society through overthrowing established philosophical thinking. Among others: - Copernic's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium enabled the copernician revolution, which had profound impacts on how people thought about their place in the universe. - Darwin's On the Origin of Species had more or less the same kind of impact, and…
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I still have nightmares about my iPhone and my BMW randomly playing that album with that cover picture when I entered the car. I sold the car and even had to start iTunes to remove the album.
And you are an adult. Imagine all the children and how that effected them on their ipads. My son used to come running over to me says “it’s back” and I’m not exaggerating he was afraid, fear in his eyes. It was an actual scary experience for many little kids.
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We had linked lists of hashes which themselves referenced hash-tables, and we had a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem, but the bitcoin whitepaper combined them, and the combination of those two properties (not even tied to the consensus mechanism) is the thing people are talking about when they use the word "blockchain" now
> Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.
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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.
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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