Hal talking about his ALS diagnosis. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outside

Did you know Bitcoin was the 1st project to use the secp256k1 eliptic curve? At the time NIST & ANSI recommended secp256R1. Some speculate this was what in fact made Satoshi make the odd choice + some only theoretical optimisations at the time.

Did you know Bitcoin Core got it's 1st fee estimator in February 2015 with Bitcoin Core 0.10.0 Before this fees were hardcoded, and changed with new versions to reflect market conditions. Here we can see people in 2010 being very surprised by the fact that fees are even a thing on Bitcoin. They did not knew the extra BTC they got when mining were transactions fees.

No one needs a discovery algorithm!

Make a habit of: - posting sources - archiving things that you visit(archive.org + archive.ph) 10 years from now, someone will find the mundane things we talk about today very interesting.

Did you Bitcoin Core had an alert system where developers could send messages to users? This was added by Satoshi after the inflation bug in August 2010 They could send a 256 bytes message to your node, like in the picture. Satoshi, Gavin and theymos were the 3 known people to have access to the trigerring key. It was speculated Mark Karpeles(Mt. Gox CEO) had one. The only one to trigger these alerts was Gavin. Even though it could only send a text message that was sent to your node, it was still dangerous. Some rogue actor could ask people to update to a bad client, and claim a vulnerability. Because of this it was completely removed in 2016, and the private key was made public.

Most people know the 1st Bitcoin TX from Satoshi to Hal, in block 170. But did you know the 2nd TXs we know Satoshi made to someone was to Dustin Trammell in block 524 for 25 BTC. Cryptographically proven by Dustin. However between the TX in Block 170 to Hal until the one shown above, we can see there were 7 other transactions made. Looking at how the funds flowed, it seems Satoshi was making test payments to hiself.

Here are 7 interesting comments Satoshi left in the original Bitcoin client(2009) Yes, he actually wrote this one. "This is why people hate C++" Satoshi explaining what is a Blockchain Bitcoin use the bas58 format for addresses(non-segwit) Satoshi makes a point that script does NOT have loops Simpler = better security! This decision is what sets Bitcoin apart today from other blockchains. Satoshi copied the implementation of SHA256 from the Crypto++ Library maintained by Wei Dai. This makes a lot of sense, since it's always good to NOT implement your own cryptography. Seems Satoshi considered using other Eliptic Curves for Bitcoin. One strange thing here is the 279 value for secp265k1 in this comment. Typo? Bitcoin uses secp256k1 with the standard 256 bits length. Satoshi showing a bit of humours. Since this is the last process that will run, it will close the app, hence closing the lights :)

Did you know Satoshi was a vibe-coder? The original Bitcoin client includes a comment showing he used wxFormBuilder to generate the UI. Not quite an AI code assistant — but it generated code nonetheless. wxFormBuilder was a GUI designer for wxWidgets C++ kit and fairly common. You could design the layouts then it would automatically generated the corresponding C++ code for the GUI components. Satoshi preferred this because it was also lightweight and had less dependences. With version 0.5 on 21 November 2011, The Bitcoin Client(not yet called Core) introduced the QT user interface. The QT stayed in the name of the client for a number of years. The QT UI is still use this today by the Bitcoin Core client.

Did you know Satoshi wanted to remove the beta-status of the Bitcoin client in 2010? Jumping from version 0.3 to 1.3. But people objected. This stuck up to September 2021, when we switched from Bitcoin Core version 0.21.0 to Bitcoin Core 22.0

When I was 5 years old, I was with my Grandma in the kitchen. She was cooking and I was running around and kept bumping into her. And since this was happening quite a lot and interrupted my chaotic playing I called her stupid, *under my breath*. Very calmly she stopped what she was doing at the sink, turned off the tap, and wiped her hands on her apron. I knew shit was serious. She looks me straighten the eye, and 5 years old she asked me: Are you a man or a bitch? Some how I knew at 5 years old, in this moment I have to decide for the rest of my life, am I man or a bitch. Very proudly I said: I am a man! Very softly and calmly she says: Well a man always speaks up his mind! Equally proudly I replied. I said that you are stupid! Then she immediately slaps me over the head, not hard enough to make me cry, but hard enough to make a point and then she said: The other part of being a man is then you do speak your mind you will get hit in the face. Ever since then I have ALWAYS spoke my mind no matter of consequences or circumstances.

You can't really filter without losing permisionless. And since "they" will add data anyway, then eliminatet it from the UTXO set. It really is that simple.

Did you know OP_RETURN had a bug that allowed anyone to spend anyone's Bitcoins? The bug would skip over the instructions and return 1, interpreted that spending conditions are meet. But was found and reported by Artforz in 20 July 2010. A fix was quickly issue by Satoshi and downplayed, probably in the hope of not triggering an exploit. He also included some improvements in the upgrade. The fix made the OP CODE return false, meaning outputs are now provably unspendable. - i.e. can never be spent = burned! 3/4 in 2013 people were doing odd hacks to insert in the blockchain: - random data - use it as a timestamp But these hacks would forever stay in the the UTXO set! A decision to set OP_RETURN as a parameter that allowed 40 bytes of data to be added. This data can be pruned! And ever since it was introduced, OP_RETURN always caused controversy and was changed quite a few times. And the conversation was always about HOW MUCH data it should allow? And now we are having this conversation yet again. What do you think?

Did you know Hal Finney joined the Bitcoin Network at block 49. We know this since he reported a crash 1st time he ran the client on Sourceforge. In the debug file last block see by node was 49.