British pragmatism by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2026-03-05
The British are very pragmatic. This has good and bad effects.
For example, a good effect is that many things work pretty well, such as the government. This also helped industry develop.
A bad effect is that they sometimes settle on local minima forever. Examples:
  • written Constitution? Who needs a written constitution!
  • as of 2020, they are still using imperial units in everyday life, rather than International System of Units, which was setup by the French, who are much more idealistic, and can therefore can break from such insanity more often.
  • the persistence of the insane system of colleges of the University of Oxford
  • the incredibly late date of the decimal day in 1971, and that was partly due to the advent of the computer. That one was too much, even for the Brits, or maybe it helped that the greedy financiers were involved
  • the British train system as of the 2010's, which is completely not unified, each part operated by a different company with different standards. Private and public unification efforts are ongoing, Trainline being one of the best/only private buy from any line unification approaches.
  • Church of England priests can marry, which reduces the proportion of pedophiles. Also women were accepted starting in the 1970's in certain dioceses (non uniform rules as usual, typical of English pragmatism), including for bishop
If it ain't totally broken, just let it continue forever! See also: Section "History of the University of Oxford".
In this malformed Coinbase transaction, the mining pool "nicehash" produced a provably unspendable Bitcoin output script due to a bug, and therefore lost most of the entire block reward of 6.25 BTC then worth about $ 123,000.
The output is unspendable because it ends in a constant 0, the disassembly of the first and main output is this series of constants:
0 017fed86bba5f31f955f8b316c7fb9bd45cb6cbc 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
and for the second smaller one:
aa21a9ed62ec16bf1a388c7884e9778ddb0e26c0bf982dada47aaa5952347c0993da 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
the third one being an OP_RETURN message.
Invalid Bitcoin script by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
They appear to be included, with rationale that you can already include syntactically valid crap in an unprovable way: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/320 Better then have syntactically invalid crap that is provable.
The outputs of this transaction seem to be the first syntactically incorrect scripts of the blockchain: blockchain.info/tx/ebc9fa1196a59e192352d76c0f6e73167046b9d37b8302b6bb6968dfd279b767?format=json, found by parsing everything locally. The transaction was made in 2013 for 0.1 BTC, which then became unspendable.
The first invalid script is just e.g. "script":"01", which says will push one byte into the stack, but then ends prematurely.
Einstein notation by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The Wikipedia page of this article is basically a masterclass why Wikipedia is useless for learning technical subjects. They are not even able to teach such a simple subject properly there!
Bibliography:
They actually abolished the original legal requirement for those institutions to have free scholars as set out by their original charity school beginnings!!! WTF!
But the broadening of scope beyond the Church of England/medieval material was a good thing at least.
Laszlo's pizzas by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
On May 19, 2020, Lazlo announced on the Bitcoin Forum at: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195
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!
I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire.
If you're interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.
Ciro 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.
User bitcoin2paysafe then asks the fundamental practical question:
In which country do you live?
and Lazslo replies:
Jacksonville, Florida
zip code 32224
United States
User ender_x then points out afterward:
10,000... Thats quite a bit.. you could sell those on www.bitcoinmarket.com/ for $41 USD right now..
so it is a slightly bad deal even then!
Three days later Lazlo's asks again on the thread:
So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I'm offering too low?
and one day later he confirms that the sale was made without naming the buyer:
I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza
Thanks jercos!
where "jercos" is presumably the Bitcoin Forum username of the buyer. en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos gives his identity as Jeremy Sturdivant.
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.
Figure 1.
Laszlo's Papa's Specialty pizzas
. Source. The most famous of Laszlo's pizzas, originally published on his website: web.archive.org/web/20210217220810/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/lightning-pizza/.
Figure 2.
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!!!
On June 12, 2010 Laszlo re-offers:
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.
My 1 year old daughter really enjoys pizza too! She just smears it all over her face if you give her a whole slice, but she does eventually manage to get most of it in her mouth (minus a few loose toppings of course).
and on August 4 user MoonShadow takes him up:
An open offer, you say? It's been a while since you had some pizza. Feeling a craving, Laszlo?
but finally Laszlo withdrawls the offer:
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.
so we understand that the sales happened multiple times!!! Also, we understand that he was probably a miner.
TODO list all of the potential sales.

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