Unless you are familiar with the new form of money, you probably had no idea what this article is about. Satoshi is connected to BITCOIN. Now, I am not a money expert by any stretch of the imagination. This is not a topic I would have chosen for myself. I hate technology and what it has done to the world. I don’t know much about investing. But, here I am, pressed to post on those very things. Since I am not an expert in this field, I am going to pretty much allow those who are experts to speak. There are some very urgent and compelling reasons why this topic is important at this time. I hope that you will stay with me. Once again, there is a lot of information to cover…but it is information that you need to know!
DISCLAIMER: In my posts I normally collect a number of written articles and videos related to the topic. I hightlight in red or black the parts of the articles that I think are important to note and try to leave it to the reader to come to their own conclusions. The object is to bring the facts/truths to your attention and cause you to look further into them yourself. Why? Because that is the only way to make the subject real to you. When you view the available information, search it our on your own, hopefully guided by the Holy Spirit, YOUR CONCLUSION is exactly that YOURS. It means something to you. It may be similar to mine or it may be completely different. We are all on our own course and in different places with our spiritual development. I pray that GOD speaks to you in a way that touches you. IF you see notes in green, those are my comments. Anything else, you find the source links on the titles, and the author and date will be below the titles. Just because I post an article or video in my articles, it does not mean that I agree with the author or support their stand. It does mean that I felt there was worthwhile information to be gleaned.
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The satoshi represents one hundred millionths of a bitcoin. Small denominations make bitcoin transactions easier to conduct and makes extremely fine transactions readable. The general unit structure of bitcoins has 1 bitcoin (BTC) equivalent to 1,000 millibitcoins (mBTC), 1,000,000 microbitcoins (μBTC), or 100,000,000 satoshis. While the exact figure is unknown, it is estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto may possess 1 million bitcoins, equivalent to 100,000,000,000,000 satoshis.
Before we delve more deeply into BitCoin there are a couple of videos about money in general that you might want to review.
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This next video will tell you all about the wonders of BitCoin. MAGIC… has somehow become a word that means something wonderful, delightful, amazing. That is what people hear when they hear that word. But, MAGIC is far from wonderful. It is amazing, even mesmerizing. IT is also A TRAP!!!
Magic Money: The Bitcoin Revolution | Full Documentary
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What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a digital currency created in January 2009 following the housing market crash. It follows the ideas set out in a whitepaper by the mysterious and pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.1 [Satoshi is usually a name given for baby boys which means “clear thinking, quick witted, wise,” while Nakamoto is a Japanese surname which means ‘central origin’ or ‘(one who lives) in the middle’] The identity of the person or persons who created the technology is still a mystery. Bitcoin offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms and is operated by a decentralized authority, unlike government-issued currencies. (Just like everything evil…there is always a promise, a lure, bait, something you gain when you give up your soul.)
What Is Bitcoin?KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Launched in 2009, Bitcoin is the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap.2
- Unlike fiat currency, Bitcoin is created, distributed, traded, and stored with the use of a decentralized ledger system known as a blockchain.1
- Bitcoin’s history as a store of value has been turbulent; the cryptocurrency skyrocketed up to roughly $20,000 per coin in 2017, but as of two years later, is currency trading for less than half of that.3
- As the earliest cryptocurrency to meet widespread popularity and success, Bitcoin has inspired a host of other projects in the blockchain space.
Understanding Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a collection of computers, or nodes, that all run Bitcoin’s code and store its blockchain. A blockchain can be thought of as a collection of blocks. (BLOCK is another word for CUBE.) In each block is a collection of transactions. Because all these computers running the blockchain have the same list of blocks and transactions and can transparently see these new blocks being filled with new Bitcoin transactions, no one can cheat the system. Anyone, whether they run a Bitcoin “node” or not, can see these transactions occurring live. In order to achieve a nefarious act, a bad actor would need to operate 51% of the computing power that makes up Bitcoin. Bitcoin has around 47,000 nodes as of May 2020 and this number is growing, making such an attack quite unlikely.4
In the event that an attack was to happen, the Bitcoin nodes, or the people who take part in the Bitcoin network with their computer, would likely fork to a new blockchain making the effort the bad actor put forth to achieve the attack a waste.
Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency. Balances of Bitcoin tokens are kept using public and private “keys,” which are long strings of numbers and letters linked through the mathematical encryption algorithm that was used to create them. The public key (comparable to a bank account number) serves as the address which is published to the world and to which others may send bitcoins. The private key (comparable to an ATM PIN) is meant to be a guarded secret and only used to authorize Bitcoin transmissions. Bitcoin keys should not be confused with a Bitcoin wallet, which is a physical or digital device which facilitates the trading of Bitcoin and allows users to track ownership of coins. The term “wallet” is a bit misleading, as Bitcoin’s decentralized nature means that it is never stored “in” a wallet, but rather decentrally on a blockchain.
Style notes: according to the official Bitcoin Foundation, the word “Bitcoin” is capitalized in the context of referring to the entity or concept, whereas “bitcoin” is written in the lower case when referring to a quantity of the currency (e.g. “I traded 20 bitcoin”) or the units themselves. The plural form can be either “bitcoin” or “bitcoins.” Bitcoin is also commonly abbreviated as “BTC.”
