Comment on Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator
xantoxis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
When someone says “He’s an unbelievable genius,” I now understand that the person speaking is either a con artist or a gullible idiot. Unbelievable geniuses don’t exist, there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard. So if you’re saying someone is such a genius, either you have no metric by which to measure genius, or you’re selling something.
“I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film.”
Cullen is absolutely selling something: he’s selling his documentary.
The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection.
Smells 100% like bullshit. I had no take on this documentary one way or the other before, but now I’m very skeptical.
Not to mention that this could also endanger this guys life.
Just imagine if you walk on the street and suddenly there’s some asshole filming you and bothering you wanting to make a documentary about you. Just leave people the fuck alone.
Privacy exists you know.
It very likely will be. IIRC the Satoshi wallet has a significant amount of coin in it.
Unbelievable geniuses don’t exist
“I haven’t seen one so it must not exist” ?
I’ve met one. He’s unbelievable. 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 – in heated discussions about topics as diverse as economy, politics, technology, and the history of Coffee. He’s so nice and so unfathomably intelligent that when he’s working you just naturally want to see if he needs anything on the way back to his desk and otherwise leave him alone to craft miracles in the environment of his choosing.
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.
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.
What is Noam Chompsky or Daniel Elsburg. If you ever have a conversation with folks like this, you know there is a level of genius that is unbelievable
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.
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 think most people could have the capacity to store the knowledge in their brain (with immediate recall) no matter how hard they worked.
I bet, but that’s just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to “most people” who have never written essays since high school and I but a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.
That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely “selected” him for the practice.
I don’t believe it.
I mean, I think people like Euler are geniuses. Dude created so many theorems that they had to start naming them after the second person to discover them.
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.
You can’t do what Euler did by just working hard. Working hard is a prerequisite but you need to be a genius
It’s almost certainly bullshit. This is the entry point to conspiratorial thinking; it’s a classic Argument from Silence.
“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? Seems like a pretty good reason to try to throw you off.
Also, who gives a shit who it is? Only people trying to make a buck or beg money off of that person care. Reveals a lot about the documentary director.
“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…
Well technically you can’t just keep having transactions until it is untraceable with BTC. It’s all documented on the coin, its on the blockchain forever and always. You can trace every BTC everywhere it has been from its inception. That’s why the FBI love it so much, the US Federal Government as a whole owns more than 1% of all bitcoins as a result of asset seizures.
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 a grift than a freedom, countries like El Salvador have taken it up as official currency, so real lives can be affected by whoever holds that bitcoin stockpile.
Sure. Counterpoint: there’s real billionaires with known identities fucking things up, and we aren’t doing shit about them.
Obviously, knowing the identity of one more isn’t that big of an issue.
Allonzee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh come on now.
Almost all people declaring or otherwise promoting their supposed genius are completely full of shit, Elon comes to top of mind, but there in fact are some savants for which quickly understanding and mastering highly technical domains just comes naturally.
These people are almost always far more interested in exercising their gift and solving problems than in self promotion. People like Elon unfortunately receive most of the fruits and accolades of the efforts of people like this.
It’s sad that humans largely tend to swoon over, and would much rather be led by charismatic narcissistic bullshit artists 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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
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.
Allonzee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh come on now.
Almost all people declaring or otherwise promoting their supposed genius are completely full of shit, Elon comes to top of mind, but there in fact are some savants for which quickly understanding and mastering highly technical domains just comes naturally.
These people are almost always far more interested in exercising their gift/curse and solving problems than in self promotion or feeding a greed disease. People like Elon unfortunately receive most of the fruits and accolades of the efforts of people like this. It makes me sick how selfish, self-important capitalist baffoon types literally rule the world by paying people that do solve mankind’s great problems a salary, then perverting their work to maximize profit and walking out on stage with it in a fucking turtleneck all but declaring “I made dis thing. Don’t ask me how it fucking works, but I made dis. Pay me. I’m God.”
It’s sad that humans largely tend to swoon over, and would much rather be led by empty headed, charismatic, narcissistic bullshit artists, usually dopes who never think before they open their gaping mouth holes, 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.