- 2008-08-18: bitcoin.org registered
- 2008-10-31: first public announcement at www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html by satoshi@vistomail.com
- 2009-01-03: Genesis block mined
- 2009-01-11: First block not mined by Satoshi
- 2009-01-12: First Bitcoin transactoin
- 2010-05-18: the first of Laszlo's pizzas at about $0.0045 / BTC
- 2010-07-17: first trade happes on Mt. Gox at $0.04951 / BTC: cryptopotato.com/10-years-ago-first-bitcoin-trade-on-mt-gox-for-0-05-per-btc/
- 2014: OP_RETURN goes live
Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!
Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.
The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.
As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!
First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.
Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.
You remind me of a friend of mine. He always wanted to understand the deeper reason for things. He now works at NASA.
Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.
Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.
Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.
University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:
The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.
This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.
Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?
And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.
But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.
The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.
Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.
If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.
And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.
Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.
To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:
He who teaches one thousand, saves one million.
So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.
We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.
And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)
So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.
Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:
- Jimmy Wales
- Brewster Kahle
- Tim Berners Lee
- Tim O'Reilly, who once brilliantly described O'Reilly Media as "a lifestyle business that got out of control" [ref]
- Aaron Swartz. Minus suicide hopefully.
How ASML Won Lithography by Asianometry (2021)
Source. First there were dominant Elmer and Geophysics Corporation of America dominating the market.
Then a Japanese government project managed to make Nikon and Canon Inc. catch up, and in 1989, when Ciro Santilli was born, they had 70% of the market.
youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=240 In 1995, ASML had reached 25% market share. Then it managed the folloging faster than the others:
- TwinScan, reached 50% market share in 2002
- Immersion litography
- EUV. There was a big split between EUV vs particle beams, and ASML bet on EUV and EUV won.
- youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=459 they have an insane number of software engineers working on software for the machine, which is insanely complex. They are big on UML.
- youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=634 they use ZEISS optics, don't develop their own. More precisely, the majority owned subsidiary Carl Zeiss SMT.
- youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=703 IMEC collaborations worked well. Notably the ASML/Philips/ZEISS trinity
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLNsYecX_2Q ASML: Chip making goes vacuum with EUV (2009) Self promotional video, some good shots of their buildings.
Using funds from block 9.
The point of these is that they are good for transfection apparently.
One of the companies that has fabs, which buys machines from companies such as ASML and puts them together in so called "silicon fabs" to make the chips
As the quintessential fabless fab, there is on thing TSMC can never ever do: sell their own design! It must forever remain a fab-only company, that will never compete with its customers. This is highlighted e.g. at youtu.be/TRZqE6H-dww?t=936 from Video "How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards by Asianometry (2021)".
- UCM failed because it focused too much on the internal market, and was shielded from external competition, so it didn't become world leading
- one of TSMC's great advances was the fabless business model approach.
- they managed to do large technology transfers from the West to kickstart things off
- one of their main victories was investing early in CMOS, before it became huge, and winning that market
On May 19, 2020, Lazlo announced on the Bitcoin Forum at: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195Ciro Santilli remembers his father always telling him how when Ciro was small, he would try to grasp the value of money by converting it into how many pizzas he could buy. Well, at least he was not alone.
I'll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I'm aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don't have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a 'breakfast platter' at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you're happy!
User bitcoin2paysafe then asks the fundamental practical question:and Lazslo replies:
In which country do you live?
Jacksonville, Florida
zip code 32224
United States
User ender_x then points out afterward:so it is a slightly bad deal even then!
10,000... Thats quite a bit.. you could sell those on www.bitcoinmarket.com/ for $41 USD right now..
Three days later Lazlo's asks again on the thread:and one day later he confirms that the sale was made without naming the buyer:where "jercos" is presumably the Bitcoin Forum username of the buyer. en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos gives his identity as Jeremy Sturdivant.