How Bitcoin Works
Bitcoin is one of the first digital currencies to use peer-to-peer technology to facilitate instant payments. The independent individuals and companies who own the governing computing power and participate in the Bitcoin network, are comprised of nodes or miners. “Miners,” or the people who process the transactions on the blockchain, are motivated by rewards (the release of new bitcoin) and transaction fees paid in bitcoin. These miners can be thought of as the decentralized authority enforcing the credibility of the Bitcoin network. New bitcoin is being released to the miners at a fixed, but periodically declining rate, such that the total supply of bitcoins approaches 21 million. As of July 2020, there are roughly 3 million bitcoins which have yet to be mined.3 In this way, Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency generated through a similar process) operates differently from fiat currency; in centralized banking systems, currency is released at a rate matching the growth in goods in an attempt to maintain price stability, while a decentralized system like Bitcoin sets the release rate ahead of time and according to an algorithm. (The entire system is run and controlled by AI, robots/demons)
Bitcoin mining is the process by which bitcoins are released into circulation. Generally, mining requires the solving of computationally difficult puzzles in order to discover a new block, which is added to the blockchain. In contributing to the blockchain, mining adds and verifies transaction records across the network. For adding blocks to the blockchain, miners receive a reward in the form of a few bitcoins; the reward is halved every 210,000 blocks. The block reward was 50 new bitcoins in 2009 and is currently 12.5. On May 11th, 2020 the third halving occurred, bringing the reward for each block discovery down to 6.25 bitcoins.5 A variety of hardware can be used to mine bitcoin but some yield higher rewards than others. Certain computer chips called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) and more advanced processing units like Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) can achieve more rewards. These elaborate mining processors are known as “mining rigs.”
One bitcoin is divisible to eight decimal places (100 millionths of one bitcoin), and this smallest unit is referred to as a Satoshi.6 If necessary, and if the participating miners accept the change, Bitcoin could eventually be made divisible to even more decimal places.
How Bitcoin Began
Aug. 18, 2008: The domain name bitcoin.org is registered. Today, at least, this domain is “Who is Guard Protected,” meaning the identity of the person who registered it is not public information. (That is a very strange name for a domain. Guarded by who? Demons?)
Oct. 31, 2008: A person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto makes an announcement on The Cryptography Mailing list at metzdowd.com: “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party. This now-famous whitepaper published on bitcoin.org, entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” would become the Magna Carta for how Bitcoin operates today.
Jan. 3, 2009: The first Bitcoin block is mined, Block 0. This is also known as the “genesis block” and contains the text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” perhaps as proof that the block was mined on or after that date, and perhaps also as relevant political commentary.7
Jan. 8, 2009: The first version of the Bitcoin software is announced on The Cryptography Mailing list.
Jan. 9, 2009: Block 1 is mined, and Bitcoin mining commences in earnest.
Who Invented Bitcoin?
No one knows who invented Bitcoin, or at least not conclusively. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name associated with the person or group of people who released the original Bitcoin white paper in 2008 and worked on the original Bitcoin software that was released in 2009. In the years since that time, many individuals have either claimed to be or have been suggested as the real-life people behind the pseudonym, but as of May 2020, the true identity (or identities) behind Satoshi remains obscured.
Before Satoshi
Though it is tempting to believe the media’s spin that Satoshi Nakamoto is a solitary, quixotic genius who created Bitcoin out of thin air, such innovations do not typically happen in a vacuum. All major scientific discoveries, no matter how original-seeming, were built on previously existing research. There are precursors to Bitcoin: Adam Back’s Hashcash, invented in 1997,8 and subsequently Wei Dai’s b-money, Nick Szabo’s bit gold and Hal Finney’s Reusable Proof of Work. The Bitcoin whitepaper itself cites Hashcash and b-money, as well as various other works spanning several research fields. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the individuals behind the other projects named above have been speculated to have also had a part in creating Bitcoin.
Why Is Satoshi Anonymous?
There are a few motivations for Bitcoin’s inventor keeping his or her or their identity secret. One is privacy. As Bitcoin has gained in popularity – becoming something of a worldwide phenomenon – Satoshi Nakamoto would likely garner a lot of attention from the media and from governments. (Hard to believe that this person would value his privacy over all the financial reward he would earn as its inventor, not to mention the fame and glory. Or, how about the future funding that would be his for the asking when he moves to his next project?)
Another reason could be the potential for Bitcoin to cause major disruption of the current banking and monetary systems. If Bitcoin were to gain mass adoption, the system could surpass nations’ sovereign fiat currencies. This threat to existing currency could motivate governments to want to take legal action against Bitcoin’s creator.
The other reason is safety. Looking at 2009 alone, 32,489 blocks were mined; at the then-reward rate of 50 BTC per block, the total payout in 2009 was 1,624,500 BTC, which is worth $13.9 billion as of October 25, 2019. One may conclude that only Satoshi and perhaps a few other people were mining through 2009 and that they possess a majority of that stash of BTC. Someone in possession of that much Bitcoin could become a target of criminals, especially since bitcoins are less like stocks and more like cash, where the private keys needed to authorize spending could be printed out and literally kept under a mattress. While it’s likely the inventor of Bitcoin would take precautions to make any extortion-induced transfers traceable, remaining anonymous is a good way for Satoshi to limit exposure.
Receiving Bitcoins As Payment
Bitcoins can be accepted as a means of payment for products sold or services provided. If you have a brick and mortar store, just display a sign saying “Bitcoin Accepted Here” and many of your customers may well take you up on it; the transactions can be handled with the requisite hardware terminal or wallet address through QR codes and touch screen apps. An online business can easily accept bitcoins by just adding this payment option to the others it offers credit cards, PayPal, etc.
Working For Bitcoins
Those who are self-employed can get paid for a job in bitcoins. There are a number of ways to achieve this such as creating any internet service and adding your bitcoin wallet address to the site as a form of payment. There are several websites/job boards which are dedicated to the digital currency: (well, many people do service work so they can deal in cash and maintain their privacy. Why would they want every transaction to public knowledge?)
- Cryptogrind brings together work seekers and prospective employers through its website
- Coinality features jobs – freelance, part-time and full-time – that offer payment in bitcoins, as well as other cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and Litecoin
- Jobs4Bitcoins, part of reddit.com
- BitGigs
- Bitwage offers a way to choose a percentage of your work paycheck to be converted into bitcoin and sent to your bitcoin address
Investing in Bitcoins
There are many Bitcoin supporters who believe that digital currency is the future. Many of those who endorse Bitcoin believe that it facilitates a much faster, low-fee payment system for transactions across the globe. Although it is not backed by any government or central bank, bitcoin can be exchanged for traditional currencies; in fact, its exchange rate against the dollar attracts potential investors and traders interested in currency plays. (So, just another means for the rich to get richer and avoid taxes and fees that regular folk have to pay.) Indeed, one of the primary reasons for the growth of digital currencies like Bitcoin is that they can act as an alternative to national fiat money and traditional commodities like gold.
In March 2014, the IRS stated that all virtual currencies, including bitcoins, would be taxed as property rather than currency. Gains or losses from bitcoins held as capital will be realized as capital gains or losses, while bitcoins held as inventory will incur ordinary gains or losses. The sale of bitcoins that you mined or purchased from another party, or the use of bitcoins to pay for goods or services are examples of transactions which can be taxed.9
Like any other asset, the principle of buying low and selling high applies to bitcoins. The most popular way of amassing the currency is through buying on a Bitcoin exchange, but there are many other ways to earn and own bitcoins.
Risks of Bitcoin Investing
Though Bitcoin was not designed as a normal equity investment (no shares have been issued), some speculative investors were drawn to the digital money after it appreciated rapidly in May 2011 and again in November 2013. Thus, many people purchase bitcoin for its investment value rather than as a medium of exchange.
However, their lack of guaranteed value and digital nature means the purchase and use of bitcoins carries several inherent risks. Many investor alerts have been issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and other agencies.
The concept of a virtual currency is still novel and, compared to traditional investments, Bitcoin doesn’t have much of a long-term track record or history of credibility to back it. With their increasing popularity, bitcoins are becoming less experimental every day; still, after 10 years, they (like all digital currencies) remain in a development phase and are consistently evolving. “It is pretty much the highest-risk, highest-return investment that you can possibly make,” says Barry Silbert, CEO of Digital Currency Group, which builds and invests in Bitcoin and blockchain companies.
Bitcoin Regulatory Risk
Investing money into Bitcoin in any of its many guises is not for the risk-averse. Bitcoins are a rival to government currency and may be used for black market transactions, money laundering, illegal activities or tax evasion. As a result, governments may seek to regulate, restrict or ban the use and sale of bitcoins, and some already have. Others are coming up with various rules. For example, in 2015, the New York State Department of Financial Services finalized regulations that would require companies dealing with the buy, sell, transfer or storage of bitcoins to record the identity of customers, have a compliance officer and maintain capital reserves. The transactions worth $10,000 or more will have to be recorded and reported.10
The lack of uniform regulations about bitcoins (and other virtual currency) raises questions over their longevity, liquidity, and universality.
Security Risk of Bitcoins
Most individuals who own and use Bitcoin have not acquired their tokens through mining operations. Rather, they buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital currencies on any of a number of popular online markets known as Bitcoin exchanges. Bitcoin exchanges are entirely digital and, as with any virtual system, are at risk from hackers, malware, and operational glitches. If a thief gains access to a Bitcoin owner’s computer hard drive and steals his private encryption key, he could transfer the stolen Bitcoins to another account. (Users can prevent this only if bitcoins are stored on a computer which is not connected to the internet, or else by choosing to use a paper wallet – printing out the Bitcoin private keys and addresses, and not keeping them on a computer at all.) Hackers can also target Bitcoin exchanges, gaining access to thousands of accounts and digital wallets where bitcoins are stored. One especially notorious hacking incident took place in 2014, when Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin exchange in Japan, was forced to close down after millions of dollars worth of bitcoins were stolen.11
This is particularly problematic once you remember that all Bitcoin transactions are permanent and irreversible. (so, if someone steals your bitcoin, you have no way to recourse.) It’s like dealing with cash: Any transaction carried out with bitcoins can only be reversed if the person who has received them refunds them. There is no third party or a payment processor, as in the case of a debit or credit card – hence, no source of protection or appeal if there is a problem.
Insurance Risk
Some investments are insured through the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Normal bank accounts are insured through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) up to a certain amount depending on the jurisdiction. Generally speaking, Bitcoin exchanges and Bitcoin accounts are not insured by any type of federal or government program. In 2019, prime dealer and trading platform SFOX announced it would be able to provide Bitcoin investors with FDIC insurance, but only for the portion of transactions involving cash.12
Risk of Bitcoin Fraud
While Bitcoin uses private key encryption to verify owners and register transactions, fraudsters and scammers may attempt to sell false bitcoins. For instance, in July 2013, the SEC brought legal action against an operator of a Bitcoin-related Ponzi scheme.13 There have also been documented cases of Bitcoin price manipulation, another common form of fraud.
Market Risk
Like with any investment, Bitcoin values can fluctuate. Indeed, the value of the currency has seen wild swings in price over its short existence. Subject to high volume buying and selling on exchanges, it has a high sensitivity to “news.” According to the CFPB, the price of bitcoins fell by 61% in a single day in 2013, while the one-day price drop record in 2014 was as big as 80%.14
If fewer people begin to accept Bitcoin as a currency, these digital units may lose value and could become worthless. Indeed, there was speculation that the “Bitcoin bubble” had burst when the price declined from its all-time high during the cryptocurrency rush in late 2017 and early 2018. There is already plenty of competition, and though Bitcoin has a huge lead over the hundreds of other digital currencies that have sprung up, thanks to its brand recognition and venture capital money, a technological break-through in the form of a better virtual coin is always a threat.
Bitcoin’s Tax Risk
As bitcoin is ineligible to be included in any tax-advantaged retirement accounts, there are no good, legal options to shield investments from taxation.
Bitcoin Forks
In the years since Bitcoin launched, there have been numerous instances in which disagreements between factions of miners and developers prompted large-scale splits of the cryptocurrency community. In some of these cases, groups of Bitcoin users and miners have changed the protocol of the Bitcoin network itself. This process is known “forking” and usually results in the creation of a new type of Bitcoin with a new name. This split can be a “hard fork,” in which a new coin shares transaction history with Bitcoin up until a decisive split point, at which point a new token is created. Examples of cryptocurrencies that have been created as a result of hard forks include Bitcoin Cash (created in August 2017), Bitcoin Gold (created in October 2017) and Bitcoin SV (created in November 2017). A “soft fork” is a change to protocol which is still compatible with the previous system rules. Bitcoin soft forks have increased the total size of blocks
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Everything about CryptoCurrency is so secretive and clouded in mystery. Why? Even the verbiage starting with the word Crypto which means hidden. They don’t want you to know how it really works, who actually maintains control, who really started it. Just everything about it is secretive and occulted/hidden. That should be a gigantic RED FLAG!!!
