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The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

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

#381

Post by ninkendo »

chclt wrote: post #262
Skyy93 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meh, being able to synchronise an append-only tamper proof linked list and control who gets to put what on it in a decentralized way is pretty cool. Not to mention it's far easier to implement with limited means, than 5nm chips, or large tansformer models. (Also implementing money on it does seem pretty intelligent -- its a scarcity device -- peoble just seem to do stupid stuff with it)

Git (and any merkle tree) already implements a tamper proof linked list, there’s no reason to burn electricity in a proof of work algorithm to accomplish this.

Controlling who gets to put things in it in a decentralized way isn’t as important as many people think, at the end of the day almost all applications (other than currency) can just use a central authority to publish hashes.

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

#383

Post by ralfd »

idkyall wrote: post #363
ralfd wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster I don't understand this reference and Google leaves me totally blank here. I could ask you to clarify, but there is the chance you don't see it or dont reply so … ChatGPT to the rescue? ----------- Prompt: What was the Paula Abdul office background poster controversy? ChatCPT: The Paula Abdul office background poster controversy refers to a incident that occ…

I wonder if American Idol or Paula Abdul has paid to reduce some of those results in relevance

It is maybe noteworthy that I am in Europe. The google results have a disclaimer that some results could be missing and link to https://policies.google.com/faq

> How are you implementing the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision on the right to be forgotten?

I don't think that is really the issue though, I think there is just too much noise around the signal. But I am struck that GPT could answer my question (I guess?) and Google not.

I also wonder when demands are done for a "right to be forgotten" in the training data for AI.

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

#384

Post by coldpie »

3np wrote: post #326
jboy55 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story mentioned how one of the reasons to put Bob on each CD was to make any download of the ISO longer, since the actual XP data didn't fill the CD's capacity. Someone this conjured a memory of downloading XP/2000 back in the day, when I first got DSL, and how it was almost an hour. I thought that was quick at the time. 1.5mb/s vs 56k and all. I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 1…

I wonder what the accumulated climate impact of this cryptographically-validated-bloat-as-friction-for-filesharing across the claimed half-a-billion copies is on the earth.

30 MB * 500,000,000 copies = 15,000 TB = 15 PB. Per [1], that's about one month of global Internet traffic in 1999, and about 6 minutes of global internet traffic in 2017[2]. I'm too lazy to re-do this math with today's numbers, but it's probably more like 2 minutes today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic

[2] Check my math: ( (15 PB) / (100,000 PB monthly traffic in 2017) ) * 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 6.5 minutes.

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

#385

Post by lottin »

sMarsIntruder wrote: post #272
lottin wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is neither deflationary nor a currency.

Here’s the arguments-less old schooler. Edit: bank worker I see, now makes more sense. Sorry man.

Where? An asset that loses 70% of its value in a week is hyperinflationary. This is literally what hyperinflation means.

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

#386

Post by capableweb »

SXX wrote: post #191
humanistbot wrote: post #145

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…

Outside of US most famous document produced by fed would be W-8BEN. Basically anyone who ever opened investment account know about it.

I'm fairly certain most people outside of the US never even heard of that form at all, as most people don't work with/in US companies, nor deal with the US government at all.

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

#387

Post by jxf »

aldanor wrote: post #366
jxf wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Not trying to defend the grandparent's comment, but) You might be also succumbing to the country bias – outside of UK/US, most people wouldn't have ever heard and wouldn't care about ML's 95 or Magna Carta, and it's not going to impact their present and future life in any way.

> (Not trying to defend the grandparent's comment, but) You might be also succumbing to the country bias – outside of UK/US, most people wouldn't have ever heard and wouldn't care about ML's 95 or Magna Carta

I think you're underestimating the colossal, compounding effect that these have had over the centuries. It would be very surprising to me if, say, Germans did not learn about the Ninety-Five Theses, considering that it was a seminal event in German history. Just because it's not obviously affecting your life right now does not mean it was not impactful in dramatically changing the course of history.

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

#388

Post by jxf »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #333
jxf wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the significant laws like “don’t stab people” were never written down because they’re so obviously the law. So I reckon there is space in the top 100.

Many of these laws were, in fact, written down a very long time ago. That's how they became laws in the first place! [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

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

#389

Post by alex_sf »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #378
alex_sf wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You seem to have a odd definition of “useless”.

It's only useful for speculation, scams, and drugs. What other utility does it have?

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

#390

Post by alex_sf »

olalonde wrote: post #343
alex_sf wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a great point. I hadn't even thought to approach it like that.

I mean the whole comment is wrong and I mean not just a little, like straight misinformation. > We had DHTs, we had blockchains, and double spending was solved at least 2 years before the bitcoin white paper. - Bitcoin doesn't use DHTs. - The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin. - Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending pr…

> - Bitcoin doesn't use DHTs.

I didn't say it did. But the idea of distributing data in a P2P fashion is not novel.

> - The term blockchain was coined after the Bitcoin white paper was published, to describe the mechanism used in Bitcoin.

I'm not very interested in the particular etymology. The fundamental ideas of a blockchain, regardless of what you call it, had been laid out by multiple people years before the bitcoin whitepaper[0].

> - Bitcoin was the first system to solve the double spending problem in a decentralized way.

No, it wasn't[1][2].

> The network is actively used. Just yesterday, there were 345K on chain Bitcoin transactions totaling a value of around 4 billion USD.

..Ok? That's about the level of activity I would expect between speculation, scams, and drugs, sure.

[0]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.06130.pdf

[1]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4268195

[2]https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0832

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