Stack overflow allows deleting content/making it visible only to 10k rep users.
Ciro Santilli is strictly against this, and this is an intended core policy of OurBigBook.com.
If you delete people's content randomly, they will be much less likely to write anything.
Getting downvoted to oblivion is one thing, but data loss? Unacceptable.
Only illegal content must ever be deleted. Or extremely obvious spam. But anything in a gray area should never be removed.
Deletion can be done by either:
- votes of high reputation users
- moderators
- or worse of all, which happens often on the smaller websites: auto-deletion because come content has not received enough views/votes above some treshold! stackoverflow.com/help/auto-deleted-questions. The most illogical thing of all is that the question is not even permanently removed from the system, only hidden from other/low reputation users! So it does not save any disk space at all! Mind blowing!
- www.varsity.co.uk/features/24648 ‘It felt impossibly romantic’: the nightclimbers of Cambridge by Varsity (2022)
Their only undergraduate courses that matter:
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Financial crime preventive measures by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16Crazy shady crypto people seem to like Ciro Santilli, so this is in order.
Giving to Ciro Santilli is the worst possible way to launder your money, as donations amounts are clearly publicly disclosed (though not donor identities if they with to remain anonymous), and clear records kept of every donation made (including private note of donor identities if known). Also suspicious donations are promptly reported to the authorities.
Donation refunds upon donor's requests are only made at our discretion, and may be declined, unless required by law of course. This is to reduce the risks of us unknowingly serving as money mules or aiding money laundering.
Ciro Santilli believes that he is not require to report large donations to either:But note that Ciro will preventively report if there are any further suspicious aspects to any donations received.
- charities have to report anonymous donations of £25,000 or more as "serious incident", but Ciro Santilli does not have a registered charity: www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-report-a-serious-incident-in-your-charity, related: docs.ourbigbook.com/project-governance
- dealers selling goods over 10,000 euros for cash must make a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) www.gov.uk/guidance/money-laundering-regulations-high-value-dealer-registration. However Ciro Santilli does not sell any goods, only provides services, and services are excluded from the report requirements
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com 1000 Monero donation by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16On 2024-03-18, Ciro Santilli received an anonymous 1000 Monero donation (worth ~126k USD at the time) to his self-custody wallet, which pushed him over his public plea for 100k USD goal to quit his job for one year.
The transaction ID was
5c6af4df39021f3a4a053ef169c9b397e6d6bf6c7e557d3f08e4e1675d7d3eed to self hist custody wallet with address 47kzoCeRMTohJhADejtsGmGimvQKzNsuST7u2aVhAD1VX5WDbh3v1FPUoJoTK3NTJVUgAM3dWCqC4Tmp9KSQaJi6GGYWgYn. This is a roof generated by his Monero wallet: InProofV2AVFBmFhofH4GoG5NsaDutkdNWRTaEhuFgHpHTkpprRmuZ54B8FdUwFp71gqfp2jJpDUrhB3GCzZ2p8CNbh2TW1Z88ShmYWEwtkZFLccEMw9PhH3vWcMVo9mKaRsH3WgJXqq9.Since this donation is so huge, it deserves some comments and a bit of a retrospective. The path to this donation has been an interactive one, and it is described below.
After starting the OurBigBook Project, Ciro started the sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com page on cirosantilli.com and setup some donation methods to help support the project, and possibly try to capitalize a bit on Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
His sponsors are absolutely crazy amazing people, but Ciro simply could attract a large enough amount of small sponsors to reach life changing amounts under those circumstances. This is partly due to Video "And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)".
As such, Ciro came to realize more and more that the best approach would be to reach out to a smaller number of rich people, given that the things he works on niche, but may appeal to a particularly wealthy tranche of the population: STEM people. Other experiences and ideas that contribute to this realization are:
- the creation of the OurBigBook Fellowship, which as of writing consisted of a single donation. During this exercise, Ciro Santilli gave about 2k USD to help a promising Brazilian student. In doing so, he understood a lot about what goes on inside a "rich person's" head when considering a donation
- it is hard to decide who to donate to and find those people. In part because as soon as you create a public donation system with an application process, people will game the fuck out of it. Perhaps the Lost Horse LLC approach of "they find you" is the best?