It is one of the great mysteries of the digital age.
The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of Bitcoin, has captivated even those who think the virtual currency is some sort of online Ponzi scheme. A legend has emerged from a jumble of facts: Someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto released the software for Bitcoin in early 2009 and communicated with the nascent currency’s users via email — but never by phone or in person. Then, in 2011, just as the technology began to attract wider attention, the emails stopped. Suddenly, Satoshi was gone, but the stories grew larger.
Over the last year, as I worked on a book about the history of Bitcoin, it was hard to avoid being drawn in by the almost mystical riddle of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. Just as I began my research, Newsweek made a splash with a cover article in March 2014 claiming that Satoshi was an unemployed engineer in his 60s who lived in suburban Los Angeles. Within a day of publication, however, most people knowledgeable about Bitcoin had concluded that the magazine had the wrong man.
Many in the Bitcoin community told me that, in deference to the Bitcoin creator’s clear desire for privacy, they didn’t want to see the wizard unmasked. But even among those who said this, few could resist debating the clues the founder left behind. As I had these conversations with the programmers and entrepreneurs who are most deeply involved in Bitcoin, I encountered a quiet but widely held belief that much of the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo.
Mr. Szabo is nearly as much of a mystery as Satoshi. But in the course of my reporting I kept turning up new hints that drew me further into the chase, and I even stumbled into a rare encounter with Mr. Szabo at a private gathering of top Bitcoin programmers and entrepreneurs.
At that event, Mr. Szabo denied that he was Satoshi, as he has consistently in electronic communications, including in an email on Wednesday. But he acknowledged that his history left little question that he was among a small group of people who, over decades, working sometimes cooperatively and sometimes in competition, laid the foundation for Bitcoin and created many parts that later went into the virtual currency. Mr. Szabo’s most notable contribution was a Bitcoin predecessor known as bit gold that achieved many of the same goals using similar tools of advanced math and cryptography.It may be impossible to prove Satoshi’s identity until the person or people behind Bitcoin’s curtain decide to come forward and prove ownership of Satoshi’s old electronic accounts. At this point, the creator’s identity is no longer important to Bitcoin’s future. Since Satoshi stopped contributing to the project in 2011, most of the open-source code has been rewritten by a group of programmers whose identities are known.
But Mr. Szabo’s story provides insight into often misunderstood elements of Bitcoin’s creation. The software was not a bolt out of the blue, as is sometimes assumed, but was instead built on the ideas of multiple people over several decades.This history is more than just a matter of curiosity. The software has come to be viewed in academic and financial circles as a significant computer science breakthrough that may reshape the way money looks and moves. Recently, banks like Goldman Sachs have taken the first steps toward embracing the technology.
Mr. Szabo himself has continued to be quietly involved in the work. In the beginning of 2014, Mr. Szabo joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., that was operating in stealth mode and that aimed to build a better Bitcoin exchange. After his arrival, Mr. Szabo helped reorient the company to take advantage of the Bitcoin software’s capability for so-called smart contracts, which enable self-executing financial transactions, according to people briefed on the company’s operations who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Genesis Block
What Is Genesis Block?
Genesis Block is the name of the first block of Bitcoin ever mined—thus called “Genesis.” The Genesis Block forms the foundation of the entire Bitcoin trading system and is the prototype of all other blocks in the blockchain. In 2009, Bitcoin’s named developer, Satoshi Nakamoto, created the Genesis Block, which launched the process of Bitcoin trading that’s in place today.
Fans of the Genesis Block
Because the Genesis Block, also known as Block 0, began the process of trading bitcoin, Bitcoin fans hold the Genesis Block in a kind of cult-like reverence, as they do its creator. Fans are drawn to Bitcoin’s arcane construct and idiosyncratic vocabulary with the fervor of one obsessed with a sophisticated arcade game.
Bitcoin devotees have been donating small amounts of bitcoin (BTC) to the Genesis Block as a tribute to Satoshi Nakamoto. This is seen as a kind of sacrifice because once a coin is moved into the Genesis Block, it can never be moved again—sort of like throwing a quarter into a fountain.
(Wow… if that did not creep you out, tune in to the spirit a little better. So they are like worshiping this thing. Drawn to do so as if addicted. Anytime you have a compulsion toward something, you better check the spirit. There is a spirit involved. IF it is not the Holy Spirit… than you better drop that thing, quick. Ask GOD to forgive you and cleanse you from it.)
A Quick Bitcoin Primer
Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency, which is based on the peer-to-peer electronic cash system developed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin refers to the system and concept of the trading platform and “bitcoin”—small “b”—refers to the virtual coinage that is traded. There are no actual coins, thus the “bit”—or binary digit, the most basic unit of data in computing—before “coin.”
In the world of digital currency, blocks (CUBES) are files where data about the Bitcoin network and its transactions are permanently recorded. Each time a block is completed—that is, filled with bitcoin transactions—it gives way to the next block in the blockchain. The only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation is through mining. So, to “mine bitcoin” is to “mint currency.” (So, you are actively “mining” material/gold to make bricks/cubes; making you a builder/mason)
Like gold, Bitcoin cannot be created arbitrarily. Gold must be mined out of the ground, and BTC must be mined via digital means. Moreover, Bitcoin’s founder stipulated that, like gold, the supply of bitcoin should be limited and finite. Only 21 million BTC can be mined in total. When miners have unlocked this many bitcoin, then the planet’s supply will be tapped out, unless someone changes Bitcoin’s protocol to allow for a larger supply.
