Meredith appears to be telling the truth. She didn't say Len wasn't Satoshi, she simply said to the best of her knowledge he wasn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't working on it covertly.
One of Len's best friends (Bram Cohen) knew Len was posting pseudonymously on the cypherpunk mailing list but never knew what handle he was using. Also, when Bram was about to release BitTorrent Len tried to convince him to do it anonymously. It's not hard to believe that Len would have done it secretly; even from his wife.
Furthermore, Meredith can't be 100% trusted. When Satoshi handed the project over to the maintainers and stopped posting to the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2010, Meredith tweeted, "Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time yet, according to its creator. Interested people can help finish it, though!"[1]
Satoshi never said those words publicly or privately-- so it's a curious thing to say.
As for the computer...
It's likely Len used university computer(s) for the development as the commit times and communication line up with an academic schedule. It's likely the university had Windows computers. Plus; it's one way to isolate the environment and reduce the chance of information leakage (could have even been a Windows VM).
The C++ coding style is also very much the way a Windows developer would write C++ code. Not the way a Unix-y C++ developer writing on Windows would write.
I always figured based on the code and the emails that it was an older Japanese developer. I've emailed 100s of them over the years and they do all typically write similar in English, they mix a lot of UK/US-ism, and often their English is really good, like I wouldn't know they weren't a native English-speaker until I just caught on to how they wrote. (Speaking is an entirely different issue, many of them cannot speak English in person very well or make obvious grammatical mistakes they don't make when typing.)
Coding is quite subjective. When I examined the early bitcoin code (the one Satoshi wrote and shared). The C++ code looked pretty sloppy and amateur-ish.
The comments were odd and not standardized (randomly using four //// sometimes, etc). The use of 4-6 random new lines between sections of code was awkward. The way the code was organized, folders named, etc.
The code itself was a mix of hungarian-isms. It felt very academic-y to me... like someone that did most of their coding in university as a teacher or phd candidate (little real-world coding).
There's a podcast (name slips my mind...) where the host asked Bram Cohen if he thought Len was Satoshi and he doesn't outright say yes... To paraphrase, he basically answered, "I can't say for sure. It seemed like he (Len) lacked the C++ knowledge.. but his programming got a lot better since I last seen it... so I don't know. It seems to be the most likely scenario would be Len doing the brain work and someone like Hal doing the coding."
But, isn't that sorta what happened? Satoshi had 169 commits and Hal basically took over and cleaned everything up. Satoshi didn't do that much coding, and the coding he did do was done over 1.5-2 years (as he stated in the cypherpunk mailing list).
I'm anyways skeptical of those who refer to "the media" or "the West" as a single entity.
"Much of the press saw U.S. troops as defending a pro-Western populace against a deeply unpopular Taliban insurgency. But Blue quickly realized that, in the insurgent heartlands, which lie in rural areas, the story was much more nuanced. To begin with, U.S.-occupied Afghanistan had been a divided realm; Afghans living in areas of relative calm tended to oppose the Taliban, but those living in war-racked regions often saw the Taliban as a better alternative to the corrupt U.S.-backed government. The Western media missed this story."
Is there an example of such a story (that describes near universal support for the US backed Afghan government and ignores the attitudes of rural areas) from any of the newspapers he mentions (WSJ, New York Times, Washington Post)?
I tried searching for "NYTimes rural Afghanistan 2019" and this is what I got:
"As American diplomats push for a peace deal with the Taliban to end the 17-year war, a strong voice of protest, largely coming from urban centers, has been cautioning against a rushed deal that could endanger some of the gains of past years. Those include women’s right to work and education, as well as an independent news media.
On the other hand, however, is the nearly half of the country that is caught between the two sides of the seesawing conflict. The constant fighting has deprived these rural Afghans of most of the improvements — schools and institutions — at the center of concerns over peace negotiations. And the voices of those Afghans are notably underrepresented in the debate."
