The musical study of software engineering.

Ciro Santilli is obsessed by those in order to learn any new concept, not just for bug reporting.

This includes to learn more theoretical subjects like physics and mathematics.

These people don't fuck around.

This is a well known though experiment, which Richard Feynman used to emphasize

In the above experiment:

The solution to this problem is length contraction: the positive charges are length contracted and the moving electrons aren't, and therefore they are denser and therefore there is an effective charge from that frame.

This is also mentioned at David Tong www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/em/el4.pdf (archive) "David Tong: Lectures on Electromagnetism - 5. Electromagnetism and Relativity" "5.2.1 Magnetism and Relativity".

tx 210000d1392bec2505d1289e5c39c2039204ff1ecf7eef55f973ccd3111003e1, block 360235 (2015-06-10) and the following transactions have transcripts of a very long developer chat starting with:

TODO purpose? The transcripts are interspersed with developers likely voting for project leadership, and commenting on Gavin.

TODO find original discussion location, these are almost certainly from one of the Bitcoin IRC channels.

Part of the goal of this dump is that the Bitcoin developers have a policy of not allowing logging on their talk channel, and this released it all to the blockchain forever where it cannot be deleted. These might just be more of protests against larger block sizes.

Protesters were posting large chunks of text multiple times into the blockchain as a way to protest against the controversial increase of block size.

tx 08893442680a20c4d0548dec2c8c421fa43336528b4e274dbf2652774f9c9f2d has the first copy of:which is the first line of a parody on:from the Baby Got Back hip-hop song.

tx 52159222289cd0a5afe0644150d0e23d5d272a57365627d5e869fdb458289858 has the first copy of:which is likely a copy of an email from the bitcoin development mailing list. This message is repeated dozens of times in other transactions.

The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:

Until those problems are solved, the only real applications of cryptocurrency will by illegal activities, notably buying drugs, paying for ransomware. But also paying for anti-censorship services from inside dictatorships. Illegal activity can be good when governments are bad, and arguably selling drugs should be legal.

For this reason Ciro Santilli believes that privacy coins like Monero are currently the most useful cryptocurrencies. Also, people concerned with their privacy are likely to more naturally make fewer larger payments to reduce exposure rather than a bunch of small separate ones, and therefore transaction fees matter less, and can be seen as a reasonable privacy tax. Also drugs are expensive, just have a look at any uncensored Onion service search engine, so individual transactions tend to be large.

Hedgint against inflation due to money creation in fiat currencies is a another valid argument for cryptocurrencies. Money printing is a bad form of tax. But why not just instead invest in bonds or stocks, which actually have a specific intrinsic value and should therefore increase your capital and beat inflation? Even if crypto did take over, its value would eventually become constant, and just holding it would lose out to stocks and bonds. And pre-crypto, salaries should adjust relatively quickly to new inflation levels as they come, though there is always some delay. Also, without anonymity, governments will sooner or later find a way to regulate and pervert it. If you want to do things without anonymity, then what you really have to fight for is to change government itself, perhaps with a DAO-like approach, or pushing for a more direct democracy.

If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), so the experience will be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.

For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.

Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.

In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.

One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.

TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?

Exciting... sometimes cruel. But too exciting not to do:

Databases and projects:

The term "Mount Liang" generally refers to both the mountain and the surrounding marshy areas.

The novel always uses the term "梁山泊' (liang2 shan1 po1) to refer to the place.

As of 2023 the most important ones economicaly were:The main application is magnetic resonance imaging. Both of these are have to be Liquid helium, i.e. they are not "high-temperature superconductor" which is a pain. One big strength they have is that they are metallic, and therefore can made into wires, which is crucial to be able to make electromagnetic coils out of them.

All found so far are also reproduced at: asciiart.website/index.php?art=people/naked%20ladies therefore not blockchain original.

Some of the very first ASCII art present in the blockchain besides BitLen is porn. Surprising?

For now we are going to keep this site porn-free and only link to prevent bad things from happening, as it might violate GitHub porn policy depending on how it is hosted, and Google may dislike it. Video "What is more obscene: sex or war? scene from The People vs. Larry Flynt".

If illegal porn were to ever be found, we would be unable to acknowledge that, and would just have to silently remove it. Of course, the reproducible nature of Bitcoin Inscription Indexer means that anyone who regenerates the data would immediately see such entries in the diff.

Another issue is that it can be quite hard to determine if porn is legal or illegal, e.g. it can be hard to distinguish legal an illegal ages or revenge vs consensual porn, especially at the low resolutions that you may expect to find embedded in the blockchain. We are generally going to be quite strict about this, and in case of uncertainty on porn legality we will censor first.

OK the list:

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Starting at tx cbbaa0a64924fe1d6ace3352f23242aa0028d4e0ff6ae8ed615244d66079cfb1 (2011-08-05), Catholic Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr started to inscribe prayers in the miner messages of his mining pool "Eligius pool", usually one verse per message.

These are some of the earliest inscriptions in the blockchain, and therefore extremelly visible.

Although the prayer verses appear contiguous in ASCII dumps, Eligius was not actually mining every block: it is just that in those early days, miners still hadn't started adding advertisement messages to every block, so only Eligius shows up and appears contiguous.

At some point, opponents noticed these messages, and started adding atheist mockery graffiti replies, which appear interspersed in ASCII dumps with the prayer.

The first prayer is the Latin version of the Divine Praises, a Catholic prayer composed in 1797 in Italian by Luigi Felici for the purpose of making reparation after saying or hearing sacrilege or blasphemy. Luke claims he was referring to anything in particular that came prior in the blockchain: twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1749182637569122434. There arent many earlier inscriptions at all to refer to in any case! The prayer and correspondong interrupts (in transaction outputs, not by other miners) ordered by block are:

Then comes:and various others + output message interruptions.

Then at last come the first miner message interruptions. Luke explained on Twitter^[ref] that they were also made by Eligius pool, as there was a system in which contributors besides Luke could submit their own strings:followed by more prayers and interruptions such as tx ec92d245822fa1ff862f3314b9102f36fe1eb8bc055865674c75323540aedef6:

The last Luke prayer appears to be on block 143822 (2011-09-03)

Then there is a bit of radio silence, until finally Slush Pool started self advertising for the first time on block 163970 (2012-01-26):They had been mining for a long time by then (December 2010 according to en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Slush_Pool), but this is when they decided to add a human readable ASCII message as well.

From then on, miner messages would be forever polluted with ads, and Luke's multi-miner message feat would never again be reproduced.

The non-obvious interruptions are all well known memes/anime references:

Bibliography:

One of the most simple to state undecidable problems.

The reason that it is undecidable is that you can repeat each matrix any number of times, so there isn't a finite number of possibilities to check.