Mysteries of the Genesis Block
Beginning with the fact that the name, “Satoshi Nakamoto,” itself is a pseudonym, the Genesis Block and the founding of Bitcoin remains riddled with mystery. Shortly after the launch of Bitcoin, the person called “Satoshi Nakamoto” vanished from the face of the earth, leaving barely a trace. This auspicious event paved the way for the continuous enigma surrounding what fans lovingly call “the Block.” (CUBE)
The First 50 BTC Could Not be Spent
The Genesis Block’s beginnings were shrouded (hidden/occulted/veiled) in the debate about a fine point of its creation: Was the code that rendered the Genesis Block effectively untradeable an intention or a mistake on the part of Nakamoto?
Although the Genesis Block points to a web address—written into the Genesis Block’s code—that link displayed an error message when activated. The system could not find the first 50-BTC transaction in its database, and the spending transaction was rejected. So, the Genesis Block’s transaction is not considered as a “real transaction” by the original Bitcoin client.
But Why? Did Nakamoto mean for the first bitcoin to be non-tradeable? Or, was it a mistake? This became the subject of much debate among Bitcoin fans and insiders. Because of the precision of this developer, however, most believe that it was hardly an error. Nakamoto likely wrote the code for the Genesis Block exactly the way he wanted it. We just will never know why, as the quirk was not discovered until after Nakamoto disappeared.
Current versions of the Bitcoin system handle the block/transaction databases differently from the original system, so the Genesis Bock’s transaction is now just a weird special case in the code.
The Genesis Block’s Secret Message
Another puzzling aspect of the Genesis Block is the secret message that Nakamoto instilled within the Block’s raw data: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Although Nakamoto never commented on the meaning of this text, most believe that it serves as a mission statement for Bitcoin itself. The text is a headline for an article in the January 3, 2009 edition of The [London] Times about the British government’s failure to stimulate the economy following the 2007–08 financial crisis. Nakamoto famously hated the idea of too-big-to-fail financial institutions and wanted Bitcoin to be different in that regard. Most people think that Nakamoto’s reference to the article in the Genesis Block’s code was a hint as to how Bitcoin is different from the big investment banks that needed government bailouts in 2008.
The True Legacy of the Genesis Block
Bitcoin cannot be bailed out because its process eliminates the middleman; there is no third-party, no corporate entity to go between BTC and the consumer. The Bitcoin network checks and double-checks itself continuously via complex mathematical problems that are first resolved by computers, then by human bitcoin miners. One cannot proceed with any bitcoin trade until the math puzzle is validated. Another failsafe is that, because all transactions are stored forever, the actions of miners can always be traced, which makes it impossible to hide any evidence of wrongdoing.
In November 2013, early protegees of Nakamoto formed the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (SNI) to educate the public about the history and vision of Bitcoin’s creation. Among other interesting details, the SNI houses one of the biggest remnants of Nakamoto’s online existence: An extensive list of forum posts, broken into subject categories, that the Bitcoin creator penned while he still worked on the project.
Perhaps the true gift of the Genesis Block, however, is its legacy of accountability, integrity, and transparency—qualities that the financial services sector is painfully learning to acquire.
answered Jan 18 at 1:10
Satoshi = enlightenment, wisdom, or intelligence.
Nakamoto = root hit, center / origin.
Satoshi Nakamoto could be “Central Intelligence“. Hahaha
The CIA Project, a group dedicated to unearthing all of the government’s secret projects and making them public, has released a video claiming Bitcoin is actually the brainchild of the US National Security Agency.
The video entitled CIA Project Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin a CIA or NSA project? claims that there is a lot of compelling evidences that proves that the NSA is behind Bitcoin. One of the main pieces of evidence has to do with the name of the mysterious man, woman or group behind the creation of Bitcoin, “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
According to the CIA Project, Satoshi Nakamoto means “Central Intelligence” in Japanese. Doing a quick web search, you’ll find out that Satoshi is usually a name given for baby boys which means “clear thinking, quick witted, wise,” while Nakamoto is a Japanese surname which means ‘central origin’ or ‘(one who lives) in the middle’ as people with this surname are found mostly in the Ryukyu islands which is strongly associated with the Ryūkyū Kingdom, a highly centralized kingdom that originated from the Okinawa Islands. So combining Nakamoto and Satoshi can be loosely interpreted as “Central Intelligence”.
The CIA Project also points to the fact that no one has ever actually met Satoshi Nakamoto in person, and there’s no conclusive evidence that could lead to his identification. The group says this means that the individual who created Bitcoin almost certainly had intelligence training;
Other evidence includes the fact that Bitcoin uses a common PRNG (crypto program) to create secure keys, which is itself believed to have an NSA backdoor; numerous Reddit threads linking Bitcoin or Satoshi Nakamoto with the NSA have been removed; and that Bitcoin is not decentralized as it is being controlled by a small group which is led by Gavin Bell, popularly known as Gavin Andresen – the face of Bitcoin.
But do the CIA Project’s claims have any merit?
As it stands, their argument is not very compelling. The meaning of Satoshi Nakamoto can be loosely interpreted as something that pertains to a highly organized and intelligent agency, but the name could also have chosen simply because it has a nice ring to it. And would the NSA really have given the creator of its ‘secret project’ such an obvious name? If the NSA really is behind Bitcoin, naming it “Central Intelligence” would not be a very intelligent move.
Claims that the NSA created Bitcoin have actually been flung around for years. People have questioned why it uses the SHA-256 hash function, which was designed by the NSA and published by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The fact that the NSA is tied to SHA-256 leads some to assume it’s created a backdoor to the hash function that no one has ever identified, which allows it to spy on Bitcoin users.
“If you assume that the NSA did something to SHA-256, which no outside researcher has detected, what you get is the ability, with credible and detectable action, they would be able to forge transactions. The really scary thing is somebody finds a way to find collisions in SHA-256 really fast without brute-forcing it or using lots of hardware and then they take control of the network,” cryptography researcher Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins University said in a previous interview.
