“At the end of the day, knowing the identity of Satoshi is about as important as knowing who created HTTP or HTML,” a bitcoin entrepreneur named Jason Weinstein told Slate. “Every day people communicate, socialize, get information, move money, and transact business over the Internet using these protocols without knowing how they work or who created them.”
.. The search for Nakamoto, the argument goes, undermines the anti-authoritarian premise of bitcoin. Andreas Antonopoulos, a well-known bitcoin entrepreneur, laid out this argument in a post on Reddit explaining why he declined an offer to meet Wright:
Identity and authority are distractions from a system of mathematical proof that does not require trust. This is not a telenovela. Bitcoin is a neutral framework of trust that can bring financial empowerment to billions of people. It works because it doesn’t depend on any authority. Not even Satoshi’s.
.. The Economist pointed out, this latest saga unfolded during a heated “civil war” that has broken out among bitcoin developers over how to deal with an increase in transaction volume in the bitcoin network. The network processes transactions in batches known as “blocks.” As the number of blocks has increased, the network has become in danger of being overloaded. One side in the dispute wants to change the bitcoin code, increasing the block size to allow the system to process transactions more quickly. The other side sees this as a betrayal of the integrity of the original code, arguing that a change would lead to more centralization in the system (the greatest sin for a bitcoin believer) and consequent problems.
.. In this context, the fight over Nakamoto looks more like the jostling of courtiers to install a sympathetic heir to the throne than an objective analysis of the cryptographic proof.
.. Unlike HTML or HTTP, bitcoin was an ideological project from the start.
.. Turning away from the question of Nakamoto’s identity is a way to deny the fact that bitcoin, like all technology, is ultimately, imperfectly, human.
The Unpleasant Charisma of John Kasich
Kasich, however, has a couple of weaknesses of his own. He has frequently defied his party’s right wing, including on the hot-button issue of Obamacare. And he has a combustible personality that strikes some as refreshing and genuine but others as erratic. “He’s not an ordinary politician,” says Keith Faber, the president of the Ohio Senate, who accompanied Kasich to New Hampshire. “Before he answers a question, he doesn’t sit and think, ‘Oh, what is the least controversial way to discuss this so no one will misinterpret me?’ He says what he thinks.” If Kasich runs for president, as he now seems almost certain to do, that quality could make him 2016’s most interesting entrant.
.. The thing about John Kasich is, he’s kind of a jerk.
Lobbyists in Columbus warn their clients before meeting the governor not to take it personally if he berates them. A top Ohio Republican donor once publicly vowed not to give Kasich a penny after finding him to be “unpleasantly arrogant.” As a congressman, Kasich sometimes lashed out at constituents—one who called him a “redneck” in a 1985 letter got a reply recommending he “enroll in a remedial course on protocol”—and when Kasich was thrown out of a Grateful Dead concert for trying to join the band onstage, he allegedly threatened to use his clout to have the band banned from D.C. As I was writing this article, Kasich’s press secretary, Rob Nichols, helpfully emailed me the thesaurus entry for “prickly,” sensing that I would need it.
..But while Kasich can be rude—and at times even genuinely nasty—he is also prone to spontaneous displays of empathy, frequently becoming emotional as he talks about the plight of people “in the shadows.”..They describe Kasich as a sort of heartland Chris Christie—brash, decisive, authentic—without all the baggage...“But here’s the thing—he makes things happen. His will is tremendous, and he gets people to follow him. He’s an ass-kicker.”..“Well, I’m an energetic guy, and I’m not going to change it.”..Despite seeming perpetually off-the-cuff, he rarely makes gaffes serious enough that he has to apologize for them.
The Field Guide to Ted Cruz
Because Cruz is currently running for the Republican nomination, the perception that he is a ferocious hard-liner serves his interests, and he’s not likely to dispute it.
.. What’s ironic is that Cruz is one of the least erratic people in national politics. The oddities in his behavior are strategic rather than spontaneous. In interviews, for example, he often gives answers that have clearly been rehearsed; that’s not “normal,” per se, but it makes sense if you’re an ambitious politician, being interviewed or questioned in public.
.. It’s possible that Cruz wouldn’t have taken his defunding campaign so far had it cost him anything, or put his own ambitions at risk.
