Technology

“What is he trying to hide‽” I dunno, man. Maybe he recognizes that there’s a bunch of unhinged weirdos who are hellbent on stalking “Satoshi,” and he doesn’t want to be harassed?

Forget being harassed. Honestly, being kidnapped is a serious concern. Whoever or whatever group Satoshi is, it's estimated he, she, or they own something like a million bitcoins.

Kidnapping is normally a pretty poor choice of crime for a criminal gang to undertake. It had its heyday back in the early 20th century. But as the FBI really got going, and we got better at tracking down people across state lines and internationally, kidnapping became much more difficult to pull off. Kidnapping someone - physically abducting them - is the easy part. But actually sending their family a ransom letter and collecting the money in a way that can't be traced back to you? That's a whole different matter. Actually getting the ransom money and somehow getting it into a form you can spend, all without getting caught? That's nearly impossible in this day and age.

But someone with a million Bitcoins? It's entirely possible that everything needed to access those funds is entirely within that one person's skull. Either the private keys themselves, or some way to access or generate them.

Someone with that amount of Bitcoins is actually at incredible risk for kidnapping by an organized crime outfit. We're talking about $65 billion USD worth of assets that can be obtained by just kidnapping one person and torturing them until they give up their private keys. Then once you have them, the coins can be transferred to another account and washed through numerous transactions until they're untraceable. And the poor bastard who gets kidnapped for this just never leaves their captors alive.

And even if they keep their keys in their home instead of in their head? Now they're at risk of break-in, or being held hostage during a nighttime break-in.

Hell, even just being suspected of being Satoshi would be incredibly dangerous. That's an even more horrifying scenario. Imagine an organized crime outfit thinks you're Satoshi, they're incorrect, and they abduct you and torture you, demanding you give them something you are simply incapable of providing...

Hoback argues

In any case, says Hoback, the identity of the real Satoshi is a matter of public interest. “This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth,” says Hoback. “If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there's potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one-twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important.”

Currently bitcoin or any block chain based currency is more of a grift than financial freedom. However countries like El Salvador have taken it up as official currency, so real lives can be affected by whoever holds that bitcoin stockpile.

Maybe, I don't know enough about him, but I will say this: Nobody fits my definition of "people who work hard" better than Euler.

It very likely will be. IIRC the Satoshi wallet has a significant amount of coin in it.

but there in fact are some savants for which quickly understanding and mastering highly technical domains just comes naturally.

Doesn't work like that ; some people's brains work a bit differently and they are also used to solving problems differently due to resulting disadvantages in the usual ways.

For a typical person solving a problem with effort in different places from how they do it, this looks like something effortless. It's not.

This is not something specific to people with disorders.

In the society one can easily find two people envying each other because they only see the difference not in their favor. Similar to ethnic stereotypes and hostility based on them, usually members of each group think that the other group is somehow stronger and threatening them. Even Nazi propaganda about Jews had them controlling the world, being very cunning and get-everywhere, and such.

who have no problem declaring they know everything about everything than almost exclusively non-charismatic, high functioning geniuses that are almost always too neurotic to want to lead, which makes them even more desirable candidates to be drafted into it.

A stereotype again. You know, it really sucks to meet both people who are following it and those who are contrarian to it. Both tend to ignore the real traits of certain conditions and wave them off to you just being lazy or an asshole.

there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard.

I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don't know about Elsburg but wouldn't you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.

How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is "normal" that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by "just" being.

I don't believe it.

Never heard of the latter guy, the former had some interesting takes on linguistics which had seminal importance in CS, the rest of what he says is pretty much genocide denial after genocide denial.

He's a great guy, but sometimes a little hard to follow if you're only taking part in one conversation at a time when he's talking in two and listening to a third because he expects you to be on the ball in your own discussion when he jumps in to drop a tidbit or ask a question like a chess master playing 4 games in the park at once

If it's like simultaneous chess, why isn't the single thread sufficient context for everything that happens in that thread? It just sounds like the guy you're describing has low cognitive empathy and doesn't understand other people's minds. At that point you're just describing a neurodivergent person who may or may not be a genius in certain domains, while being a moron in this one domain that you've described.

Downvotes because I've seen someone gifted?

I kinda wonder where he's going now that VMware is being squeezed dry. He'll pop out and get snapped up by someone else, but there aren't many doing actual kernel dev for money anymore.