- it is basically impossible to donate more than 1% of your net worth if you have a family. Even 1% you may be discouraged about. Perhaps with reason due to previous bad donations they have made.
- the increasing wealth inequality of this world, perhaps one of the greatest problems we now face
Then, whenever a larger donation would come through and surprise Ciro, he would improve his sponsor page statements. First a private 150 USD by an awesome sponsor. Then the 2023-09 ~810$ Bitcoin one. Finally came the 2023-11-20 100 Monero one. And it was that one that pushed Ciro to start his "100k USD = 1 year campaign".
Finally on 2024-03-13, Ciro received an anonymous 10 Monero donation to self-custody wallet. He had clearly stated that one should make a test donation to that wallet before the big one, so 10 Monero felt like it could be the test one. Ciro communicated the reception at: mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/112112988286298258 and twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1769464788009066710:
I cashed out 10 XMR on @AgoraDesk for ~1,375 USD, and kept some change in the wallet for fun. This donation confirms that my self-hosted wallet and cash-out work just fine, so feel free to drop those millions whenever you want Mr. Anon :-)
Over the next few days, Ciro checked his wallet more often than his previously self imposed once a weekend max, and as expected, he found the big one on a slightly despaired around midnight sleepless night (partly due to parenthood). He was feeling particularly bored and a bit sad with his work life that night. And there it was. 1000 Monero on the wallet. Needless to say, not much sleep was done on that evening!!!
1000 Monero donation (~126,000 USD) reaction video by Ciro Santilli
. Source. 
Still of the reaction video after finding out about the big donation around about midnight
. Source. 
The following days were also tense, with Ciro having a trial by fire on selling large amounts of Monero on the UK, which is not trivial as it had been banned from all major exchanges. But he managed. Further notes on that at: www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/17arz9f/converting_xmr_to_gbp_in_the_uk/. Ciro also decided to keep about 200 Monero around just for fun as a crazy moonshot.
Another major factor likely Ciro having published his article: Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" in 2019. This is something he wrote entirely for fun during an intense 3 week side-time binge in 2019, though some large updates were made later on. It was this article that likely some crypto-dude attention to Ciro Santilli's profile. As of 2024, there is said to be about 20 crypto billionaires, so perhaps there are about 2000 crypto 10 millionaires[ref], which is the minimum net worth for a donation of 100k USD to be feasible (1% mark). And perhaps a reasonable number of them are just nerds who got rich, and want to improve the world. There are two lessons from this:
- follow your instincts, always. If something seems mega fun and quick, do it!
- making money from a few rich people (or entities like organizations) is easier than working for a bunch of poor people, because you have to convince less people. If you reach many poor people however, things are much more stable as you can lose a few customers and still be fine
Another factor in the donation, Ciro Santilli believes, is that many rich people thing that education is bullshit. Many successful people are neurodiverse and as such, it is only natural that a large number of rich people want to improve our educational system, which tends to be the very epitome of "boring and average normality" which Ciro Santilli so much detests. This can also be seen in people such as:
- Michael J. Saylor and his Saylor Academy
- Peter Thiel and his Thiel Fellowship
Announcements:
- pre-announcement before everything was clearly documented online:
- main announcement
Amazing reactions from the Monero Reddit community: www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1brryao/ciro_santilli_received_a_1000_xmr_donation_to/These people have some serious trust issues!!! Perhaps not surprising from a privacy coin community. Ciro's Twitter post: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1775961945193017790
geonic_comments:Reaction video is fake. Very bad acting.
Inaeipathycomments:-TrustyDwarf-comments:rbrunner7comments:
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com 1000 Monero donation Anonymity of the donation by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16The first sensation Ciro Santilli got was as if God himself had come down from heaven to toy with an unsuspecting human being. God running an experiment. Or perhaps an AGI that had already secretly taken over. Not very different.
Like with God, this was the answer to Ciro's prayers on Twitter. A one way conversation that leaves you uncertain of the details.
Whichever the case, Ciro is going to put on the best show he possibly can for your money, documenting every step along the way in usual fashion!
Ciro ran this over and over in his head, and the only big risk of anonymity is that if this money is ever proven to be from the proceeds of crime, he would have to give it back to the government and "lose one year's salary he would have otherwise gained".
