Banks be like View quoted note →

Every day can be leg day if you walk like you’re doing lunges.

Bitcoin was created roughly as soon as it became possible to run it. It couldn’t have been invented prior to the telegraph or before the ENIAC (1940s). Once computers began proliferating cryptography needed time to mature in the evolving environment so it couldn’t have lasted more than a decade or so if it was invented prior to, say, the 1980s. It wasn’t until commodity hardware was capable of running long term viable cryptographically secure algorithms that Bitcoin could even last and that didn’t happen until 2001 at the earliest (when SHA256 was invented; SHA-1 was broken in the last decade). #bitcoin #history

“Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won. The rest is suffering and historical opera.” - Michael Ventura View quoted note →

Spent many years on whiteboards, keyboards, and skateboards. Now it’s time to get into printed circuit boards (PCB). Any ideas for trouble to get into with a Flipper Zero? #askNostr

If you’re “paid by the hour” then why not “receive by the hour”? #cashu can fix this. Small to medium sized businesses can run their own mints and stream sats to their employees as they work. Why wait an arbitrary 2 weeks? One day we’ll look back and wonder why we ever worked for days and weeks before getting paid. #ecash #bitcoin

Came to Nostr for tea and crumpets. Stayed for the revolution.

Now that you are your own bank, time to be your own comms network: View quoted note →

The big AI players like OpenAI are building in personalized responses based on your prior chat history. It’s helpful but it leads to lock in. Imagine after using it for a year or two and it knows you well how likely are you to switch to another platform? If you run your own bitcoin node you can run your own LLM infrastructure. #AI #LLM

Worked hard for the last few months and now it’s time to play hard. I’ll be offline for the next 5 days to recharge the soul. See you all in a few days!

In other words, “true randomness” is relative to the observer. There’s a continuum between cryptographically secure randomness and “true” randomness. True randomness occurs when the Kolmogorov complexity [1] of the random process exceeds the maximum possible computational budget of the observer while cryptographically secure randomness occurs when the complexity exceeds the observer’s budget on a sufficiently long time scale. 1.

Kolmogorov complexity - Wikipedia

View quoted note →

Some thoughts on randomness and how it relates to computation. Computation is the act of following rules to transform inputs into outputs. Computational irreducibility is the idea that for some systems the output can’t be predicted from the input without performing the computation. For example the SHA256 of a string is deterministic and computable (therefore the output is not truly random) but there are no shortcuts for getting the output aside from doing all the steps. The path a ball takes when you throw it on the other hand is computationally reducible since we have equations of motion and can predict where it goes before throwing it. Computational irreducibility is a necessary component of true randomness but it’s not sufficient. So then what does it mean to be truly random? In this context my best guess is that it’s a process whose compute requirements exceed what’s available to the observer. The observer (the person or system interacting with the “random” process) can’t run the algorithm needed to produce the apparent randomness. Example: suppose you have a computer with only 7 bytes of memory. You can’t perform SHA256 since you need at least 8 bytes of memory for the registers alone and you obviously need a budget for storing the algorithm itself. The output of SHA256 would be forever appear random to your computer.

Block hashes are a good form of entropy that we can all use to sync random number generators. For example when doing experiments or training AI models. Maybe we can finally fix the reproducibility issue.

In the first half of the 20th century the world had people like Hilbert, Bohr, Von Neumann, Einstein, Feynman, Fermi, Gödel, Noether, Oppenheimer, Erdos, Dirac, Poincaré, etc. Where are these types of people today? We have Perelman and Wiles. Maybe Maldacena or Arkani-Hamed? Was the early 20th century a unique period of fertile scientific ground just waiting to be uncovered by smart people or was there an unusually high supply of gifted scientists in that era?