Todd’s urgent dismissal of the documentary reads to Hoback like an attempt to throw Satoshi-hunters off the scent. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter would go on the offense. He’s a master of game theory—it’s what he does. He has spent a lot of years now muddying the waters,” says Hoback. “He’s an unbelievable genius.”
I haven’t seen the docu, but I did like his (Hoback’s) docu about Qanon, Q: Into the Storm.
When someone says “He’s an unbelievable genius,” I now understand that the person speaking is either a con artist or a gullible idiot. Unbelievable geniuses don’t exist, there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard. So if you’re saying someone is such a genius, either you have no metric by which to measure genius, or you’re selling something.
Cullen is absolutely selling something: he’s selling his documentary.
Smells 100% like bullshit. I had no take on this documentary one way or the other before, but now I’m very skeptical.
It’s almost certainly bullshit. This is the entry point to conspiratorial thinking; it’s a classic Argument from Silence.
“What is he trying to hide‽” I dunno, man. Maybe he recognizes that there’s a bunch of unhinged weirdos who are hellbent on stalking “Satoshi,” and he doesn’t want to be harassed? Seems like a pretty good reason to try to throw you off.
Also, who gives a shit who it is? Only people trying to make a buck or beg money off of that person care. Reveals a lot about the documentary director.
Hoback argues
Currently bitcoin or any block chain based currency is more of a grift than financial freedom. However countries like El Salvador have taken it up as official currency, so real lives can be affected by whoever holds that bitcoin stockpile.
Sure. Counterpoint: there’s real billionaires with known identities fucking things up, and we aren’t doing shit about them.
Obviously, knowing the identity of one more isn’t that big of an issue.
Oh come on now.
Almost all people declaring or otherwise promoting their supposed genius are completely full of shit, Elon comes to top of mind, but there in fact are some savants for which quickly understanding and mastering highly technical domains just comes naturally.
These people are almost always far more interested in exercising their gift/curse and solving problems than in self promotion or feeding a greed disease. People like Elon unfortunately receive most of the fruits and accolades of the efforts of people like this. It makes me sick how selfish, self-important capitalist baffoon types literally rule the world by paying people that do solve mankind’s great problems a salary, then perverting their work to maximize profit and walking out on stage with it in a fucking turtleneck all but declaring “I made dis thing. Don’t ask me how it fucking works, but I made dis. Pay me. I’m God.”
It’s sad that humans largely tend to swoon over, and would much rather be led by charismatic narcissistic bullshit artists, usually dopes who never think before they open their gaping mouth holes, who have no problem declaring they know everything about everything than almost exclusively non-charismatic, high functioning geniuses that are almost always too neurotic to want to lead, which makes them even more desirable candidates to be drafted into it.
“I haven’t seen one so it must not exist” ?
I’ve met one. He’s unbelievable. He’s a great guy, but sometimes a little hard to follow if you’re only taking part in one conversation at a time when he’s talking in two and listening to a third because he expects you to be on the ball in your own discussion when he jumps in to drop a tidbit or ask a question like a chess master playing 4 games in the park at once – in heated discussions about topics as diverse as economy, politics, technology, and the history of Coffee. He’s so nice and so unfathomably intelligent that when he’s working you just naturally want to see if he needs anything on the way back to his desk and otherwise leave him alone to craft miracles in the environment of his choosing.
Like, I’ve sat down and taken those tests from back in the day when measuring IQ was a thing. I did well. I’m proud of how well I did. This guy cannot be measured by any yardstick built by mortals.
Downvotes because I’ve seen someone gifted?
I kinda wonder where he’s going now that VMware is being squeezed dry. He’ll pop out and get snapped up by someone else, but there aren’t many doing actual kernel dev for money anymore.