Most of the article is technically ill-informed; unfortunately, much of the logic, while sound if it were based on factual reality, fails in that sense.
The gaslighting in this case is therefore inverted.
lol ArtForz was an engineer who single-handedly designed from scratch low-run book printing machines, built his house with CHP that he designed and created himself, created his own pick-n-place machines from parts he had laying around, reversed a hidden opcode in the AMD GPUs of the time, designed at the gate-level his own FPGA, manually soldered his own sASIC, and printed his own MOSIS chips. He was the smartest person in the room. By far. Many of the very early non-get-rich-quick people that didn't think anything would happen for decades but were interested in Bitcoin, were in fact the applied-science smartest people in the room. The people generally who thought it was digital tulips even a few years later were also people who thought they were the smartest people in the room, but were actually nowhere close.
Others who were very early (source: I was there and interacted with them) were extremely wealthy investment bankers with a track history of being able to make money, some kinds of cryptographers (Hal, Adam, etc) and others who were ultra-competent, often inventors of new technique in their own right.
It's a well-studied but unfortunately not particularly well-known result that the people most interested in Bitcoin are at the two ends of the expertise spectrum—highly highly financially competent, and financially incompetent people.
You will never hear from most of the highly-competent people because they also recognize that being noisy about owning Bitcoin draws a giant target on their backs. E.g. try and find ArtForz now.
I would offer that the late and very great James Randi's often-repeated comments on ultra high-skilled people being some of the easiest to trick are probably illustrative, and my personal opinion at the moment is that many of these people have been tricked long ago into thinking that Bitcoin is something bad.
I'm not gmax, mike, which you definitely knew on IRC when you offered to help me deal with criminal harassment on IRC by handing me +o status in the channels where they were harassing people in your name.
(edit) I'm also not answering gmax; I'm answering you, with concrete specifics and an actual example, to inform you about the utility of DKIM even if Satoshi's email provider didn't use them, which you clearly didn't already know.
The massive amount of additional logic and thought about Satoshi from OG'ers (e.g. |}ruid etc) that have come out in response to this terrible effort, IMO is partly the purpose of the doco.
Most people have no way to more-deeply authenticate those emails because you didn't provide headers. Many people, myself included, would love some way to better-rule-out whether parts of the messages had been elided, for example. A DKIM signature would have been a perfect integrity check of the message. It's just good protocol.
As a result of timestamping emails with their DKIM into Bitcoin, now even rotated, broken, or released keys can be used to partially authenticate e.g. Google messages. You can see this for example in this project here:
This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is still around who is interested in contradicting them.
The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.
His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions.
There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
Maybe in the 1990s. Now, try getting it running even on a network edge platform like those from Netgate. NetBSD's hardware support is singularly unstable and unusable.
Most new platforms port to Linux, commit drivers to the Linux kernel, and ignore the other platforms. The other platforms don't really seem to bother anymore, unfortunately. Things have bit-rotted to such an extent that FS will destroy large amounts of data and.. nobody seems to notice. Kernel panic reports are ignored. Debuggers fail to set functional breakpoints on native hardware. CPU quirks that need workaround to prevent panics are never committed.
Meanwhile, developing this kind of expertise is about as far from the minds of younger experimenters and hackers now as baking cakes and permaculture gardening were from the 00s hardware hackers decades ago. Not only is it far from the minds of younger experimenters, but even attempting to develop it hits a hard wall of hardcore, draconian behavioural purists, secops fashionistas who deride essentially any burgeoning attempts at writing drivers, and language revolutionaries who rage extensively at people for writing any new code in any language but their own favourite.
The situation is pretty harsh and it's likely not going to get any better anytime soon.
this logic would apply to literally every facet of human existence if it were true; your argument has devolved into "people would make more money if they were engaged in criminality and didn't get caught, therefore everyone eventually devolves into a criminal."
the papers studying the amount of black market activity in Bitcoin have consistently shown Bitcoin to be cleaner than the economies in virtually every country on the planet, except for the occasional ultra-clean tiny european state.
literally every bitcoiner since the first roll-out of the Silk Road and the resulting senatorial attacks on them, have been ultra-interested in exactly how much of their hobby is black market and how much is criminality. literally every single one of them is heavily invested in knowing more about the nature and extent of bitcoin criminality. to say that it didn't occur to them that self-interested criminals are operating in BitcoinLand is .. stupid.
You are inflating the amounts considerably (and unverifiably with bald assertions) and then generalizing the rest of the industry based on anecdotal individual reports.
The amount of bad participation is negligible compared to the whole; the benefits are well-catalogued in places where it works under a legal regime. Your commentary about the attempt to destabilize the world economy has no legs and no justification aside from bald assertions, and in any event is directly contradictory to literally every academic estimation of the size of Bitcoin's black market going back to literally its first participant, being Silk Road v1, which even at the very beginning of Bitcoin represented only a tiny, tiny fraction of the otherwise legitimate economy.
Your assertion about the nature of miner profitability even internal to the assertion itself is a completely contradictory lie, since it can only be true if both miners are somehow ultra-profitable due to theft, but also not profitable at all and is thus a lie.
The mining conglomerates and larger operators and their profit in your assertions are clownish strawmen that have nothing to do with reality, and you are ignoring high-quality analyses of majority hashrate, their location, their energy use and source of energy, and ignoring the fact that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide find positive value in Bitcoin's existence, and smacks of an oppressive first-world privileged hypocrisy and failure in value judgement.
The first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that.
The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all.
It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.
Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible.
Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress.
There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.