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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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s satire.

I'm not convinced it is. Poe's Law

There should be a Bitcoin Satire Impossibility Law. Posts about Bitcoin that look like satire either a) oh boy are they not satire or b) will soon be interpreted acted on in earnest by Bitcoin zealots anyway.

E.g., Dogecoin.

Rest assured there is a gaggle of Bitcoin zealots hitting up reddit et al to spread the word about how good this discovery is for Bitcoin's bottom line!

I'd make a joke about Kind Midas here, but in light of BSIL I'm afraid someone here would use the premise as an idea for a startup and end up hurting themselves (or others).

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

#72
post #29

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

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 important inventions in addition to being a critically important financial asset.

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

#73
post #58

This is like a slightly better version of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-th... someone wanted to pick an example PDF and picked the bitcoin one. Just like in the article above back in 1973 they didn't realize the harm in what they were selecting as the sample photo. And maybe there is no harm with this PDF selection? We'll know in 2073!

What harm was done with that photo? Was even one woman turned away from an industry bc of it? Absurd.

Read the link.

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

#74

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.

2015-2017 and 2021-2022 were hype years. 2018-2020 was dead crypto winter.

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

#75
post #58

This is like a slightly better version of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-th... someone wanted to pick an example PDF and picked the bitcoin one. Just like in the article above back in 1973 they didn't realize the harm in what they were selecting as the sample photo. And maybe there is no harm with this PDF selection? We'll know in 2073!

What harm was done with that photo? Was even one woman turned away from an industry bc of it? Absurd.

we don't know the harm, because we don't know how many women encountered this image and may have been made uncomfortable because of it.

we also don't know how many men felt encouraged in their sexism upon encountering this image.

while the image didn't make men sexist, it undoubtedly helped normalize that view among those coming across it during their work.

context matters. if you read playboy at home, that's on you, but if it is found in the breakroom at an office then it has an effect on everyone working there.

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

#76
post #45
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.

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

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

#77
post #61

> One other oddity: there’s a file called cover.jpg in the Resources folder used for testing the Photo media type, a 2,634×3,916 JPEG of a sign taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. There’s no EXIF metadata in the photo, but photographer Thomas Hawk identified it as the location of a nearly identical photo he shot in 2008. If I were Thomas Hawk, I’d be sending Apple a bill for the use of my photograph.

I don't think it's his photograph -- they just both photographed the same sign (the Apple version contains parts of the wall that are not in Thomas Hawk's version).

Shadows on the sign are different, as well as some of the natural growths around the sign.

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

#78
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every iPhone ships with a bitcoin miner. It gets activated once your phone is over a year old.

I wonder if that would generate a financially significant amount of BTC. Would they ever actually mine a block with that little compute?

if the hash rate drops by a sufficient amount, then they could :)

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

#79
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And facilitating organized crime, terrorism, and investment scams.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3942181 > For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.

the other 97% is bots sending small amounts of bitcoins back and forth to each other for no reason whatsoever
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