Yeah my first guess on #74 was 7.7 miles away (!) so I thought for sure I would get it. But it turns out that the flag location is actually 14 miles away according to Google Maps, and the multiple photos "of the same place" are over 6 miles apart. So I kept getting weird numbers for my guesses that didn't line up with the geography.
> There was one problem, though: Hua knew that G.E. would deny permission to give the talk if he asked, which he was supposed to do. “Since G.E. is a high-tech company, it is difficult to get approval even to present at conferences in the United States,” he says. The company was concerned about giving away proprietary information.
If a foreign country invites you to come give a talk on your work and you're afraid to ask your employer for permission, do not go.
I'm considered a "young worker" by this articles definition, and have worked in the tech industry my whole life. Like many of my generation I came of age and entered the workforce during America's worst economic crisis since the great depression. Watching people around me lose their jobs and their homes and leaders fret over the near-collapse of the financial system is burned into my conscience.
I may have never personally been laid off, but I have always saved, invested carefully and lived within my means, in anticipation of the next crash. So have many of my peers.
So this article does not ring true for me, unless it's simply saying "twenty-something gets laid off for first time, older person says welcome to the club', which isn't exactly news.
Yeah, I tend not to comment on stories about how hard it is to save money. My first professional job went belly up in the dot com crash, but even before that, I always made it a point to not just live within my means, but also not be too proud to scrounge. Whether that's thrift shopping, buying cars used, dumpster diving, or buying houses that are just shy of being condemned, the point was always to make sure I was building a cushion, just in case. It's hard to do, given how rampant consumerism is in America, but if you're able to blot out that narrative, these bumps in the road are much less likely to be catastrophic.
Nowadays you've got sites like Mr Money Mustache, which, while extreme, can at least present a kind of framework for being more mindful about spending and saving. I felt like I was just kind of making it up as I went along. You don't buy into someone else's idea of a lifestyle - make preparations for financial stability. Once that hits, everything else is gravy.
Was my first economic downturn a surprise? Sure, kinda. There was a lot going on that seemed really dumb, even to a relatively naive 19 year old. Had I also read about The Great Depression, the 70s gas shortage, and the 80s recession? Sure did. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
I think it boils down to how old you were when the subprime mortgage meltdown happened in 2008, and how much your parents were affected by it. I wasn’t in the workforce until 2014 but seeing my parents and others struggle left an impression on me for sure.
> BlockFi has said it had “significant exposure” to FTX and its sister company Alameda Research LLC, including taking a $400 million credit line from FTX U.S. that also gave FTX an option to buy the company.
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> BlockFi was one of several struggling crypto firms that signed deals to be rescued by FTX in the past months. The agreement is now in jeopardy as FTX itself sorts through its financial trouble and is subject to federal and state investigations.
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> It also holds assets at FTX.com and made loans to crypto trading firm Alameda partly secured by FTX’s FTT tokens.
So FTX lent money to BlockFi, and BlockFi lent money to Alameda, and Alameda owed money back to FTX? And BlockFi's money was stored on FTX and denominated in a "currency" that relied on FTX's performance for value?
This all lends credence to the theory that we instinctively knew was true: SBF was just doling out money to crypto firms in the spring to prop up the system a little longer, but ultimately it all relied on users injecting new money into the system.
Lots of water before going to bed (or ideally, combined with the alcohol intake, 2 glasses of water for every glass of alcoholic drink) is the best preventive measure I know. I guess drinking afterwards might also help.
I don't know how well they work (if at all) but there's quite a market for 'hangover cure' drinks in Japan[0], and I've heard of a tradition of drinking citrusy supplements or anything high in Vitamin C in Japan. It always sounded off to me, but I suppose it would help with mineral depletion.
I'm a believer. I don't care if it's superstition, I'll take a gram of C at the drop of a hat. I love the Japanese hangover drinks, E-Mergen-C is not quite as tasty but 30 of them take up the volume of 3 bottled C drinks, for the small kind.
