Exactly. People are all for globalization until it comes for their specific industry and job. I remember there being a great uproar and gnashing of teeth over the outsourcing of IT jobs to Asia back in the 90s and 00s, yet now there’s something wrong with protecting one of America’s remaining big manufacturing industries.
The only two that match up with the Windows piece of the puzzle are Dave Kleiman and Paul Le Roux. Of those two, Paul Le Roux had a interest in online gambling. Guess what the first Bitcoin release had references to.
There’s one more man you are missing that fits better with the Windows piece that is more likely than those two. A man that was obsessed with anonymity (with no real picture of him on the net), an active writer still today, and with the coding and cryptography chops to have actually built it.
When I see lists of URLs like that I can only wonder what a future post archeologist, coming upon this long dusty thread half a decade from now, will find when they try to go to those sites.
Might sound dumb, but there are still places in the world where having $400k worth of BTC != $400k in the bank.
Plenty of banks will freeze your bank account instantly.
And good luck convincing them that you stumbled upon $400k by solving a puzzle - only takes one suspicious fraud/risk manager to conclude that there’s a higher chance of fraud than legitimacy.
(But you are right, no problem to find someone to pay you the market price. That’s a done deal in seconds)
Examples of such places? I did KYC/AML with multiple European banks when withdrawing crypto, and while they checked thoroughly, there were never any issues.
I doubt that it would be useful for most newcomers to try to compete with GPT/Claude, etc for pure text LLM's now.
If someone is just starting AI research for something like a PhD or startup, now, I think it'll be more useful to get familiar with robot simulation framework, such as Nvidia Omniverse.
While there's a lot of competition around humanoid robots, I'm sure there are plenty of more specialized possibilities. Maybe some agricultural machine, maybe medical, mining, etc.
