pre-Final Draft

pre-Final Draft.  This is the final draft. I just need to clean up typos and grammar mistakes.
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@ -5,13 +5,11 @@ I fell in love with word-smithing in the eleventh grade after reading Shakespear
I had some flings with fiction, a few blogs, and in 2014 fell in love with a younger, sexier form of mathematical poetry--Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System. She taught me what Copernicus observed so long ago. Mathematics is the language of the universe. When I first read it, I did not understand most of the math. I had no idea what a "digital signature" was. I never had the word hash without the words corned beef in front of it, but believed **fractional reserve banking and bailouts helped the rich get richer and the poor get poorer**. My limited background knowledge from messing around with Napster and BitTorrent in my younger years gave me enough background knowledge to understand that Satoshi'swhite paper was an important historical document. He wrote in plain English, math, and C+ explaining Bitcoin in three languages like the Rosetta Stone.
"To implement a distributed timestamp server on a Peer-To-Peer basis we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash, rather than newspaper or Usenet posts."
"To implement a distributed timestamp server on a Peer-To-Peer basis we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash, rather than newspaper or Usenet posts."
--Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer To Peer Electronic Cash System
![Bitcoin White Paper](https://i.nostr.build/KKZnL41ElbcpGd3V.jpg)
## Proof Of Poetry
Adam Back discovered hashcash. Satoshi cited this in the White paper. Despite it's name, hashcash was not a "cryptocurrency." Hashcash is more like a digital stamp. Stamps have a cost, of course, and so does hashcash. We can't hand a piece of paper with a portrait of some dude wearing a wig to a computer, of course. We must pay for electronic stamps with the only fungible currency computers can use, electriity. This makes electricity the de-facto currency for computers. Therefore, you must pay for the hashcash stamp with electricity. As anyone who has been shocked by their electricity bill in the summer knows, electricity has a real cost. The beauty of hash cash is you wouldn't notice a difference on your electric bill if you sent a dozen emails a month, but if you spammed the whole Word Wide Web with a chain-letter, your electric bill will drain your bank account . Hashcash is a stamp you pay for with computational power, which requires your computer to work. That work can only be paid for with electricity.
@ -46,8 +44,6 @@ These zerobits are also found in the bitcoin timechain. Look at the blocks 87402
- https://mempool.marc26z.com/block/00000000000000000000f17afb5f4bcab00c75dea27659c9b596878763c83533
- https://mempool.marc26z.com/block/00000000000000000000c09a854ef63d9b99594997d3f0b8fa7229944b8ea3cb
Notice how each line from a from an instance of mepool that I run from a [Start9](https://store.start9.com/) server has zerobits in the front. This is because bitcoin uses the same matehmatical poetry that Adam Back Discovered in 1997. It's elegant, has a pattern, dare I say rhthym and looks like a matematical sonnet.
![shakespere sonnet 18](https://i.nostr.build/LFKPOX9jwC2a2l6W.png)
@ -61,7 +57,7 @@ Whenever a miner produces a hash with the required amount of zerobits to send th
At this point, most people have heard the story about Lazzlo buying two pizzas for 10,000 whole Bitcoin. It is often touted as the worst investment in history by the mainstream media, but journalists focus on the sensational and miss the subtleties of this story since they are experts in journalsism, but not so well-versed at cryptography, a branch of mathematics that no one is taught in high school and only the nerdiest of nerds tend to learn it in college. The lesser known part of the story is Lazzlo was also the first person to mine Bitcoin using ASIC chips. ASICs were used well by IT professionals well before bitcoin was discovered, but Lazzlo learned he could mine bitcoin much faster with these spcialized chips than with a laptop. As the first person to figure this out, he must have had an extremely unfair advantage, so why couldn't he just mine all 21 Bitcoin in a matter of months? He was limited by the Difficulty Adjustment.
Here is how it works:- Every hour we can expect 6 blocks- Every Day we can expect 24x6 blocks or 144 blocks- Every week, we can expect 1008 blocks- Every two weeks, we can expect 2016 blocks
At the end of 2016 blocks, if blocks are mined faster than this, the math problem miners try to solves becomes more difficult to slow them back down to ten minutes. When Lazzlo ramped up his bitcoin production, he could only have an unfair advantage for 2016 blocks. Let's say he mined 90% of the blocks within a week. Good for him, but now his ASICS mining slows down because the blocks become much more difficult to mine. His fancy miner essentially must find more zerobits. It's a little more complex than this, but that's the non-boring gist of the story.