Works better before, but will improve disposition the morning of as well.
Can confirm that. If you're drunk, drink as much water as you can, expel it and drink again; this will help a lot to soften and shorten the hangover, effectively reducing the amount of alcohol in the blood.
This is the method that works for me. If I go heavy on water between alcoholic drinks I can avoid having a hangover entirely, or at least reduce it to a very mild headache that Ibuprofen can deal with.
The only downside is you will have to use the bathroom a lot.
It has a positive affect on an irritated stomach lining, I've found. This is easy for me to explain when it's slime/phlegm doing it, as the bubbles helping enzymes and stomach acid dissolve the goo.
I'm seldom enough drunk to have a good sample, but liquor isn't good for the stomach, and I've cautiously drunk a pint of sparkling water with complete success, while knowing that still water would have come back up within five minutes.
Maybe the stimulation of the bubbles promotes the lining to exude what it's supposed to, which alcohol strips away? No idea but I do think it materially helps.
works for me too, but vitamin c powder (emergenC or whatever) seems like magic to prevent one before I go to sleep, along with lots of water. I'd love to know why that works so well.
Next time try lots of water, without adding the vitamin C. I got absolutely blasted at my brother's wedding a few months ago, blasted as in I lost an entire hour of dancing and attempting to win an auction of whiskey that I don't even drink. My parents and family were astonished when I woke up the next morning at like 10am, very very groggy but with no headache and actively shoveling greasy hotel breakfast into my stomach to prepare for a 6 hour drive home.
My secret? I was far too drunk to sleep when we got to the hotel so I stayed up drinking about 100oz of water over the course of an hour or so, while sobering up. Just drink water, you probably don't need the vitamin C, or if you somehow messed up your "electrolytes" or something, just sip gatorade.
Most of a hangover is dehydration, or not having enough excess water in your blood to easily expel the literal vinegar the metabolism of ethanol creates.
Yeah massive amounts of water os of course the standard. But the vitaminc/d powder really does do something extra. Its consistent and after a friend told us about it both my wife and I have had success with it after making a dilly mistake like have drinks on an empty stomach or not paying attention to the abv on a bottle.
I have no hypothesis why it might work, but I'm absolutely convinced it does so, and well, vs water chugging. Its mainly just the headache you skip. It doesn't replace hydration or speed up metabolism of the alcohol. I think it may speed up conversion of alcohol metabolism byproducts, but I don't know why that would be the case.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism#Acetaldehyd... it seems the ascorbic acid MAY help neutralizing free radicals produced when Acetaldehyde breaks down, though that paragraph seems to be in the context of a pregnant person metabolizing alcohol for some reason.
800mg is prescription strength, granted I usually just take 2 500mg and a cup of coffee any time I have a headache. IDK if it is the caffeine or the ibuprofen, but any headache will usually be gone within 30 minutes.
Makes sense that my dr/nurse friends are the ones that told me to do 800mg when I use it (and it worked much better). I typically don't take painkillers, and ibuprofen isn't something to be taken everyday anyway.
My wife's doctor said the optimal does for an average adult is 600 mg (typically 3 pills) - he warned that going below that won't product the same results. When it's been prescribed, it's always 800 mg.
I’ve never heard of NAC or Emoxypine - but here’s what Wikipedia says about the latter:
“In Russia, emoxypine has a wide range of applications in medical practice. It purportedly exercises anxiolytic,[4][5] anti-stress, anti-alcohol, anticonvulsant, nootropic, neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory action.[citation needed] Emoxypine presumably improves cerebral blood circulation, inhibits thrombocyte aggregation, lowers cholesterol levels, has cardioprotective and antiatherosclerotic action.”
An acquaintance who likes to party a lot, and have a job related to medicine, have small bottles of some B vitamins to inject themselves when they are pretty bad. AFAIK those are the medicine ER gives you when you have a really bad alcohol intoxication, so I believe this works.
What do you think they study at the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice ?