Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

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 Wednesday 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 announced its reception on Sunday March 17, probably having noticed it after the usual weekend check:

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

Currently a redirect page on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/?title=Department_of_Statistics,_University_of_Oxford&redirect=no Newbies!

Why is this not part of the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford? Who knows!

Related:

One "LevelDB" database contains multiple file in a directory. Off the bat inferior to SQLite which stores everything in a single file!

Officially supported installation method on Ubuntu 23.10.

One of Satoshi's email addresses, this one is given on the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Is the only atom that has a closed form solution, which allows for very good predictions, and gives awesome intuition about the orbitals in general.

It is arguably the most important solution of the Schrodinger equation.

In particular, it predicts:

The explicit solution can be written in terms of spherical harmonics.

Amazon's informtion about their own intances is so bad and non-public that this was created: instances.vantage.sh/

Author: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Zee from University of California, Santa Barbara.

ISBN-13: 978-0691140346

Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/0691140340

lecture 1 mentions that this book is quick and dirty, as one might guess from the title. Ciro Santilli thinks he's gonna like this one.

First edition: from 2003, www.amazon.com/dp/0691010196, ISBN-13: 978-0691010199.

Summary:

This didn't really deliver. It does start from the basics, but it is often hard to link those basics to more interesting or deeper points. Also like many other Quantum field theory book, it does not seem to contain a single comparison between a theoretical result and an experiment.