[ExI] hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered

spike spike66 at att.net
Tue Aug 18 17:04:17 UTC 2015


 

 

>… On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered

 

From: spike <spike66 at att.net> 

>>… I see this as a proof there is no designer of the universe.  Reasoning: had there been a Grand Designer, when she was setting up something like this (perhaps as a little joke for math geeks to discover way down the road) she would have thought about their faces when they discovered it and ended up laughing so hard the whole thing would have been wrecked.

 

>…It reminds me of the Borwein integrals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borwein_integral

>Anders Sandberg,…

 

 

Ja, excellent, thanks Anders.  I had never heard of Borwein integrals.  It feels like something set up specifically to screw with our minds.  It is working on me.

 

 

This whole attack on the pentagon thing really has me thinking back on an incident which happened here over 17 yrs ago.  Anders you have been here the whole time, some of you others do help me remember please as many of the details as we can.

 

Somewhere around I think about early 1998 or so, we were discussing a recently-discovered new Mersenne Prime and how I got that look on my face, posted earlier, whenever a new one was discovered.  The GIMPS group had its own online chat.  In that group, someone posted to the discoverer of M(3021377) with the offer “I’ll give you 10 thousand bucks for that computer”  The owner posted back with the ambiguous “Ha ha.  Serious offers only please.”

 

OK now.  That got me to wondering, and I posted to ExI about the exchange.  The computer in question was an already-outdated Intel 486 box, which the user could put aside and assign to GIMPS, since he already owned a Pentium machine.  The market value of an Intel 486 box at the time would be about 100 bucks tops.  So was the owner not aware that the computer on which the prime was discovered is now a valuable museum piece and would have gladly turned over the machine for 500, assuming the 10k bid was a joke?  Or was the owner assuming the machine was far more valuable than 10k?  We still don’t know.  For all we know, that valuable relic computer could have ended up in the trash.

 

That led to our discussing the fact that being a Mersenne discoverer means nothing to normal people.  To math geeks, it is a lifetime achievement, it means being able to sell your bath water at the geek gatherings.  Everywhere you went, geeks would remove pebbles from the pathway upon which you tread, so that you might not injure your delicate feet, all while assuring you they are unworthy, they suck, etc.  So a normal person who discovered a Mersenne Prime could offer it up for sale.  A number becomes a thing of great value.  A geek could buy the number, register it, run a check, submit to GIMPS, get in the history books on a short list with Euler and God, start bottling bath water.

 

One of our Extropian RSPs Hal Finney was reading all this and (being Hal) went off and co-developed or invented a system which does something like that, performs some kind of special calculation and creates numbers which can be traded as currency.  Hal Finney read our Mersenne Prime as currency discussion, then went off and invented BitCoin.

 

Hal is no longer with us, and didn’t answer email in the last couple years of his life.  Can anyone here offer any details?

 

spike

 

 

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