It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

The people who buy electric cars are hip urban professional types. The people who support Brexit are pensioners and skin-heads.

Dyson's public support for Brexit meant that most people in his target market wouldn't ride in a Dyson car, let alone buy one. And of course buggering off to Singapore because the Brexit he campaigned for would make assembly in the UK a disaster only made things worse.

It was a stupid idea anyway. Musk was there ten years ahead of him and was already churning out electric cars as a new entrant. It is far from clear Tesla can survive as VW and the major manufacturers enter the EV market. Dyson stood no chance. Sticking an electric motor in a vehicle instead of a petrol engine is not a huge feat of engineering. There are significant design differences but the bulk of the design and assembly technology is unchanged.

Electric vehicles still have doors, monocoque, windows, seats, suspension, in car entertainment, etc. Ford, GM and the rest only need to change one small part of the package. Sure, they have been slow to adapt. But nobody is making EVs at a profit yet. VW and BMW look set to change that this year.

Only it will automatically update itself unless you stop it.

This is irritating as it upsets my plans for end-to-end Web encryption. By which I mean encryption of the data on the server so that the server has no access to it. The only things that are on the server are encrypted data blobs and a pile of random numbers.

By end-to-end Web I mean that you will be able to set up comment forums like slashdot, read email in a Web browser and everything else you are accustomed to doing on the Web but without any of the plaintext content being accessible to the server.

The technical basis for this scheme was worked out in the 1990s and then patented by a completely unrelated company which merely sat on the patent till it expired last year. It uses meta-cryptography which is a property of the Diffie Hellman schemes that if you add two private keys, the corresponding public key is the product of the public keys, etc. Matt Blaze, Torben Pedersen and others worked out how to apply these effects to achieve an effect they considered interesting but insufficient. My contribution is merely to show that the simple scheme is more than enough to do interesting things.

So now I need to work out how to hook into the browser. One possibility is to present the decryption module as a new compression scheme. It looks like a compression scheme in other respects. It just requires the host to have access to a private key capable of completing the decryption.

Any help would be appreciated: hallam@gmail.com

The project site is mathmesh.com but that is of the previous approach which has been superseded in the reference code but not yet documented.

[Oh and yes, I do know what I am doing sort of, I have probably considered the corner case you have just thought up. This has been in discussion for many years with serious protocol design people.]

Well, they 'allegedly' both need a certain white chemical to survive.....

Agree.

Over the past year I've (for the first time) used Mac OS X on my laptop, I find it much less useful, and frankly much less user friendly, than Gnome 3 (and even Gnome 3 hides too much information because it assumes its users are technophobes).

One can understand Microsoft and Apple designing user interfaces primarily for technophobes, because in the modern world the majority of their users are people for whom the full power of a computer system is too complex for them to understand, much less use; and, seeing that they have in effect a duopoly, the fact that their more technically able users are not well served by their user interfaces doesn't matter, because there aren't enough of us to be a significant market, and most of us will be told what to use at work in any case.

But I really don't understand the Gnome designers' reasons for hiding so much, for making even moderately technical things so awkward. In practice, almost everyone who chooses to use Gnome is a geek. Having said that, if it really annoyed me I could either switch to something else or get under the hood and modify it, and I don't.

For me, Gnome 3 works with niggles. MacOs X is really annoying, but I can use it. Windows 7 is tolerable. Windows 10? Just let's not go there.

Then it's poor responsive design.

Seriously, there is a limit to the width of a column of text that it's comfortable to read, so for continuous text on large screen there may be reasons for having large amounts of whitespace. And, again, for continuous text, having a proportion of white space around the text is easier on the eyes. There can be good ergonomic reasons for using significant whitespace in design.

Good responsive design is hard; to have the same page layout on a two inch wide mobile phone screen as on a 24 inch monitor, and have it attractive and easy to work with on both requires a great deal of thought, and often some compromise. Making the compromises at the small end of the range doesn't work because on a very small screen pages that are not well adapted are completely unusuable, whereas if you make the compromise at the big end of the range you end up with a page that looks ugly but still works.

But the challenge of responsive design is to respond to a wide range of screen sizes and be functional and elegant on all. It's a significant challenge, and too many designers design to one fixed size or a small range of fixed sizes.

In as much detail you care to provide, how did you get where you are today?

Interpret that as you will.

Obama didn't release his birth certificate for one very good reason, he is very clever and Trump is very stupid.

The fact is that the Republicans will always invent some crazy idiotic 'scandal' that they obsess about and endlessly throw up smoke. The birther conspiracy was mind numbingly ridiculous. It would require someone to go back in time to plant the birth notice in the papers. Or for some group of conspirators to go to an enormous amount of trouble in order to make a particular black kid president.

So rather than release the birth certificate and let the Republicans invent a new scandal, Obama held onto it and let them obsess about a scandal nobody else thought made the slightest sense, knowing that he could knock their house of cards down any time he chose. Which of course he did a week before the Bin Laden raid which was guaranteed to end the story.

George W. Bush opened torture chambers across the world and collected photographs for a sick sexual thrill. Yet nobody ever talks about that. None of the people complaining about Hilary ever complained about GWB refusing to comply with Congressional investigation or the deletion of 5 million emails.

So here is what is going to happen. Trump is going to go down to the biggest defeat since Carter and he is going to drag the rest of his party down with him. And afterwards there is going to be a new civil rights act that prohibits Republican voter suppression tactics and the gerrymandering that give them a 5% advantage in elections. And by the time it is all done the Republican party will have two choices, either boot the racist conspiracy theorists and Trumpists out or face two decades in the wilderness.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.