However, that worst case scenario is not bad enough. If anything, it was a great excuse to quit his job for his family and wife is already worth it. Ciro could do it and survive, though situation would deteriorate slowly. But he was a coward previously.
Ciro does however feel that there is good chance that it is legitimate.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions are exceptional, he's amazing right! He deserves this! Of course, there is danger in this rationale which scammers could exploit. But bro, if scammers are going to send 100k USD to me, then please continue to do so!
Also which criminal would be stupid enough to donate proceeds of crime to a highly public person who is going to clearly announce it?
Just be warned, if you come with a baseball bat trying to get the money back by force, I will call the police immediately and by God you will not get it!!
Given this, Ciro just keeps thinking about the likely profile of the donor:
But the "why anonymous if not criminal" question remains. Generally rich people want recognition both for:Two options that come to mind:
- reputation washing
- to make their donation mechanisms higher profile which allows raising more and attracting better candidates and reach greater impact
- rich crypto dude that doesn't want thieves to know he is rich
- more public rich person that doesn't want association with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, notably Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, but perhaps also CIA 2010 covert communication websites, which could hurt business.
- crazy rich person with a philosophy of "if they knew who I was it might interfere with what they do". AKA a God.
Ciro Santilli has sometimes wasted time with low impact projects such as those listed at Ciro Santilli's minor projects instead of doing higher impact projects such as those mentioned at: Section "The most important projects Ciro Santilli wants to do".
But maybe "Everything you did brought you where you are now." applies, maybe it is during the "low impact activities" that one gets the inspiration and experience required for the "high impact ones".
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free books that anyone can write to get famous.
Live website: ourbigbook.com
Further information and rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
The project's mission is one of, or perhaps the most important, life objective of Ciro Santilli. Reproductive goals aside. These two types of goal are incommensurable. This is one of the great challenges of life.
This is ongoing project.
Ciro's goals in advertising this half done project are is partly to obtain some feedback, and partly to give the idea to someone else who might help push it further, be it in this stack or not.
But besides that, it is already in broad strokes the best approach Ciro Santilli can come up with to try and reach the mission statement only with technical advances, i.e. without large amounts of money or political influence which Ciro Santilli does not have.
Maybe that website isn't enough of a technical advance to reach its mission. Maybe there is some further not yet imagined technical insight that would push it into viability. Maybe not. But one must try. Only God can know the answer to these questions.
As of 2022, Ciro has spent about 2.5 years full time working on this project. First he spent about 1 year in 2014 on the first iteration: github.com/booktree/booktree, a GitLab fork, but then decided it was not the way to go.
Then around 2021 he put in some more 1.5 year of full time work, now with a possibly overly complicated (or perhaps just insane/immature) Next.js/Sequelize from scratch website stack.
It makes Ciro a bit ashamed to see that "so little user visible stuff was achieved in so much time". It is partly because he and many people underestimate the difficulty of web development. Perhaps there were some bad stack/useless feature choices issues. And a good dose of indulging in studying the natural sciences to bootstrap content and have fun. But really trying is the only way to learn.
This is the most important technical tutorial project that Ciro Santilli has done in his life so far as of 2019.
The scope is insane and unprecedented, and goes beyond Linux kernel-land alone, which is where it started.
It ended up eating every system programming content Ciro had previously written! Including:
so that that repo would better be called "System Programming Cheat". But "Linux Kernel Module Cheat" sounds more hardcore ;-)
Other major things that could be added there as well in the future are:
- github.com/cirosantilli/algorithm-cheat
- computer architecture tutorials with gem5
Due to this project, some have considered Ciro to be (archive):which made Ciro smile, although "Linux kernel documenter God" would have been more precise.
some kind of Linux kernel god.
[ 1.451857] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /devices/platform/i8042/s1│loading @0xffffffffc0000000: ../kernel_modules-1.0//timer.ko
[ 1.454310] ledtrig-cpu: registered to indicate activity on CPUs │(gdb) b lkmc_timer_callback
[ 1.455621] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid │Breakpoint 1 at 0xffffffffc0000000: file /home/ciro/bak/git/linux-kernel-module
[ 1.455811] usbhid: USB HID core driver │-cheat/out/x86_64/buildroot/build/kernel_modules-1.0/./timer.c, line 28.