.. Instead, I proceed on the assumption that Cruz is smarter than me—not that he’s a superior human who Americans should follow blindly, and not that he’s always right. Just that he’s smarter than me. In practice, that means when Cruz says or does something that doesn’t make sense to me, I ask myself what I’m missing. I take a step back and slowly puzzle through why a very smart person with certain well-documented strategic objectives would do that. Lord knows this is not my usual practice with politicians, but it has turned out to be a surprisingly effective technique for analyzing Cruz. I highly recommend it.
.. But it creates two complications that are, I think, worth remembering. First: between his intelligence and his verbal agility, Cruz is easily able to elide questions, or to answer them in a lawyerly, nuanced way. Such deftness can be a lifesaver for a politician who’s been put on the spot, and Cruz’s nuanced arguments are often quite interesting, but such answers can also seem like sophistry, and over time, have fueled suspicions that Cruz is a phony.
.. Most of his Republican colleagues in Congress agreed with at least some of his critiques of the Affordable Care Act itself; all of them who were there in 2009, after all, had voted against it in the first place. Their criticisms of Cruz hinged on the premise that his defunding campaign had no realistic chance of succeeding. Democrats controlled the Senate. And as Tom Coburn pointed out, Obama would presumably not have been pleased if Congress sent him a bill that defunded his signature effort; Cruz would ultimately have had to convince dozens of Democrats, in both chambers, to join Republicans in voting to override a presidential veto. From that point of view, the wacko bird from Texas had arguably engineered a government shutdown for no possible productive purpose. Cruz, not surprisingly, was keen to argue that the effort was worth a chance, and that the chance did in fact exist.
.. In addition to carefully framing his briefs, it turns out, he went into every Supreme Court appearance with an individuated understanding of the nine justices on the bench, and some arguments tailored to the ones likely to cast the swing vote.
.. I enjoyed interviewing Cruz; he’s intelligent and thoughtful. But under normal circumstances, he’s so disciplined and on message that there’s almost no point in asking him a question. You’re more likely to find the answer by using the Cruz rules in conjunction with inferential reasoning.
.. With very few exceptions, what he said is exactly what he meant to say. Thanks to this technique, I was able to discover Cruz’s position on immigration reform all the way back in 2013.
.. Cruz is fiscally conservative, and focused on fiscal issues; socially conservative, but only once or twice a season; pragmatic rather than ideological; and, as noted earlier, not nearly as radical as his reputation would suggest.
Frank Sinatra has a Cold
The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra — his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on — and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism — a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.
.. At other times, aiming to please, his men will overreact to his desires: when he casually observed that his big orange desert jeep in Palm Springs seemed in need of a new painting, the word was swiftly passed down through the channels, becoming ever more urgent as it went, until finally it was a command that the jeep be painted now, immediately, yesterday. To accomplish this would require the hiring of a special crew of painters to work all night, at overtime rates; which, in turn, meant that the order had to be bucked back up the line for further approval. When it finally got back to Sinatra’s desk, he did not know what it was all about; after he had figured it out he confessed, with a tired look on his face, that he did not care when the hell they painted the jeep.
Yet it would have been unwise for anyone to anticipate his reaction, for he is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct — suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow.
.. Martin Sinatra, a ruddy and tattooed little blue-eyed Sicilian born in Catania, boxed under the name of “Marty O’Brien.” In those days, in those places, with the Irish running the lower reaches of city life, it was not uncommon for Italians to wind up with such names. Most of the Italians and Sicilians who migrated to America just prior to the 1900’s were poor and uneducated, were excluded from the building-trades unions dominated by the Irish, and were somewhat intimidated by the Irish police, Irish priests, Irish politicians.
.. He arrived suddenly on the scene when DiMaggio was silent, when paisanos were mournful, were quietly defensive about Hitler in their homeland. Sinatra became, in time, a kind of one-man Anti-Defamation League for Italians in America, the sort of organization that would be unlikely for them because, as the theory goes, they rarely agreed on anything, being extreme individualists: fine as soloists, but not so good in a choir; fine as heroes, but not so good in a parade.
.. “He can’t make his mother do anything she doesn’t want to do,” adding, “Even today, he wears the same brand of underwear I used to buy him.”
.. The fight, called a holy war between Muslims and Christians, was preceded by the introduction of three balding ex-champions, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston
.. With most women Sinatra dates, his friends say, he never knows whether they want him for what he can do for them now — or will do for them later. With Ava Gardner, it was different. He could do nothing for her later. She was on top. If Sinatra learned anything from his experience with her, he possibly learned that when a proud man is down a woman cannot help. Particularly a woman on top.