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Napkin Math by Sabine Hossenfelder:

- people working in space top secret research 20,000 (conservative estimate, probably much smaller)

- adult disappearances 1/50k to 1/100k per year

- demographics are stable, high earners, so more like 1/100k per year or less

- so for the pool of 20k, then 0.2 per year on average

- these disappearances are a 1:10,000 to 1:20,000 probability

- homicides made this situation even more unlikely 1:100,000

Conclusions: A conspiracy is highly unlikely, but the situation is very unlikely. Shrug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEnvorobhEE


> the concentration of deaths and disappearances within such a small, specialized field as defying ordinary probability.

The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.

Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.


I imagine it is difficult to get good work out of scientists at the point of a gun. With physical labour you can tell if someone is doing a good job, but with intellectual labour its much harder to tell if someone is intentionally being slow or if its a hard problem that is difficult to solve.

> defying ordinary probability

Improbable events do not defy probability.


Specialized fields such as property custodians, administrative employees and managers

Now that's a fun one, where did you hear that from? Other ones I've seen include; tit for tat revenge for the assassination of Iranian nuke scientists; a global conspiracy of illuminati/masons/"jews" (defined so broadly as to be useless); chinese interdiction (kidnapping, a-la the reverse of the subplot in nolan's the dark knight film - that is essentially what you said); bankers who own everything and subvert everything to their interests (which remains stickily plausible to me); of course we can't forget our favorite: ancient aliens been doing all of this from the beginning. Anything to absolve people of confronting their own DNA and the predator/prey dichotomy that rules most life forms.

Struggling to tell if you’re trolling,

or just often on a good one at this hour,

based on your other comments.

Anyway, did you fix the hiccups?


Theres a lot of awesome fixes to hiccups that actually work if you do them right. One thing I've learned over the years is that most problems have an obvious fix that some people figured out ages ago and the reason you're late to the party of knowing is that after everyone else figured it out they decided not to tell you because then they could make a buck off of selling you the solution. Applies to so many things in our world.

So…did you fix them?!

Still meandering without contribution, a bit.


Israel just lobbies with money, it's far more effective.

They assassinate truckloads of people all the time too though, Mossad operations in the west are usually not even investigated or reported by western media, they just quietly release agents back to Israel if they ever accidentally caught them. Some info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...

Given the '72 events at the Olympics, that's reasonable. Altough their colonialism, para-Nazism (Zionism) with tons of school brainwashing and the IDF war crimes are on par on the Islamic fundamentalism sickos with madrassas and the like. Different shades from the same turd.

Edit:, in '72, Munich attacks.

While everyone in the Mediterranean was trading, sharing and mating each other (especially under the Roman empire) boosting commerce, sales and culture -relatively speaking to what you could find in a tribe-, these backwards shepherds (both sides) want to bring the world back to the Bronze Age.

Gnostics at least got it better, as Arrians.


Many SEV-1s are “obvious”. Still feels like a kick in the stomach if your the one that was response LOLz.

I meant "obvious to anyone putting PostgreSQL in production that they have to put specific monitoring in place for this, and palliative measures"

The database shutting itself down and refusing to come back up until a full vacuum or vacuum freeze is performed, which means days of downtime, yes, that's pretty obvious indeed.


Every day is Christmas. Not enough time to play with our new toys before the next batch drops. Insane.

You have deterministic malware at home

HN to be renamed Flex Social. Damn.

Does Carreyrou give reasons for eliminating Hal Finney from being (part or all of) Satoshi?


  (part or all of)
Your aside suggests you might already have considered what I'm about propose, but why not Finney and Back both as Satoshi?

The reporting already establishes all three parties (Satoshi being the third) were familiar/friendly with one another. The reporting says that Finney was the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction, which seems like a completely natural thing to do if the two of you are working together.

Finney's name also rises to the top in a few of the author's analysis, while also noting:

  > "But his analysis had been hampered by the fact that most of Mr. Back’s papers were coauthored with other cryptographers, which made it difficult to know who really wrote them."
Again, why not both of them as Satoshi?

Hal Finney's passing also helps explain how such a monumental secret of Satoshi's identity has remained a secret for so long. The only other person who's in on the secret is Back himself.

Edit: To add further conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if Satoshi's wallet is locked away in a trust or tied up with Finney's estate. I can imagine a scenario where the keys to the wallet are legally unobtainable until such time that both Finney and Back have passed, at which point the wallet is liquidated and its proceeds donated (Finney previously raised money for ALS research).


If Finney and Back were working together, why does Finney post a lot as himself through Satoshi's existence while Back does not?

That implies it's just Back who was the Satoshi poster. And if so, you don't have any evidence Finney is a technical co-founder.


No evidence, just imagination. Reading the article was my first time learning about these people, so I'm unlikely to contribute anything new to the discourse that hasn't already been debated and scrutinised ad infinitum. I did find this person's post[1] to be the most compatible with what I had in mind when I made my original comment, in case you're looking for a more substantive viewpoint.

I do think there's something to my idea that the reason we haven't seen any activity from Satoshi's wallet is because it's being held in some sort of trust. An individual might not go to the trouble of setting something like that up, but a collective might be more inclined to do so. I haven't seen anyone else float this line of reasoning before and it seems to make more sense than the prevailing theories.

[1] https://xcancel.com/Brand/status/2041892664954818788


Yes, he mentions he was photographed running a foot race during a date and time Satoshi sent emails (of course that's a bit weak).


Thank you!

Reasoning: They have the chops to create the world's first system where consensus, scarcity, and ownership exist without a central authority... But, they also lack the ability to write a Perl script to "Send Later". Checks out.


Why would they believe that someone in the future would be tracking their mailing list post history and correlating email timestamps with real-life activity? There's no motivation to take steps to hide one's tracks (by setting up a remote email send while one is were away) unless one thinks that is going to happen.


As the article says, Back was very interested in methods of covering one's tracks.


Parent poster was talking about Hal Finney, not Back.

What the parent is suggesting is that Finney covered his tracks by leaving digital fingerprints (as Satoshi, supposedly) while he was actually out running. This requires that he not only thought someone was tracking Satoshi's email activity, but also tracking his own whereabouts. I can see someone trying to hide their digital identity, but intentionally setting up false alibis seems insanely paranoid to me, which is why I don't buy it.

But regarding Back, the article also points to periods where Back goes dormant while Satoshi becomes active or vice versa. That's not the behaviour of someone who is particularly devious at constructing false alibis.


Satoshi took many steps to conceal his identity and very much values anonymity. Why is this step one too far?


Anyone sophisticated enough to hide their writing style and identity would be more than capable of setting an email to go out while they were at a public event.

Likewise, the argument discounting szabo because he exposed some ignorance of Bitcoin is exactly what someone might do to throw off the scent.


If you believe that Satoshi's email wasn't hacked then his last emails came after Finney had passed away.


I remember at the time the consensus was that the email host itself had been hacked

It was running on outdated software with known vulnerabilities


Seems like a hacker would then use the email for more nefarious goals like manipulating price...

He died before Satoshi last posted. He could have been a joint creator though

Luckily, the author will face no frustrations with Ubuntu or whatever Linux OS they migrate to. Flawless UX. Zero compromises.


It's really gotten better in the last few years. Try a spin of Fedora sometime to see the latest polish.


I have been an active user for almost 30 years. You can tell by my comment.


Oh, sorry, I misread your comment as sarcasm.


But you can onshore pests... wait, Nutria pest control and generate demand by ... introducing Nutria to untapped markets!


William Burroughs on 1959 HN: I wanted to write Naked Lunch, so I took a pest control job.


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