Read one book. Dostoyevsky's ‘Crime and Punishment’, concentrating on all of the various ways he portrays righteousness.
He helps you see what's right in front of you, namely that people do wrong things not because they are evil or bad, but because they are weak.
Once you understand people as inherently weak, that they do stupid shit because they are essentially helpless, not because they're bad or evil or cruel, it becomes so much easier to forgive.
Mental toughness is all about forgiving and forgetting, and you learn to forgive only by accepting that people are weak, that people are essentially incapable of doing what's right.
Here one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“She is so unhappy! Ah, how unhappy! She believes there must be righteousness everywhere. She expects it. She doesn't see that it's impossible for people to be righteous and she is angry at it.”
It's a bit higher than that. 150 mg for anti-smoking (as Xyban), 300 mg for severe depression or Bipolar 1 (as Wellbutrin) is not uncommon, but with all the others (esp. the Adderall and the mood stabilizer) and coffee to chase, yeah, that would wake up a mummified corpse.
That shrink should have his license pulled.
(That said, Buproprion is a miracle drug. As far as antidepressants go, it's in class all by itself.)
This is tectonic. If it's purely WFC, I'm really amazed and excited. It's not the novelty, it's the perfection of each. They remind me of the Laurentian library by Michelangelo.
But it was new, it wasn't previously described in print, and it wasn't available to the public...
...oh, before the effective filing date. There's the rub.
But couldn't the case could be made that all of those conditions applied at the time Satoshi released it; and, had the rightful owner known of its existence, would have applied?
I just think the anonymity is really interesting. Why be anonymous? I don't think it's open-source altruism like the mythology suggests. I think it's greed. If he'd developed it for someone else or while working for someone else or on/with (their) prior art, that's a damn good reason to hide. So is (at present) the $6.4 billion USD value of his 980,000 bitcoins.
That makes a lot of sense. I can see a case if his/her/their intention was to deceive for whatever reason, like personal gain.
The creative solution to the “double spend” problem is the valuable piece. The other pieces, cryptographic hashing and proof-of-work have been around for some time. Algorithms make up the largest pool of software patents.
If it went private (it's actually patent pending once publically released; even if CC licensed, the license is null re: invalid ownership), an owner could do what MasterCard and Visa do: percentage of transaction, etc. I bet they could even make a case for ownership of his 1+ million coins ($6.4 billion USD).
The technology is already out of the bag, though, it's not going back in.
A future-tense corollary: “What if it turns out not to be open source?”
As someone who works in crypto-currency, the enduring mystery over who invented bitcoin bothers me a lot.
The going belief is in a still-anonymous fairy godfather, Satoshi Nakamoto, who gave unto the world his/her/their foundational idea, or intellectual property, and said go forth and multiply.
Just one problem: What if Nakamoto invented his/her/their technology at a company or academic institution? That institution c/would claw back the intellectual property. Where there is intellectual property, there are patent lawyers; and where there are patent lawyers, there are licensing fees! See Oracle v. Google over Sun Microsystems' Java.
What if the reason he/she/it maintains anonymity is because to reveal himself is to reveal where he worked when he invented bitcoin? That employer would be the true owner of the IP, and open-source bitcoin would go private. The foundational idea that's launched a thousand startups, supposedly open-source, turns out to be anything but open-source. That would suck.
I wager that, at some point in the future, bitcoin will be private property owned by a corporation or academic institution.
He helps you see what's right in front of you, namely that people do wrong things not because they are evil or bad, but because they are weak.
Once you understand people as inherently weak, that they do stupid shit because they are essentially helpless, not because they're bad or evil or cruel, it becomes so much easier to forgive.
Mental toughness is all about forgiving and forgetting, and you learn to forgive only by accepting that people are weak, that people are essentially incapable of doing what's right.
Here one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“She is so unhappy! Ah, how unhappy! She believes there must be righteousness everywhere. She expects it. She doesn't see that it's impossible for people to be righteous and she is angry at it.”