My kids are huge Minecraft fanatics. I set them up their own server with a whitelist, and now they have over 40 of their friends on it building incredible things.

Not wanting to waste this opportunity, I'm using Purugin (https://github.com/enebo/Purugin) and helping them learn to write plugins in Ruby for their server. I'm writing a book with my son and daughter about the experience in hopes other parents out there can channel their kid's passion into learning a skill that will serve them the rest of their lives, no matter what occupation they choose.

Minecraft has been a life changing event in our home. My kids would rather create than consume. That's something I can get behind as a parent.

This is almost certainly wrong.

If you spend any time at all reading about history of Bitcoin and other related currencies, it's clear that Satoshi was a cypherpunk. And at least an active lurker, if not a well-known participant, in the cypherpunks mailing list during the 1990s and early 2000s. Just look at the sources in the bitcoin paper. Satoshi cites lots of cypherpunks, and not many mainstream academics. The code borrows time-stamping ideas from Usenet and takes inspiration from command-and-control architectures of IRC botnets.

The pieces of the puzzle are:

- (1997) Adam Back's hashcash proof of work system

- (1998) Wei Dai's b-money

- (1998-2005) Nick Szabo's writings about git gold

- (2004) Hal Finney's reusable proof of work (RPOW)

Satoshi brought these ideas -- cypherpunk ideas -- together to make Bitcoin, not the ideas about improving Chaumian blind signatures and anonymous e-cash that were being discussed in the academic crypto literature of the time. Remember, cypherpunks (and others inspired by Tim May's crypto-anarchy) have a long history of communicating anonymously. Anonymous remailers and pseudonyms were expected on the list, so it's not unusual to see Satoshi Nakamoto come out of this tradition.

There are probably people that know who the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but they're not going to tell. They're cypherpunks, after all. And if Satoshi stays anonymous, it just means that everything is going exactly as planned.

I am a professional mathematician and number theorist, who has studied work closely related to Zhang's.

I had never heard before of an older (40+) mathematician, who has done essentially no meaningful work in the subject before, and has virtually no publication record, coming out of seemingly nowhere and proving such a big theorem.

This is in no way a slight against older mathematicians, indeed many spectacular results are proved by people over 40, but they typically accumulate an excellent track record on the way.

Indeed, I fully assumed that this guy was full of shit. However, I have heard that well-known experts in the area have closely read Zhang's paper and found it to be correct.

This is enough to put a smile on my face. There is something wonderful about skepticism and cynicism being proven wrong, especially when the skepticism is my own.