Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

The first diodes. These were apparently incredibly unreliable, especially for portable radios, as you had to randomly search for the best contact point you could find in a random polycrystalline material!!

And also quality was highly dependant on where the material was sourced from as that affected the impurities present in the material. Later this was understood to be an issue of doping.

It was so unreliable that vacuum tube diodes overtook them in many applications, even though crystal detectors are actually semiconductor diodes, which eventually won over!

For a long time, before artificial semiconductors kicked in, people just didn't know the underlying physical working principle of these detectors. What I cannot create, I do not understand basically.

This was the first generation of commercially successful radios.

It uses a crystal detector as its diode, which is a crucial element of the radio, thus its name.

They were superseded by transistor radios, which were much more reliable, portable and could amplify the signal received.

China stuff is mentioned at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/bitcoin-blockchain.

There's a bit of both sides in the 2016 race:

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.

www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/01/12/taproot-wizards-bitcoin-ordinals-project-that-raised-75m-to-sell-quantum-cats-collection/:OMG if only the worlds wouldn't invest in such useless crap... it would probably be a better and more boring world.