Pictures: heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/Thanks jercos!
www.thesun.co.uk/news/15049566/other-bitcoin-pizza-jeremy-sturdivant-fortune-hanyecz/ mentions Jeremy sold too early however:
The cryptocash disappeared when Sturdivant used it to "cover expenses" while travelling the US with his girlfriend.
Laszlo's secondary pizza event
. Source. web.archive.org/web/20210217220810/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/lightning-pizza/ documents another pizza event, as we have different pizza boxes from the most widely known one: web.archive.org/web/20211219130004/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/ Only image thumbs are archived however. web.archive.org/web/20211016070745/https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15049566/other-bitcoin-pizza-jeremy-sturdivant-fortune-hanyecz/ however shows a large version that The Sun got their hands on before the takedown.
heliacal.net is presumably his personal website? But is was down as of 2023. But we have Wayback Machine archives of course :-) Latest working one of that page 2021: web.archive.org/web/20211219130004/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/ And some other stalking:Laszlo is truly, literally, the nerd who got very very very lucky!!!
- web.archive.org/web/20090812075412/http://heliacal.net/pmwiki
- web.archive.org/web/20091031044500/http://heliacal.net/pmwiki/Main/Cats he's a mega cat owner
- At web.archive.org/web/20091031044606/http://heliacal.net/pmwiki/Main/Jackie we get to stalk his wife a bit:
- web.archive.org/web/20030805153714/http://heliacal.net/~solar/ that home has some files, partly early piracy
On June 12, 2010 Laszlo re-offers:and on August 4 user MoonShadow takes him up:but finally Laszlo withdrawls the offer:so we understand that the sales happened multiple times!!! Also, we understand that he was probably a miner.
This is an open offer by the way.. I will trade 10,000 BTC for 2 of these pizzas any time as long as I have the funds (I usually have plenty). If anyone is interested please let me know. The exchange is favorable for anyone who does it because the 2 pizzas are only about 25 dollars total, maybe 30 if you give the guy a nice tip. If you get me the upgraded extra large ones or something, I can throw in some more bitcoins, just let me know and we'll work something out.
Well I didn't expect this to be so popular but I can't really afford to keep doing it since I can't generate thousands of coins a day anymore. Thanks to everyone who bought me pizza already but I'm kind of holding off on doing any more of these for now.
TODO list all of the potential sales.
Bibliography:
en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos mentions:www.bitcoinwhoswho.com/jercosinterview is the source. Persumably the contact was initiated via the private messaging feature of the Bitcoin Forum.
According to jercos the transaction was finalized over IRC chats. Jercos was 18 at the time of the transaction.
Bibliography:
en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos
en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos
Can be used to detect single photons.
Richard Feynman likes them, he describes the tube at Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) at one point.
It uses the photoelectric effect multiple times to produce a chain reaction. In particular, as mentioned at youtu.be/5V8VCFkAd0A?t=74 from Video 1. "Using a Photomultiplier to Detect single photons by Huygens Optics" this means that the device has a lowest sensitive light frequency, beyond which photons don't have enough energy to eject any electrons.
The original forum thread bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195 suggests multiple purchases were made, until he had to withdrawl the offer. Perhaps an easier question is how many pizzas he got in the first place.
www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13on6px/comment/jl55025/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 mentions without source:One source is: bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-man-behind-bitcoin-pizza-day-is-more-than-a-meme-hes-a-mining-pioneer
I know. Laszlo Hanyecz estimates that he spent 100,000 BTC on pizza in 2010. Laszlo is the man that invented GPU mining and he mined well over 100,000 BTC.
Related thread from May 2023: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5453728.msg62286606#msg62286606 "Did Laszlo Hanyecz exchange 40000 BTC for 8 pizzas, not 10000 BTC for 2 pizzas?" but their Googling is so bad no one had found the 100,000 quote before Ciro.
