I am also not sure about Finney, but Hal saw his death coming so it is plausible he handed the reins to one more person he deeply trusted, and asked him to tie some knots but not to keep the show going.

Anyone tried to run some stylometry to identify if satoshi-like comments appeared in any of the early post on hacker news discussing BTC? I would say there is a very significant chance he might have added to the discussion in say the first couple of posts before BTC went mainstream (or even mainstream within hacker circles).

This very interesting hypothesis and solves multiple issues at once, has anyone attempted debunking it?

It is getting to the point where all the top (living) credibly accused Satoshis are incurring all the cost of being outed as Satoshi without getting any of the upside.

In other words it is almost irrational to deny it is you (if it is really you) if you are outted after a major investigation by the paper of record, so it is rational to take Back’s denial as honest.

His security is already screwed anyone who is incentivised to harm him for billions will already do it for tens of millions (or if they think there is more than 50% chance Back is a multi billionaire), so he might as well take the credit for it and live with the consequenes if it is really him.

Wait it seems like doing unscalable things - like face-to-face teaching/examination - is exactly the sort of things that humanity can afford to do as it benefits from the surplus free time generated by AI efficiently doing the scalable things.

can you elaborate more, also isn't this necessary for a Lab that wants to compete with highly funded entities (like OpenAI, Anthropic)?

At this rate, with round 4, outside investors own 70% of company.

It’s not wrong, but unusual. Most seed round might be 10-20% of business. Your point on quantum of capital could be the disconnect for me.

Concorde?

What are they top 3 languages that you have used that can be used as Go alternatives ranked by fun in your opinion (I am guessing Clojure and Rust are two of them)?

You’re right! I think overall I have most fun with Clojure.

I also really like Julia; it has a channel mechanism and it has a very nice macro syntax. It also is obscenely fast at number crunching tasks and I find the language pretty pleasant to use with a nice syntax. I use Julia whenever I need to do anything involving CPU bound number crunching stuff (which admittedly isn’t too often).

All that said, I have been mostly favoring Rust because the memory footprint is so much smaller and I still have a fair amount of fun with it :).

Also, depending on the task, I also get a fair bit of mileage out of ZeroMQ, which can bolt on channel-like semantics in a pinch. It’s not as nice as having it build directly into the language but it does support more flexible patterns. Whenever I have to use Java I almost always end up importing JeroMQ the moment that that built in BlockingQueues stop being sufficient.

It’s a combination of the problem appearing to be low-hanging fruit in hindsight and the fact that almost nobody actually seemed to have checked whether it was low-hanging in the first place. We know it’s the latter because the problem was essentially uncited for the last three decades, and it didn't seem to have spread by word of mouth (spreading by word of mouth is how many interesting problems get spread in math).

This is different from the situation you are talking about, where a problem genuinely appears difficult, attracts sustained attention, and is cited repeatedly as many people attempt partial results or variations. Then eventually someone discovers a surprisingly simple solution to the original problem which basically make all the previous paper look ridiculous in hindsight.

In those cases, the problem only looks “easy” in hindsight, and the solution is rightly celebrated because there is clear evidence that many competent mathematicians tried and failed before.

Are there any evidence that this problem was ever attempted by a serious mathematician?

You can do a lot of money in swindles and bubbles if you time your exit well. There is a fair bit of opportunistic investors who did well in the NFT craze, who speculated knowing fully well that NFT is a craze that will go to zero.

The Greater Fool theory of investing strikes again.

everything will eventually go to zero. we look at some of these things and laugh because we're pretty sure they're going to go to zero within weeks or months vs years. but by the end of all of our lifetimes, most the companies on the stock market will be replaced. the few that won't are probably investment banks like goldman sachs