Category: #Bitcoin Quotes

Running bitcoin – Hal Finney

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Join Honorary Chair Fran Finney and the Running Bitcoin Challenge Committee as we honor legendary cypher punk, Hal Finney.

This is THE EVENT that combines Hal Finney’s love of running and Bitcoin and is raising funds and awareness to help defeat ALS, which ultimately claimed his life in 2014.

You are challenged to run (or walk, roll, or hike) the equivalent of a half marathon — cumulatively or all at once — by the end of January 10, 2023.

From wherever you are, spread the word about Bitcoin, participate in a healthy activity, feel good about doing your part to defeat ALS, and start the year off right

Hal Finney, one of the earliest bitcoin contributors, died eight years ago from complications of nervous system disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

His spouse, Fran Finney, is now organizing a half marathon to raise funds for ALS research via bitcoin.

The “Running Bitcoin Challenge” is set to take place between Jan. 1 and Jan. 10. The timing of the occasion leads up to the anniversary of Hal Finney’s “Running bitcoin” tweet, in which Finney famously disclosed he was deploying a Bitcoin node.

There is no set location — participants can choose to join anywhere they wish. Players are encouraged to either run, walk, roll or hike the equivalent of a half marathon (Hal’s favorite distance) either in one go or over the entire 10-day period.

Donors contributing at least $100 will receive an official shirt with the half marathon’s logo, while the event’s top 25 fundraisers will get a Hal Finney collectible signed by his wife.

As of Wednesday morning, the event has already managed to secure nearly $10,000 in bitcoin donations.

An advocate of cryptography and digital privacy, Finney was the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transfer from the network’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The bitcoin community often suspected Finney was Nakamoto, a claim he consistently denied. He reportedly found out about his condition in 2009 and decided to move away from the project.

Hal’s name is high in the Bitcoin pantheon as one of the first people to voice support for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention and for being the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.

He was, for a time, considered one of the top contenders on the list of potential Satoshis himself (many in blockchain who reject Dr. Craig Wright’s statements still falsely believe Finney to be Bitcoin’s real creator).

Hal, who referred to himself as a “cypherpunk,” was a cryptographic activist who went from developing video games to working on the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) project in the 1990s. He described his PGP work as “dedicated to the goal of making Big Brother obsolete.”

PGP creator Phil Zimmerman hired Hal as his first employee when PGP became PGP Corporation in the early 2000s. He described Hal as a “gregarious man” who loved skiing and long-distance running.

Despite gradual paralysis that eventually forced him to stop working, Hal continued to code software and follow the Bitcoin project.

Almost as famous as his 2009 tweet is his “Bitcoin and me” post on BitcoinTalk.org in March 2013, the last he’d ever make.

It’s a long post, and Hal was “essentially paralyzed” at the time, using an eye tracker to type. Forum stats show the post has been read over 278,000 times.

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he wrote. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Hal himself always denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, adding later that he’d sold most of the Bitcoins he mined (at pre-2014 prices) to pay for his treatments. He also mentioned putting some in a safe deposit box for his children.

“And, of course, the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me.

I have skin in the game.

But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me.

I lived through the crash of 2011.

So I’ve seen it before.

Easy come, easy go.”

Hal Finney
www.runningbitcoin.us
Admiration and great Respect
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Totalitarian Governments..

Totalitarianism is a form of government and political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control and regulation over public and private life.

It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.

In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as  dictators  and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry.

It remains a useful word but the old 1950s theory was considered to be outdated by the 1980s,and is defunct among scholars.

The proposed concept gained prominent influence in Western anti-communist and McCarthyist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-World War IIanti-fascism into post-war anti-communism.

Leaders who have been described as totalitarian rulers, from left to right and top to bottom in picture, include Joseph Stalin, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Adolf Hitler, former Führer of Nazi Germany; Augusto Pinochet, former President of Chile; Mao Zedong, former Chairman of the Communist Party of China; Benito Mussolini, former Duce of Fascist Italy; and Kim Il-sung, the Eternal President of the Republic of North Korea

As a political ideology in itself, totalitarianism is a distinctly modernist  phenomenon, and it has very complex historical roots. Philosopher Karl Popper traced its roots to Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s conception of the state, and the political philosophy of Karl Marx, although Popper’s conception of totalitarianism has been criticized in academia, and remains highly controversial.

Other philosophers and historians such as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer trace the origin of totalitarian doctrines to the Age of Enlightenment, especially to the anthropocentrist idea that:

“Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to nature, society, and history.”

In the 20th century, the idea of absolute state power was first developed by Italian Fascists, and concurrently in Germany by a jurist and Nazi academic named Carl Schmitt during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.

Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian Fascism, defined fascism as such: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Schmitt used the term Totalstaat (lit. ’Total state’) in his influential 1927 work titled The Concept of the Political, which described the legal basis of an all-powerful state.

Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian regimes, as the latter denotes a state in which the single power holder, usually an individual dictator, a committee, a military junta, or an otherwise small group of political elites, monopolizes political power.

A totalitarian regime may attempt to control virtually all aspects of social life, including the economy, the education system, arts, science, and the private lives and morals of citizens through the use of an elaborate ideology. It can also mobilize the whole population in pursuit of its goals.

Definition

Totalitarian regimes are often characterized by extreme political repression, to a greater extent than those of authoritarian regimes, under an undemocratic government, widespread personality cultism around the person or the group which is in power, absolute control over the economy, large-scale censorship and mass surveillance systems, limited or non-existent freedom of movement (the freedom to leave the country), and the widespread usage of state terrorism.

Other aspects of a totalitarian regime include the extensive use of internment camps, an omnipresent secret police, practices of religious persecution or racism, the imposition of theocratic rule or state atheism, the common use of death penalties and show trials, fraudulent elections (if they took place), the possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, a potential for state-sponsored mass murders and genocides, and the possibility of engaging in a war, or colonialism against other countries, which is often followed by annexation of their territories.

Historian Robert Conquest describes a totalitarian state as a state which recognizes no limit on its authority in any sphere of public or private life and extends that authority to whatever length it considers feasible.

Totalitarianism is contrasted with authoritarianism. According to Radu Cinpoes, an authoritarian state is “only concerned with political power, and as long as it is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty.”

Cinpoes writes that authoritarianism “does not attempt to change the world and human nature.”

In contrast, Richard Pipes stated that the officially proclaimed ideology “penetrating into the deepest reaches of societal structure, and the totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens.”

Carl Joachim Friedrich wrote that “[a] totalist ideology, a party reinforced by a secret police, and monopolistic control of industrial mass society are the three features of totalitarian regimes that distinguish them from other autocracies.”

Visualization of the AES round function

Advanced Encryption Standard

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɛindaːl]), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.

AES is a variant of the Rijndael block cipher developed by two  Belgian  cryptographers, Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen, who submitted a proposalto NIST during the AES selection process.

Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits.

AES has been adopted by the U.S. government. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was published in 1977.

The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data.

In the United States, AES was announced by the NIST as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001.

This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable.

AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3  standard. AES became effective as a U.S. federal government standard on May 26, 2002, after approval by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first (and only) publicly accessible cipher approved by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos (born 1972 in London) is a British-Greek Bitcoin advocate, tech entrepreneur, and author.

He is a host on the Speaking of Bitcoin podcast (formerly called Let’s Talk Bitcoin!) and a teaching fellow for the M.Sc. Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia.

Antonopoulos was born in 1972 in London, UK, and moved to Athens, Greece during the Greek Junta.

He spent his childhood there, and at the age of 17 returned to the UK.

Antonopoulos obtained his degrees in Computer science and Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London.

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All Credit goes to Andreas M. Antonopoulos

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