TIL: Fantastic Magical Blockchain Beasts and Where to Find Them

franks (64)in #til • 8 years ago (edited)

I get through a lot of odd but interesting articles, when I am researching stuff, that can pad out my stories. One of them was about "John Titor the time Traveller."

Images Courtsey of Pixabay

I have also, at the very same space and time, been chewing over the, Harry Potter Magic and the Bitcoins from Thin Air Effect.

It seemed to me every explanation about the Blockchain and cryptocurrency fell apart at the exact point, it needed to stay rock steady.

"OK!OK!" we all said, "We get it."
Bitcoins are extreme strings of mathematical puzzles that, when fit together, make up the Blockchain.

Nope, we were told, the Blockchain is the Big Magical Mathematical Beast and the Bitcoin Cryptocurrency is nothing more than a flea on its back.

OK! OK! I got it, I got it.

So the Miners are mining these exotic magical mathematical strings.
And each one is a Bitcoin.

Nope, wrong again.
The Miners 49ers are mining magical mathematical strings that interlock and extend the Blockchain.
And the Blockchain, unlike discarded dragon pets at Christmas, is forever.

So WhereTheF***** does the Bit about, you know the Bitcoin crypto thingy come into it.

When these hardy Miner 49ers discover one of these magical mathematical strings of letters and numbers, that interlock exactly into the bottom of the Big Magical Blockchain Mathematical Beast.
Woosh! they are rewarded for their endeavour, with a mathematical string portion of magical Bitcoins.

This is the exact point where all the explanations hit their singularity.
The best explanation I have read, was, they appear as if by magic.

One moment we are dealing with Pure High End Exotic Mathematica and then suddenly we are plunged in to the realm of Fantastic Magical Blockchain Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Does the whole Big Magical Blockchain Mathematical Beasts working in unison generate them, or is it just a portion.
Well, we know the Miner 49er puts his ID into the
magical mathematical strings of letters and numbers that interlock exactly into the bottom of the expanding Big Magical Blockchain Mathematical Beasts.
And then he is sent his portion of Bitcoin Magic Beanz as a reward.

From where this portion is sent from is never covered.
So a full explanation to a non believer is quite difficult.
Explanations between devotees and rabid followers of the, Way of the Cryptocoin is rather easier.
Throw in a few, Hard Forks, into every sentence and it is pretty plain sailing.
Meanwhile out in non believer land, it still is a case of watching the lights in the sky and pondering the truth or fiction of Fantastic Magical Blockchain Beasts and Where to Find Them.

And I have not even covered the even Curious and Curiouser legend of Satoshi Nakamoto.

"Writing code whenever he can, often in cafés, Satoshi Nakamoto finishes his first epic:
Fantastic Magical Blockchain Beasts and Where to Find Them.
His literary agent warns him, "You do realize, you will never make a fortune out of writing code, that will create magical mathematical strings of letters and numbers that interlock exactly into the bottom of the Fantastic Magical Blockchain Beasts?"
Satoshi ignores all the experts advice and carries on and the rest is... as everyone knows, one great disappearing act.
Satoshi is never seen again.

Which brings me nicely back to the now Ancient InterWebs story of the Time Traveller John Titor. It follows the same sort of plot as Satoshi. (As in, John Titor appeared out of nowhere, created a big stir on the Interwebs and then went very quiet. Or went Back to his Future.)
Either way it is a very entertaining story.

Who was John Titor, the 'time traveller' who came from 2036 to warn us of a nuclear war?

It was in the year 2000, on November 2, that a man calling himself John Titor logged onto an obscure internet discussion board and posted this message:

"Greetings. I am a time traveller from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.
“My ‘time’ machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two top-spin dual-positive singularities that produce a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid.
“I will be happy to post pictures of the unit.”

But in the year 2000 there were no smartphones, no social media. The cold blue glow of the CRT monitor was a portal into another world entirely – big, mysterious, and with no fixed identities. In this liminal place – one where, as the New Yorker once put it, nobody knew you were a dog – the idea of a time traveller posting on a bulletin board almost seemed plausible.
And then there was his reason for travelling. Titor claimed he had been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which was needed to debug ageing machines still used in 2036. That in itself isn’t too wacky: in 2002, NASA had to buy outdated medical equipment on eBay just so it could scavenge their obsolete Intel 8086 chips for their booster testing machines, and even the Orion spacecraft, whose first manned flight is scheduled for the 2020s, uses computers from 2002.

Read the whole story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11945420/Who-was-John-Titor-the-time-traveller-who-came-from-2036-to-warn-us-of-a-nuclear-war.html

image courtsey of @reneenouveau