This dude actually managed to convince a brain-dead British court that he was Satoshi and force a takedown of the Bitcoin whitepaper from bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf where it had been for many years prior: coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/bitcoin-org-ordered-to-take-down-bitcoin-whitepaper-because-of-copyright-infringement The page was updated to simply display the following Satoshi quote:
It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. - Satoshi Nakamoto
The mere thought that Satoshi would attempt to copyright takedown the Bitcoin whitepaper, and not be able to back his identidy with any cryptographic keys, makes one shrivel to the bones.
Also, kids, this is why you put a fucking license on everything you release to the public, and especially when doing so anonymously!!! A quick CC BY-SA on that paper would have prevented all this bullshit.
The existence of this outrageous fraudster has had two good effects on the world however it must be said:
- the release of Adam Back and Martti Malmi early email history with Satoshi: www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/23/new-emails-reveal-staggering-clues-to-the-mystery-of-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto
- the memes: Craig Steven Wright memes
Timeline:
- 2015-12-08 Wired article claims he may be Satoshi: www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/. A few days later, evidence of foul play emerged, and on 2019-04-30 Wired retracted the article altogether
- 2016-05-02 publicly claims he is Satoshi www.timesofisrael.com/australian-entrepreneur-craig-wright-says-he-created-bitcoin/
- 2024-05-20 British judge James Mellor fisting the fuck out of Craig: www.reuters.com/technology/self-proclaimed-bitcoin-inventor-lied-repeatedly-support-claim-says-uk-judge-2024-05-20/
An Australian computer scientist who claimed he invented bitcoin lied "extensively and repeatedly" and forged documents "on a grand scale" to support his false claim, a judge at London's High Court ruled on Monday.
Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
Social media:
Interesting
- www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4i7k9a/strange_edits_on_craig_wrights_wikipedia_page/ "Strange edits on Craig Wright's Wikipedia page made two days before the revelation, from an IP address in Barbados (possibly made by Craig himself?)"
Exams as a prerequisite for a degree are useless. Exams as part of a degree must be abolished. And degrees must be abolished. Ultimately the only metrics that really matter are money and fame. See also: motivation.
The only thing exams should matter for is as a screening tool to select people with specific abilities that you care about as an employer or principal investigator. If:then exams are useless for your purposes. then might as well just go by interviews (basically what all employers do already, though not PIs). Degrees are too course grained to mean anything to anybody. Employers and PIs likely only care about very few specific subjects.
- you have no idea about what the content of specific exams are (and you don't because they are all ad-hoc university secrets)
- or don't have a way to machine learn what grades correlate with your desired performance (you don't because where's the data?)
Once the question of an exam has been formulated, the usefulness of the problem is already been completely destroyed, because formulating the problem that matters is the most important part of things. And any problem with an answer, is useless to put effort into: give answers.
Furthermore, preventing people from searching for answers while answering an exam, AKA preventing "cheating", also makes absolutely no sense. In the real world, we want people to find answers as quickly as possible! We should be teaching people how to "cheat"! What we should teach them instead is what a fucking license is, and what you have to do to comply with it.
And if you must absolutely have exams, they must be open to anyone who wants to applies. Then people have to pay to take the exam, with subsidies for "official course takers", who are spending 100x more anyways due to not living with their parents.
And if you pass the exam, you pass the course, without any further time requirements.
And those exams must be applied by professional test application companies to ensure no cheating and to factor out the anti-cheat work, while still making the tests available to people anywhere.
A quote from Richard Feynman present in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.
The only metric that matters is "to feel that you've satisfied youre curiosity". When one studies for that, it can take a lot more time to actually learn everything, because it is sometimes not as clear when you should stop. But it is the only way to go deeper.
A person's understanding is the most illiquid asset that exists, to judge that based only on standardized exams, is a certain way to fail to identify top talent.