As per bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/113831/searching-the-blockchain-based-on-transaction-amount-and-or-date at blockchair.com/bitcoin/outputs?s=time(asc)&q=value(1000000000000),time(2010-05-18..2010-08-05) we can list all the transactions made between the offer and withdrawal dates for value exactly 10k. There are only about 20 of them, and including someone the 22nd of May, so it is extremely likely that this will contain the hits. No repeated recipients however, so it is hard to progress with more advanced analytics tools
Some of the transactions are:8 d1a429c05868f9be6cf312498b77f4e81c2d4db3268b007b6b80716fb56a35ad (29 May) is a common looking transaction with a single input from 1Bc7T7ygkKKvcburmEg14hJKBrLD7BXCkX and two outputs, one likely being the change to 1GH4dRUAagj67XVjr4TV6J9RFNmGYsLe7c and the other the actual value to 138eoqfNcEdeU9EG9CKfAxnYYz62uHRNrA.
- 49d2adb6e476fa46d8357babf78b1b501fd39e177ac7833124b3f67b17c40c2a (22 May 2010 06:17:59 GMT+1). This one has some Google mentions:This is a highly unusual transaction from a single address 17WFx2GQZUmh6Up2NDNCEDk3deYomdNCfk to a single address 1CZDM6oTttND6WPdt3D6bydo7DYKzd9Qik for the exact value with no change.By digging a bit, we see that the input comes from exactly 20 outputs, e.g. 1E43t1VCc3Q3STKauEiUoVqLbT81XT67xj, each of which is a block reward of 50 BTC, the reward value at those early times, thus satisfactorily explaining how the exact 10k value was obtained without change. Because we know that Laszlo was a big GPU miner, it is extremelly likely that this transaction was made by him.
- a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d (22 May 2010 07:16:31 GMT+1) also has several Google mentions, e.g.:www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d even specially marks it "Bitcoin Pizza" and "Notable". Furthermore, the receiving address 17SkEw2md5avVNyYgj6RiXuQKNwkXaxFyQ is even marked as verified an as belonging to Jeremy Sturdivant.Furthermore this also shows us how Jeremy then transferred about half of Bitcoins 10 minutes later, but we can't know if it was to his own accounts or to cash out.The nature of this transaction is very different from the previous one. It uses a bunch of inputs to a single address 1XPTgDRhN8RFnzniWCddobD9iKZatrvH4. 1XPTgDRhN8RFnzniWCddobD9iKZatrvH4 contains a mixture of regular small inputs, but also a bunch of block rewards e.g. www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1MUoh2nJudSDdKu9NkcevaCG1Qe3nZHWFZ, thus also clearly indicating Lsazlo ownership.
The input chain is complex, but it does contain one block reward on the third level: 17PBFeDzks3LzBTyt6bAMATNhowrvx5kBw + 79 rewards 4th level at 045795627ca29ec72a94c23a65ee775ea1949d60b6fba0938b75e1cfe1e6643e.
- d3498960e5f73031f726cb878382cc696938810fa43f918696cbf242afc9765e (04 June): complex chain, unclear
- 2ea2914c131b2798041a80c00c44081a3559233d69d8b367e4244e6b12096610 (10 June): single input/single output. Complex input, but has some 2nd order mines e.g. e6393f613ef12f5708fa511875b8ff5080f6c8864709f8d92bd99435826a9d0d
- ea595789878b673776d0577cbc6063db611bb4e2954e226459d556995f547922 (24 June): single input/single output. Complex input, but has some 2nd order mines e.g. b9a0c2d24a744b79fe001a67468c456746b74e94a6ce68a2e5f80bf645d678b9
- 461f91a98bbe2f269d8af938039e185287761677f0418fcc8238c5f3dca72935 (02 Jul 2010 08:39:17 GMT+1): single 20k input to two 10k outputs. Did he get 2x two pizzas at once? Complex input.
- a47f927ca1adeeb4394200e8a37a9297b07e784a251569074a9fc2c04855560f (02 Jul 2010 09:07:35 GMT+1): too close in time to the previous one, unless he was having a massive pizza party with invitees!
- 77036fa2ac75212be1ce93e8e1008d5cb2bcbb51aa560a5fe29c9c1423bbd00e (02 Jul 2010 09:14:33 GMT+1): the party grows even larger
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact