Category: #Mother Nature

Running bitcoin – Hal Finney

Wonder In Peace Bright Mind

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
With 🧡

Happy New Year 2023

Only One Wish for 2023

Controlled Supply

Bitcoin

“A fixed money supply, or a supply altered only in accord with objective and calculable criteria, is a necessary condition to a meaningful just price of money.”

Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J. (1903-1960)

In a centralized economy, currency is issued by a central bank at a rate that is supposed to match the growth of the amount of goods that are exchanged so that these goods can be traded with stable prices. The monetary base is controlled by a central bank. In the United States, the Fed increases the monetary base by issuing currency, increasing the amount banks have on reserve or by a process called Quantitative Easing.

In a fully decentralized monetary system, there is no central authority that regulates the monetary base. Instead, currency is created by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network.

The Bitcoin generation algorithm defines, in advance, how currency will be created and at what rate. Any currency that is generated by a malicious user that does not follow the rules will be rejected by the network and thus is worthless.

Currency with Finite Supply

Block reward halving
Controlled supply

Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.)

The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence will not exceed slightly less than 21 million.

Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value “21 million” are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number. Satoshi has never really justified or explained many of these constants.

Cumulated bitcoin supply

This decreasing-supply algorithm was chosen because it approximates the rate at which commodities like gold are mined. Users who use their computers to perform calculations to try and discover a block are thus called Miners.

Mother Nature Quotes

Joseph Werner: Diana of Ephesus as allegory of Nature, c. 1680

Mother Nature (sometimes known as Mother Earth or the Earth Mother) is a personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it, in the form of the mother.

Mother Nature image, 17th century alchemical text, Atalanta Fugiens

The word “nature” comes from the Latin word, “natura”, meaning birth or character (see nature (philosophy)). In English, its first recorded use (in the sense of the entirety of the phenomena of the world) was in 1266. “Natura” and the personification of Mother Nature were widely popular in the Middle Ages.

As a concept, seated between the properly divine and the human, it can be traced to Ancient Greece, though Earth (or “Eorthe” in the Old English period) may have been personified as a goddess. The Norse also had a goddess called Jörð (Jord, or Erth).

“… Mother Nature is punishing us, …, for our greed and selfishness.

We torture her at all hours by iron and wood, fire and stone.

We dig her up and dump her in the sea.

We sink mine shafts into her and drag out her entrails – and all for a jewel to wear on a pretty finer.

Who can blame her if she occasionally quivers with anger?”

Pliny, Pg. 176 – Robert Harris, Pompeii

“Harmony is about bringing things into balance and knowing how to go from sunrise to sunset.

Mother Nature teaches this to us, in so many ways, each and every day.”

Jaeda DeWalt

“Those who train their hearts in natural wonder shall forever know the rivers, forests, wildflowers, and oceans, as friends.”

Atalina Wright, ‎”Wild Riverbanks”

“Nature isn’t cruel, but unconcerned with human frailty.”

Melissa Febos

“The simplicity of life is universal. Mother Nature is a wonderful teacher.”

Steve Leasock

“Autumn is the time of year when Mother Nature says, “Look how easy, how healthy, and how beautiful letting go can be.”

Toni Sorenson

“The Earth is nothing but phlegm spat out by the Sun, and our immediate solar system a whirlwind of boulders.

There is no “delicate balance.”

A.E. Samaan, From a “Race of Masters” to a “Master Race”: 1948 to 1848

If you can’t be in awe of Mother Nature, there’s something wrong with you.

Alex Trebek

“Only after the last tree has been cut down.

Only after the last river has been poisoned.

Only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”

Cree Indian Prophecy

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.”

Albert Einstein

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

Lao Tzu

“Nature is man’s teacher.

She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumines his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.”

Alfred Billings Street

“We are all visitors to this time, this place.

We are just passing through.

Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love, and then we return home.”

Australian Aboriginal

“The world is not to be put in order.

The world is order, incarnate.

It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”

Henry Miller

“O Nature, gracious mother of us all,
Within thy bosom myriad secrets lie
Which thou surrenderest to the patient eye
That seeks and waits.”

Margaret Junkin Preston

“Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The world will burn for a hundred years.

Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust.

How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.“

Rick Yancey

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