At the end of 2016 blocks, if blocks are mined faster than this, the math problem miners try to solves becomes more difficult to slow them back down to ten minutes. When Lazzlo ramped up his bitcoin production, he could only have an unfair advantage for 2016 blocks. Let's say he mined 90% of the block within the first week.  Good for him, but now his ASICS mining slows down because the blocks become much more difficult to mine. His fancy miner essentially must find more zerobits. It's a little more complex than this, but that's the non-boring gist of the story.
Without Satoshi's discovery of the difficulty adjustment, the Cypherpunks like Lazzlo would have mined all 21 million bitcoin before the first 210,000 blocks. The difficulty adjustment makes the distribution fair because the block subsidy limits how much Bitcoin can be created every ten minutes and that amount is cut in half every 4 years.
@ -71,4 +67,20 @@ Without Satoshi's discovery of the difficulty adjustment, the Cypherpunks like L
This is poetic justice.
###The Lindy Effect of Poetry
The OG version of the introduction to The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative To Central Banking by [Saifedean Ammous](/tmp/.mount_JoplinlaXpDb/resources/app.asar/npub1gdu7w6l6w65qhrdeaf6eyywepwe7v7ezqtugsrxy7hl7ypjsvxksd76nak), was written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb has since abandoned bitcoin and Michael Saylor re-wrote the Introduction, but Nassim still has a great concept called the [Lindy Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect). The basic premise accordion to Wikipedia is, "the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy." This is often used by Bitcoiners as a steel-man argument against shitcoins. The argument goes, Bitcoin has been around the longest, so it is more likely to outlast the shitcoins. I don't disagree with that statement, but bitcoin is poetry and poetry has an even more pronounced Lindy Effect. Shakesphere died in 1616, yet his work survives over four centuries later. Those sonnets I fell in love with are older than the United States of America. Many of his clever phrases like "dead as a doornail" are part of the English vernacular. The English language would be much different if not for Shakesphere.
![bitcoin dead]([https://gitea.marc26z.com/marc/NostrPhotos/raw/branch/main/Screenshot from 2024-12-14 05-01-44.png](https://gitea.marc26z.com/marc/NostrPhotos/raw/branch/main/Screenshot%20from%202024-12-14%2005-01-44.png))
Bitcoin is almost 16 years old, but about every ten minutes, a new line of bitcoin poetry is written in the form of a bitcoin block. No one knows for sure, and I do not have a crystal ball, but it would not surprise me if nerds like me admire the poetry of bitcoin at block 21,000,000. This is every Bitcoiner's favorite number, but the 21 millionth block will be produced about 400 years from the Genesis Block. We, the ride-or-die bitcoin freaks, are optomistic.  We believe bitcoin will exist in 400 years from now in the same way Shakespere's Sonnets survive. Bitcoin lingo is already slipping into the wider English Vernarcular. A decade ago, nobody but grumpy gold bugs and geeky bitcoiners used the term "fiat." Fiat is now part of everyday parlance. 
The mainstream media has reported that Bitcoin has died at least 477 times according to [99Bitcoins](https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/). We, the people running bitcoin, disagree. We do not believe bitcoin will die anytime soon. We think it will last generations to come. We expect it to be around hundreds of years from now like Shakesphere's sonnets, maybe even thousands of years from now like the Rosetta Stone. That's why it has captured the imaginations of so many nerds. We are currently in the age where most people think of bitcoin as an investment, but bitcoin is not an investment like a stock or bond. Bitcoin is an investment like a masterpiece. It is more in the category of a Mona Lisa. Imagine if you had a page of Romeo and Julliet that was hand written by William Shakespere. Best of all, you could verify that it was written by Shakesphere every ten minutes. How much would that be worth now that Shakespere has been pushing daisy's for over 400 years? What if you could send that page written by Shakespere to anyone in the world  in ten minutes? Do you think anyone would be interested in one of those pages?
Bitcoin is a poem being written as we speak. This poem, written in math and translated into C++ code, was written by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is 94.26% finished. Current estimates project this poem will be finished on March 1, 2138* You can buy about ten tiny pieces of this poem for about a penny.  Sure, you could have bought 100 small pieces of this poem for a penny 7 years ago, but we are still early in the scheme of things.
"**It** **might** make sense just to **get** **some** **in** **case** **it** **catches** **on**. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy."
-- Satoshi Nakamoto
*[According to Clark Moody's Dashboard as of block [874,733](https://mempool.marc26z.com/block/000000000000000000019b4fe6949b13bfbb5327b73248805d64166cdc51f683)](https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/)