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EXPOSED: The real creator of Bitcoin is likely the NSA as One World Currency
(GLOBALINTELHUB.COM) 6/12/17 — Bitcoin has surged to all time highs, urging us to compose this article on a hot trending topic that we’ve wanted to compose for a long time. Our parent company, Elite E Services, is primarily a FX algorithm development company – so we get asked about Bitcoin quite a bit. Life is a deteriorating asset so let’s get right down to it. Who created Bitcoin, and why? Before we get started just a quick note to all those that haven’t read Splitting Pennies – which is a great primer for those interested in Bitcoin and where it will go next.
The creator of Bitcoin is officially a name, “Satoshi Nakamoto” – very few people believe that it was a single male from Japan. For more detailed analysis about who is Satoshi Nakamoto see this article and the official Wikipedia entry. In the early days of Bitcoin development this name is associated with original key-creation and communications on message boards, and then the project was officially handed over to others at which point this Satoshi character never appeared again (Although from time to time someone will come forward saying they are the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and then have their posts deleted).
Bitcoin could very well be the ‘one world currency’ that conspiracy theorists have been talking about for some time. It’s a kill five birds with one stone solution – not only is Bitcoin an ideal one world currency, it allows law enforcement a perfect record of all transactions on the network. It states very clearly on bitcoin.org (the official site) in big letters “Bitcoin is not anonymous” :
Some effort is required to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances. This is one reason why Bitcoin addresses should only be used once. Always remember that it is your responsibility to adopt good practices in order to protect your privacy. Read more about protecting your privacy.
Another advantage of Bitcoin is the problem of Quantitative Easing – the Fed (and thus, nearly all central banks in the world) have painted themselves in a corner, metaphorically speaking. QE ‘solved’ the credit crisis, but QE itself does not have a solution. Currently all currencies are in a race to zero – competing with who can print more money faster. Central Bankers who are in systemic analysis, their economic advisors, know this. They know that the Fiat money system is doomed, all what you can read online is true (just sensationalized) – it’s a debt based system based on nothing. That system was created, originally in the early 1900’s and refined during Breton Woods followed by the Nixon shock (This is all explained well in Splitting Pennies). In the early 1900’s – there was no internet! It is a very archaic system that needs to be replaced, by something modern, electronic, based on encryption. Bitcoin! It’s a currency based on ‘bits’ – but most importantly, Bitcoin is not the ‘one world currency’ per se, but laying the framework for larger cryptocurrency projects. In the case of central banks, who control the global monetary system, that would manifest in ‘Settlement Coin’ :
Two resources available almost exclusively to central banks could soon be opened up to additional users as a result of a new digital currency project designed by a little-known startup and Swiss bank UBS. One of those resources is the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system used by central banks (it’s typically reserved for high-value transactions that need to be settled instantly), and the other is central bank-issued cash. Using the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) unveiled today, the five-member consortium that has sprung up around the project aims to help central banks open-up access to these tools to more customers. If successful, USC has the potential to create entirely new business models built on instant settling and easy cash transfers. In interview, Robert Sams, founder of London-based Clearmatics, said his firm initially worked with UBS to build the network, and that BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, ICAP and Santander are only just the first of many future members.
In case you didn’t read Splitting Pennies or don’t already know, the NSA/CIA often works for big corporate clients, just as it has become a cliche that the Iraq war was about big oil, the lesser known hand in global politics is the banking sector. In other words, Bitcoin may have very well been ‘suggested’ or ‘sponsored’ by a banker, group of banks, or financial services firm. But the NSA (as we surmise) was the company that got the job done. And probably, if it was in fact ‘suggested’ or ‘sponsored’ by a private bank, they would have been waiting in the wings to develop their own Bitcoin related systems or as in the above “Settlement Coin.” So the NSA made Bitcoin – so what?
It isn’t really important who or why created Bitcoin as the how – and the how is open source, so experts have dug through the code bit by bit (pun intended). If the who or why isn’t important – why did we write an article about it?
The FX markets currently represent the exchange between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ currencies. In the future, why not too they will include ‘cryptocurrencies’ – we’re already seeing the BTC/EUR pair popup on obscure brokers. When BTC/USD and BTC/EUR are available at major FX banks and brokers, we can say – from a global FX perspective, that Bitcoin has ‘arrived.‘ Many of us remember the days when the synthetic “Euro” currency was a new artificial creation that was being adopted, although the Euro project is thousands of degrees larger than the Bitcoin project. But unlike the Euro, Bitcoin is being adopted at a near exponential rate by demand (Many merchants resisted the switch to Euros claiming it was eating into their profit margins and they were right!).
And to answer the question as to why Elite E Services is not actively involved in Bitcoin the answer is that previously, you can’t trade Bitcoin. Now we’re starting to see obscure brokers offering BTC/EUR but the liquidity is sparse and spreads are wacky – that will all change. When we can trade BTC/USD just like EUR/USD you can bet that EES and a host of other algorithmic FX traders will be all over it! It will be an interesting trade for sure, especially with all the volatility, the cross ‘pairs’ – and new cryptocurrencies. For the record, for brokers- there’s not much difference adding a new symbol (currency pair) in MT4 they just need liquidity, which has been difficult to find.
So there’s really nothing revolutionary about Bitcoin, it’s just a logical use of technology in finance considering a plethora of problems faced by any central bank who creates currency. And there are some interesting caveats to Bitcoin as compared to major currencies; Bitcoin is a closed system (there are finite Bitcoin) – this alone could make such currencies ‘anti-inflationary’ and at the least, hold their value (the value of the USD continues to deteriorate slowly over time as new M3 introduced into the system.) But we need to pay
Another thing that Bitcoin has done is set the stage for a cryptocurrency race; even Google is investing in Bitcoin alternatives:
Google Ventures and China-based IDG Capital Partners are the second group of tech investors in two months to place a bet on OpenCoin, the company behind the currently-in-beta Ripple open-source payments protocol. OpenCoin announced today that it had closed an additional round of funding — the amount wasn’t specified — with Google Ventures and IDG Capital Partners. (Hat tip to GigaOM for the news.) Last month, OpenCoin wrapped up an earlier angel round of funding from another high-profile group of technology VCs: Andreessen Horowitz, FF Angel IV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Vast Ventures and the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund.