[ 1.462044] NET: Registered protocol family 10 │(gdb) c
[ 1.467911] Segment Routing with IPv6 │Continuing.
[ 1.468407] sit: IPv6, IPv4 and MPLS over IPv4 tunneling driver │
[ 1.470859] NET: Registered protocol family 17 │Breakpoint 1, lkmc_timer_callback (data=0xffffffffc0002000 <mytimer>)
[ 1.472017] 9pnet: Installing 9P2000 support │ at /linux-kernel-module-cheat//out/x86_64/buildroot/build/
[ 1.475461] sched_clock: Marking stable (1473574872, 0)->(1554017593, -80442)│kernel_modules-1.0/./timer.c:28
[ 1.479419] ALSA device list: │28 {
[ 1.479567] No soundcards found. │(gdb) c
[ 1.619187] ata2.00: ATAPI: QEMU DVD-ROM, 2.5+, max UDMA/100 │Continuing.
[ 1.622954] ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2 │
[ 1.644048] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM QEMU QEMU DVD-ROM 2.5+ P5│Breakpoint 1, lkmc_timer_callback (data=0xffffffffc0002000 <mytimer>)
[ 1.741966] tsc: Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 2904.010 MHz │ at /linux-kernel-module-cheat//out/x86_64/buildroot/build/
[ 1.742796] clocksource: tsc: mask: 0xffffffffffffffff max_cycles: 0x29dc0f4s│kernel_modules-1.0/./timer.c:28
[ 1.743648] clocksource: Switched to clocksource tsc │28 {
[ 2.072945] input: ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse as /devices/platform/i8043│(gdb) bt
[ 2.078641] EXT4-fs (vda): couldn't mount as ext3 due to feature incompatibis│#0 lkmc_timer_callback (data=0xffffffffc0002000 <mytimer>)
[ 2.080350] EXT4-fs (vda): mounting ext2 file system using the ext4 subsystem│ at /linux-kernel-module-cheat//out/x86_64/buildroot/build/
[ 2.088978] EXT4-fs (vda): mounted filesystem without journal. Opts: (null) │kernel_modules-1.0/./timer.c:28
[ 2.089872] VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly on device 254:0. │#1 0xffffffff810ab494 in call_timer_fn (timer=0xffffffffc0002000 <mytimer>,
[ 2.097168] devtmpfs: mounted │ fn=0xffffffffc0000000 <lkmc_timer_callback>) at kernel/time/timer.c:1326
[ 2.126472] Freeing unused kernel memory: 1264K │#2 0xffffffff810ab71f in expire_timers (head=<optimized out>,
[ 2.126706] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 16384k │ base=<optimized out>) at kernel/time/timer.c:1363
[ 2.129388] Freeing unused kernel memory: 2024K │#3 __run_timers (base=<optimized out>) at kernel/time/timer.c:1666
[ 2.139370] Freeing unused kernel memory: 1284K │#4 run_timer_softirq (h=<optimized out>) at kernel/time/timer.c:1692
[ 2.246231] EXT4-fs (vda): warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck isd│#5 0xffffffff81a000cc in __do_softirq () at kernel/softirq.c:285
[ 2.259574] EXT4-fs (vda): re-mounted. Opts: block_validity,barrier,user_xatr│#6 0xffffffff810577cc in invoke_softirq () at kernel/softirq.c:365
hello S98 │#7 irq_exit () at kernel/softirq.c:405
│#8 0xffffffff818021ba in exiting_irq () at ./arch/x86/include/asm/apic.h:541
Apr 15 23:59:23 login[49]: root login on 'console' │#9 smp_apic_timer_interrupt (regs=<optimized out>)
hello /root/.profile │ at arch/x86/kernel/apic/apic.c:1052
# insmod /timer.ko │#10 0xffffffff8180190f in apic_timer_interrupt ()
[ 6.791945] timer: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel. │ at arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S:857
# [ 7.821621] 4294894248 │#11 0xffffffff82003df8 in init_thread_union ()
[ 8.851385] 4294894504 │#12 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
│(gdb) 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