As the story goes, eunuchs were sent across the country to shortlist 5,000 young women aged 13 to 16 to be considered as

Even among acolytes, Bitcoin’s true nature is hard to pin down. It’s a fast-settling payments and settlements network, which led people to believe it would be suitable for petty-cash style payments on the internet, or even at brick and mortar points of sale. It’s a highly-available, replicated, and consistent database, which led many to envision it as a tool for the storage of arbitrary data. It’s highly innovative, and relies on new discoveries and improvements in computer science, cryptography, and peer to peer networking, yet it is perceived as antediluvian, a relic almost. These contradictions are core to the nature of Bitcoin. Something unowned, with no one to speak for it, will appear multitudinous in the minds of its users. It’s a glittering prism, refracting the opinions of observers, spitting out radically different visions of itself based on their perspectives.,That said, concubinage was a complex practice in imperial China and for most of the women a necessary evil to be adopted simply because women at that time had only four options to survive; be a wife, work as a maid, be a concubine, or work as a prostitute.,And traditionally once a girl was brought to the emperor’s attention to be concubine, she is bound for lifelong captivity. Once a girl was taken inside the palace walls, she had to leave behind her family, her friends, her usual ways of life, and not even permitted to see her relatives or friends without official consent. An army of eunuchs guards her movements closely, ensuring her ‘virginity’ for the emperor. Sex with anyone other than the emperor was strictly forbidden and is punishable by death.,Bitcoin has often confused people. It’s perhaps one of the most misunderstood phenomena of the last decade. If you lack sufficient ideological and historical context, you most likely consider it a complete boondoggle or a bizarre, unnecessary waste of computing power and effort. This is the default position. Most people in the West rarely give any thought to monetary policy or banking — why should they? Their currencies depreciate at a slow, barely perceptible rate. Their bank arrangements work fairly well, and they don’t find themselves frozen out of the financial system too often.,There are many techniques we can follow to perform an efficient EDA, most of these techniques are graphical in nature. The reason behind that is, it’s better to spot patterns and anomalies in the data when it’s represented visually. The particular graphical techniques use in EDA tasks are really straight forward, for example:,Of course, this isn’t the reality for the majority of the world’s population, who suffer under inflationary regimes, or politicized and untrustworthy banking systems. But the views of American coastal elites are far overrepresented in the discourse, so the press is replete with confused assessments of this purportedly useless monetary scheme. But understanding the purpose of Bitcoin is itself a shibboleth. If you don’t get it, it’s probably not meant for you.,I still refuse to sit and meditate. But I will accept that when I take in the foggy fall mornings, I do think only of how magical it looks and how great my tea tastes. And even if that moment is fleeting, it is still one that is mine.,I still refuse to sit and meditate. But I will accept that when I take in the foggy fall mornings, I do think only of how magical it looks and how great my tea tastes. And even if that moment is fleeting, it is still one that is mine.,And the worst part; they live for the emperor and they are made to die for the emperor. They were his to do with as he pleased, including taking them along with him in his ‘afterlife’ for entertainment. The imperial concubines were either executed by palace eunuchs or commit suicide themselves by hanging themselves with a silk scarf or by taking poison.,This matters, because October 31, 2008 was the first time Bitcoin’s core qualities were sketched out, and paired with the name. This makes the system known as ‘Bitcoin’ rather specific. It’s not simply a generic name assigned to the first successful digital cash implementation. It’s the name that Satoshi bestowed upon a system with a predefined monetary schedule, 21 million units, based on proof of work, and so on. Other digital cash systems have existed and will exist. But this one is special, and it’s opinionated. It’s not just a way to move value through a communications medium. It’s an entire monetary manifesto. An affront to the fiat system.,These last two might take some explaining. In the first case, the wavefunction describes all the possible realities that could exist. By some mysterious process, one of those realities is selected to be the “real” one that we measure. The wavefunction doesn’t let go of any of those other potentialities until we measure it but they were never real in the first place.,Recently, the great monetary historian George Selgin pointed out that Bitcoin was unlikely to displace the dollar anytime soon, because monetary network effects are incredibly powerful and enduring. And I fully agree. The difference between us is simply one of time horizons. I am willing to be patient. I believe Bitcoiners have this in common. They recognize that they have undertaken a near-hopeless task. Creating a global, neutral, apolitical settlement medium and standard of value will not happen overnight. We have barely begun the project. We are only twelve years in. But we have made some great progress so far. So we push forward.,What’s the measure of a healthy society? Arguably, it’s a willingness to undertake long term projects, whose completion their originators will never live to see. Virtually anything worth building takes time to build. Enduring institutions don’t come easy.,And out of the options available, being a concubine was one of the easiest ways available for a poor woman to earn social security and financial status if she can’t find a husband. Concubinage was also considered far safer than prostitution as there will be only one male partner and chances of getting sexual diseases were less.,The idea of digital cash had existed previously, of course, as had cash-like schemes based on computational work. But this specific scheme — capped supply, not dollar-pegged (many of the early digital cash ideas relied on maintaining a dollar peg), running on a peer-to-peer network, based on a shared ledger, with minting through proof-of-work — was new, and so Satoshi had the privilege of naming it. When you create new things, whether they’re fictional characters or nation-states, you get to name them. In some cases, merely discovering things endows you with a nominative right. But it’s unambiguous that inventors get to christen their inventions.