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".
Alex Elbanna by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Shady shady owner of "vistomail.com" sine November 2023. He sends emails as satoshi@vistomail.com without any disclaimers, Godlike.
He or someone with the same name is having some fun with the SEC: dockets.justia.com/docket/florida/flmdce/8:2023cv01638/416506 for "Securities Fraud".
The complaint: www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2023/comp25785.pdf (archive). Some pearls:
41. Elbanna told investors several other lies to gain investors’ trust. These included his claim that he had served in the U.S. Marines, when in reality he was discharged after just fifteen days of their thirteen-week recruit training. Elbanna claimed that he had worked at the U.S. National Security Agency (“NSA”). He further claimed that the NSA was aware of and participating in the Digital World Exchange enterprise. All of these claims were false.
42. Perhaps most incredibly, after claiming that he had “been in blockchain technology since the beginning” and “in the cryptocurrency space almost since its inception” in the May 2018 and March 2019 Whitepapers, respectively, Elbanna told investors in a chat program in April 2019 that he “was one of the first 4 creators of BTC.” He went so far as to tell another investor that he was the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto himself. These statements were also false. Elbanna later admitted that he was not involved in blockchain technology from its beginning, and that he “didn’t even really know much about crypto” in 2018, the year he launched the Digital World Exchange enterprise.
The documentary Bitconned from Netflix comes strongly to mind, www.imdb.com/title/tt30317302/. It is unbelieveable people would fall for that kind of thing, the founders are not even sophisticated. And on top of that he agrees to appear on a documentary!!! OMG.
Satoshi Dice by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Claims provably fair. satoshidice.com/fair clarifies what that means: they prove fairness by releasing a hash of the seed before the bets, and the actual seed after the bets.
As mentioned in bitcoin.it, it functions basically as cryptocurrency tumbler in practice.
Starting tx 2f201c8518c7b012c03c2c82e40e86f6aaf616ea5fbe22570aac9d2c6611cb68 (2023-03-11), the chain is flooded with ASCII transactions containing many repeated double quotes " and digits 3, with some other characters interspersed in them without any clear pattern e.g. the first one:
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""jk""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""'}""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""/D""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""q1""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""XK""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
TODO what is up with that?
In that first trasaction the quotes appear as part of a multisig output script.
There's a bit of both sides in the 2016 race:
Great doubt by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The type of feeling of confusion and distrut for your sense that some Koans attempt to instill.
Some notable references:
Don Valentine by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
He was at Fairchild. That place was nuts.
Lemma (mathematics) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A theorem that is not very important on its own, often an intermediate step to proving something that the author feels deserves the name "theorem".

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.
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    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
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    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
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    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
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    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
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    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
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