Here’s some interesting theories about who or whom is Satoshi:
A corporate conglomerate
Some researchers proposed that the name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ was derived from a combination of tech companies consisting of Samsung, Toshiba, Nakayama, and Motorola. The notion that the name was a pseudonym is clearly true and it is doubtful they reside in Japan given the numerous forum posts with a distinctly English dialect.
Craig Steven Wright
This Australian entrepreneur claims to be the Bitcoin creator and provided proof. But soon after, his offices were raided by the tax authorities on ‘an unrelated matter’
Soon after these stories were published, authorities in Australia raided the home of Mr Wright. The Australian Taxation Office said the raid was linked to a long-running investigation into tax payments rather than Bitcoin.
Questioned about this raid, Mr Wright said he was cooperating fully with the ATO.
“We have lawyers negotiating with them over how much I have to pay,” he said.Other potential creators
Nick Szabo, and many others, have been suggested as potential Satoshi – but all have denied it:
The New Yorker published a piece pointing at two possible Satoshis, one of whom seemed particularly plausible: a cryptography graduate student from Trinity College, Dublin, who had gone on to work in currency-trading software for a bank and published a paper on peer-to-peer technology. The other was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Vili Lehdonvirta. Both made denials.
Fast Company highlighted an encryption patent application filed by three researchers – Charles Bry, Neal King and Vladimir Oksman – and a circumstantial link involving textual analysis of it and the Satoshi paper which found the phrase “…computationally impractical to reverse” in both. Again, it was flatly denied.THE WINNER: It was the NSA
The NSA has the capability, the motive, and the operational capacity – they have teams of cryptographers, the biggest fastest supercomputers in the world, and they see the need. Whether instructed by their friends at the Fed, in cooperation with their owners (i.e. Illuminati banking families), or as part of a DARPA project – is not clear and will never be known (unless a whistleblower comes forward). In fact, the NSA employs some of the best mathematicians and cryptographers in the world. Few know about their work because it’s a secret, and this isn’t the kind of job you leave to start your own cryptography company.
But the real smoking Gun, aside from the huge amount of circumstantial evidence and lack of a credible alternative, is the 1996 paper authored by NSA “HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH” available here.
The NSA was one of the first organizations to describe a Bitcoin-like system. About twelve years before Satoshi Nakamoto published his legendary white paper to the Metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list, a group of NSA information security researchers published a paper entitled How to Make a Mint: the Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash in two prominent places, the first being an MIT mailing list and the second being much more prominent, The American Law Review (Vol. 46, Issue 4 ).
The paper outlines a system very much like Bitcoin in which secure financial transactions are possible through the use of a decentralized network the researchers refer informally to as a Bank. They list four things as indispensable in their proposed network: privacy, user identification (protection against impersonation), message integrity (protection against tampering/substitution of transaction information – that is, protection against double-spending), and nonrepudiation (protection against later denial of a transaction – a blockchain!).
“We will assume throughout the remainder of this paper that some authentication infrastructure is in place, providing the four security features.” (Section 1.2)
It is evident that SHA-256, the algorithm Satoshi used to secure Bitcoin, was not available because it came about in 2001. However, SHA-1 would have been available to them, having been published in 1993.
Why would the NSA want to do this? One simple reason: Control.
As we explain in Splitting Pennies – the primary means the US dominates the world is through economic policy, although backed by bombs. And the critical support of the US Dollar is primarily, the military. The connection between the military and the US Dollar system is intertwined inextricably. There are thousands of great examples only one of them being how Iraq switched to the Euro right before the Army’s invasion.
In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar – ‘the currency of the enemy’ – for the more multilateral euro. The changeover was announced on almost exactly the same day that the euro reached its lowest ebb, buying just $0.82, and the G7 Finance Ministers were forced to bail out the currency. On Friday the euro had reached $1.08, up 30 per cent from that time.
Almost all of Iraq’s oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001. Around 26 billion euros (£17.4bn) has been paid for 3.3 billion barrels of oil into an escrow account in New York. The Iraqi account, held at BNP Paribas, has also been earning a higher rate of interest in euros than it would have in dollars.
The point here is there are a lot of different types of control. The NSA monitors and collects literally all electronic communications; internet, phone calls, everything. They listen in even to encrypted voice calls with high powered microphones, devices like cellphones equipped with recording devices (See original “Clipper” chip). It’s very difficult to communicate on planet Earth in private, without the NSA listening. So it is only logical that they would also want complete control of the financial system, including records of all electronic transactions, which Bitcoin provides. (So, pretty much like we got ourselves to this point by using credit cards until checks and cash became obsolete. This initial BitCoin circus and those who use it are just paving the way for the ONE WORLD DIGITAL MONEY SYSTEM!)
Could there be an ‘additional’ security layer baked into the Blockchain that is undetectable, that allows the NSA to see more information about transactions, such as network location data? It wouldn’t be so far fetched, considering their past work, such as Xerox copy machines that kept a record of all copies made (this is going back to the 70’s, now it’s common). Of course security experts will point to the fact that this layer remains invisible, but if this does exist – of course it would be hidden.
More to the point about the success of Bitcoin – its design is very solid, robust, manageable – this is not the work of a student. Of course logically, the NSA employs individuals, and ultimately it is the work of mathematicians, programmers, and cryptographers – but if we deduce the most likely group capable, willing, and motivated to embark on such a project, the NSA is the most likely suspect. Universities, on the other hand, didn’t product white papers like this from 1996.
Another question is that if it was the NSA, why didn’t they go through more trouble concealing their identity? I mean, the internet is rife with theories that it was in fact the NSA/CIA and “Satoshi Nakamoto” means in Japanese “Central Intelligence” – well there are a few answers for this, but to be congruent with our argument, it fits their profile.
