On 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:

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:

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!!!

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:

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:

Announcements:

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

Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:

They are sorted in order of "most likely to get done first".

Top one: OurBigBook.com.

Actual section at: Section "OurBigBook.com"

Richard Feynman's mentor at Princeton University, and notable contributor to his development of quantum electrodynamics.

Worked with Niels Bohr at one point.

Web of Stories interview (1996): www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB. He's a bit slow, you wonder if he's going to continute or not! One wonders if it is because of age, or he's always been like that.

One dimension in position representation:

In three dimensions In position representation, we define it by using the gradient, and so we see that

This is a good book.

It has some overlap with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which it likely takes as primary sources of some stories.

However, while Surely goes into a lot of detail of each event, this book paints a more cohesive and global picture of things.

In terms of hard physics/mathematics, this book takes the approach of spending a few paragraphs in some chapters describing in high level terms some of the key ideas, which is a good compromise. It does sometime fall into the sin of to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience, but it does give a lot of names, notably it talks a lot about Lagrangian mechanics. And it goes into more details than Surely in any case.

Just enough money to raise 3 kids in a rich country without having to work (so he can focus on whatever project he wants) and no more. Then maximize fame.

Fame is slightly convertible into money with generally little liquidity, but is more valuable if money becomes useless in a TEOTWAWKI.

Of course, in the end, one just does whatever seems cool and useful, and the Gods decide what proportion of fame/money/power they will get. Due to Ciro's love of open source software however, a higher fame percentage seems more likely than money.

Ciro Santilli's full name is quite unique and already dominated by this Ciro Santilli.

Searching just for just "Santilli" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits. The name appears to be a minor variation of the much more common "Santini". Since the name is not that common, it is possible to go over all noteworthy hits. Some relevant ones are shown at: interesting members of the Santilli family.

Searching just for just "Ciro" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits, mostly some smaller brands that could be beaten, this is Ciro's main initial fame metric goal. Reaching it would require doing things known much beyond the programming community however, as Ciro has done until of 2019. ciro.com is from an electromechanics consultancy as of 2019, so it's not bad, let them be.

At the next useless gamified level, an honorary OBE and more ambitiously ForMemRS from the Royal Society post nominal letters would be nice.

The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself on Google searches ("Ciro" == "Cyrus" in Portuguese), maybe becoming "Cyrus the Greater"? That one will be a bit harder though. Maybe if Falung Gong becomes the dominant religion in 2000 years like Christianism did, catapulting the Judaism benefactor Cyrus into greater fame, then there is some hope for Ciro as well.