Where could this ‘hidden layer’ be? Many think it could be in the public SHA-256, developed by NSA (which ironically, was the encryption algorithm of choice for Bitcoin – they could have chosen hundreds of others, which arguably are more secure):
Claims that the NSA created Bitcoin have actually been flung around for years. People have questioned why it uses the SHA-256 hash function, which was designed by the NSA and published by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The fact that the NSA is tied to SHA-256 leads some to assume it’s created a backdoor to the hash function that no one has ever identified, which allows it to spy on Bitcoin users.
“If you assume that the NSA did something to SHA-256, which no outside researcher has detected, what you get is the ability, with credible and detectable action, they would be able to forge transactions. The really scary thing is somebody finds a way to find collisions in SHA-256 really fast without brute-forcing it or using lots of hardware and then they take control of the network,” cryptography researcher Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins University said in a previous interview.
Then there’s the question of “Satoshi Nakamoto” – if it was in fact the NSA, why not just claim ownership of it? Why all the cloak and dagger? And most importantly, if Satoshi Nakamoto is a real person, and not a group that wants to remain secret – WHY NOT come forward and claim your nearly $3 Billion worth of Bitcoin (based on current prices).
Did the NSA create Satoshi Nakamoto?
The CIA Project, a group dedicated to unearthing all of the government’s secret projects and making them public, has released a video claiming Bitcoin is actually the brainchild of the US National Security Agency.
The video entitled CIA Project Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin a CIA or NSA project? claims that there is a lot of compelling evidences that proves that the NSA is behind Bitcoin. One of the main pieces of evidence has to do with the name of the mysterious man, woman or group behind the creation of Bitcoin, “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
According to the CIA Project, Satoshi Nakamoto means “Central Intelligence” in Japanese. Doing a quick web search, you’ll find out that Satoshi is usually a name given for baby boys which means “clear thinking, quick witted, wise,” while Nakamoto is a Japanese surname which means ‘central origin’ or ‘(one who lives) in the middle’ as people with this surname are found mostly in the Ryukyu islands which is strongly associated with the Ryūkyū Kingdom, a highly centralized kingdom that originated from the Okinawa Islands. So combining Nakamoto and Satoshi can be loosely interpreted as “Central Intelligence”.
Is it so really hard to believe? This is from an organization that until the Snowden leaks, secretly recorded nearly all internet traffic on the network level by splicing fiber optic cables. They even have a deep-sea splicing mission that will cut undersea cables and install intercept devices. Making Bitcoin wouldn’t even be a big priority at NSA.
Certainly, anonymity is one of the biggest myths about Bitcoin. In fact, there has never been a more easily traceable method of payment. Every single transaction is recorded and retained permanently in the public “blockchain”. The idea that the NSA would create an anarchic, peer-to-peer crypto-currency in the hope that it would be adopted for nefarious industries and become easy to track would have been a lot more difficult to believe before the recent leaks by Edward Snowden and the revelation that billions of phone calls had been intercepted by the US security services. We are now in a world where we now know that the NSA was tracking the pornography habits of Islamic “radicalisers” in order to discredit them and making deals with some of the world’s largest internet firms to insert backdoors into their systems.
And we’re not the only ones who believe this, in Russia they ‘know’ this to be true without sifting through all the evidence.
A Russian lawmaker claims that Bitcoin is a CIA conspiracy [to finance terrorism]:
Nonetheless, Svintsov’s remarks count as some of the more extreme to emanate from the discussion. Svintsov told Russian broadcast news agency REGNUM:“All these cryptocurrencies [were] created by US intelligence agencies just to finance terrorism and revolutions.”Svintsov reportedly went on to explain how cryptocurrencies have started to become a payment method for consumer spending, and cited reports that terrorist organisations are seeking to use the technology for illicit means.
Let’s elaborate on what is ‘control’ as far as the NSA is concerned. Bitcoin is like the prime mover. All future cryptocurrencies, no matter how snazzy or functional – will never have the same original keys as Bitcoin. It created a self-sustained, self-feeding bubble – and all that followed. It enabled law enforcement to collect a host of criminals on a network called “Silk Road” and who knows what other operations that happened behind the scenes. Because of pesky ‘domestic’ laws, the NSA doesn’t control the internet in foreign countries. But by providing a ‘cool’ currency as a tool, they can collect information from around the globe and like Facebook, users provide this information voluntarily. It’s the same strategy they use like putting the listening device in the chips at the manufacturing level, which saves them the trouble of wiretapping, electronic eavesdropping, and other risky methods that can fail or be blocked. It’s impossible to stop a cellphone from listening to you, for example (well not 100%, but you have to physically rewire the device). Bitcoin is the same strategy on a financial level – by using Bitcoin you’re giving up your private transactional information. By itself, it would not identify you per se (as the blockchain is ‘anonymous’ but the transactions are there in the public register, so combined with other information, which the NSA has a LOT OF – they can triangulate their information more precisely.
That’s one problem solved with Bitcoin – another being the economic problem of QE (although with a Bitcoin market cap of $44 Billion, that’s just another day at the Fed buying MBS) – and finally, it squashes the idea of sovereignty although in a very, very, very subtle way. You see, a country IS a currency. Until now, currency has always been tied to national sovereignty (although the Fed is private, USA only has one currency, the US Dollar, which is exclusively American). Bitcoin is a super-national currency, or really – the world’s first one world currency.
Of course, this is all great praise for the DOD which seems to have a 50 year plan – but after tens of trillions spent we’d hope that they’d be able to do something better than catching terrorists (which mostly are artificial terrorists).
get the book Splitting Pennies.
RESEARCH & REFERENCES
5/6/2018 This article is nearly a year old here are some updated links that were hidden or didn’t exist when this article was written, good well deserved reads:
https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/gnupg-libgcrypt-rsa-encryption.html Bitcoin ‘can be’ hacked, as researchers hack RSA-1024
http://anonhq.com/is-bitcoin-created-by-the-nsa-heres-the-truth-that-should-worry-you
For More Information:
CASHLESS SYSTEM AT THE DOOR
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