Latest news with #Watergate
Miami Herald
17 hours ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
Why higher oil prices may not change US energy policy
As military actions between Iran and Israel continued, two tankers collided Tuesday, caught fire and spilled oil in the Gulf of Oman. The incident briefly sent shock waves through the oil market as investors contemplated a closure of the Strait of Hormuz. One estimate found that a closure in the crucial shipping route could result in oil prices soaring to $120 a barrel. So would higher oil prices push more people, or governments, to move away from fossil fuels? Short-term spikes in oil prices might translate into temporary changes in consumption patterns, analysts have said. But they are not likely to have a significant impact on long-term oil production or consumer habits. Oil shocks, often accompanied by increases in gasoline prices, have bedeviled presidents since the Nixon era. But while no one likes paying more for gasoline, big price spikes have not translated into sweeping, long-term changes to domestic energy policy in the United States. To understand why, Meg Jacobs, a historian who teaches at Princeton University and the author of 'Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s,' pointed to two lessons from the energy crisis of the 1970s. Energy crises and policy change The first lesson from the energy crisis, Jacobs said, is that even though it worried voters, it didn't lead to the development of a more robust domestic energy policy in the United States. In the 1970s, after supply shocks led to high gas prices, long lines at the pump and even rationing in some states, many politicians agreed that the United States should reduce its dependence on foreign oil. Then-President Jimmy Carter flirted with fixes like supporting renewables as he encouraged consumers to conserve energy. But big promises to fix the energy crisis fell flat. 'The lesson of the 1970s was that if Watergate and Vietnam taught Americans that governments lie, then the failure to solve the energy crisis taught them that government was ineffective,' Jacobs said. Instead of reducing reliance on foreign oil by rethinking domestic energy policy, Jacobs said, the United States under President Ronald Reagan stepped up its military presence in the Middle East. Congress is currently debating the rollback of many of the renewable energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden's signature climate law. The fate of this policy may prove far more consequential for the energy transition than an oil supply disruption in the Middle East. Voters and higher prices The second lesson, Jacobs said, is that sacrifice is not popular. In 1979, Carter angered voters when he made a speech suggesting people should use less energy. He lost his bid for reelection. 'Americans would not tolerate increases at the pump,' Jacobs said. 'They were not willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains.' Biden and President Donald Trump both came of age during the energy crisis, Jacobs pointed out. And both have prioritized low costs for consumers with their energy agendas. During his term, Biden decided against proposing a carbon tax in favor of the tax breaks featured in the IRA, and Trump promised to slash energy prices on the campaign trail. So what's the long-term prognosis for America's energy mix? As domestic policies come and go, the past decade or so has seen a crucial shift in energy economics. Even if clean energy subsidies go away, solar and wind have gotten so cheap that those industries are now here to stay, Jacobs said. And domestic politics aside, oil may be fading in importance, albeit slowly. A Tuesday report from the International Energy Agency found that despite geopolitical uncertainties, oil demand is projected to plateau by 2030. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
On Juneteenth, don't forget Barbara Jordan
If she were alive, Texan Barbara Jordan would heartily endorse the celebration of Juneteenth, the federal holiday signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021. The congresswoman has faded into history, but the impact she had on the nation shouldn't be forgotten. Democrat Jordan, some may recall, landed a primetime television spot to deliver an opening statement on July 25, 1974 during the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon because of the Watergate scandal. Also on that House Judiciary Committee debating impeachment counts was Lake County Congressman Robert McClory, a Lake Bluff Republican who has a county bike and walking path dedicated in his name. Jordan, a freshman congresswoman from Houston, grew up in the segregated Jim Crow era. She had earlier made history as the first African-American woman from a former Confederate state to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since 1901. She served from 1973 to 1979, eventually stepping down due to health reasons. Jordan died at the young age of 59 in 1996 and she surely would be all in on Juneteenth. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. A few Lake County communities are marking the Juneteenth occasion of June 19, 1865 when the last enslaved people in the U.S., those residing in east Texas, were finally told by Union officers they were free men and women, two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. For generations, Black Americans celebrated the day amongst themselves, but it is now part of the nation's fabric. At a time of increasing division and the rolling back of federal diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives by the administration of President Donald Trump, this Juneteenth is a chance to celebrate. Yet, across the U.S., many Juneteenth celebrations have been scaled back due to funding shortfalls as corporations and municipalities across the country reconsider DEI support, according to a report by The Associated Press. Two events will be held in Lake County, following the College of Lake County's indoor Juneteenth Picnic on June 18 at the Lakeshore Campus in downtown Waukegan. In Grayslake, 'A Celebration of Freedom Walk' will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. June 19, beginning at the library, traveling through Central Park and ending at the village's Heritage Center and Museum. Lots of activities coincide with the event and the keynote speaker at 6:15 p.m. will be Waukegan Mayor Sam Cunningham. Also on hand will be the Chicago-based Mobile Museum of Tolerance bus, a self-contained classroom on wheels offering interactive exhibits featuring the struggle for equality during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. On Saturday, June 21, a Juneteenth Parade and Festival will be held in Waukegan, with the parade stepping off at 1 p.m. The route is along Washington Street, from Jackson Street east to Sheridan Road. Following the parade the festival featuring vendors, food trucks and live music will be held in Waukegan's Downtown on Genesee Street between Madison and Washington streets. Coordinating the event is the African American Museum at England Manor, 503 Genesee St. It is part of Black history that Congresswoman Jordan's actions during the Watergate probe catapulted her into the national spotlight. Her stentorian oratory skills and command of constitutional law — she received her law degree from Boston University — tabbed her as a rising star in the Democratic Party. She was mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate in 1976 with the party's presidential candidate, Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, who went on to defeat President Gerald Ford. Jordan became the first African American and the first woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention, at the party's New York City gathering in 1976. But it was during the first session of the House Judiciary Committee hearing was aired nationally by all three over-the-air networks in the evening of July 25, that Jordan certainly rose in stature. With Americans captivated by Watergate, it had one of the largest viewing audiences at the time. It was the eloquence of her defense of the Constitution and the rule of law, something which has been lost these last few months, that stays with many of us. Such as when she said: 'I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in 'We, the people'.' How true is that? Or when, as part of her 13-minute speech castigating Nixon's beliefs as president that he was above the rule of law, she pointed out: 'My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.' Ah, but if some in Washington, D.C., would but read her succinct and stirring words on this Juneteenth. They may have a different perspective than what their recent actions have proclaimed.
New York Post
3 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Truth wins as ‘citizen journalists' rise — and legacy media fades
If you don't follow the press, you are uninformed, goes the old saw; if you do follow the press, you are misinformed. Nowadays you can actually be, you know, informed if you carefully follow the alternative press and social media. It's a major reason why the organized left, the Democrats and the traditional media — but I repeat myself — have less traction today than they used to. My 2006 book 'An Army of Davids' explored how citizen journalists revolutionized reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and frustrated Dan Rather's attempt to steal the 2004 election with forged records about George W. Bush and the Texas National Guard. But in the years that followed, independent reporters (not accidentally) faced major barriers. The wide-open 'blogosphere' gave way to corporate 'social media,' where stories that interfered with the preferred narrative of the left, the Democrats and the traditional media — once again, I repeat myself — were muted or downright banned. Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it, didn't just ban The Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's incriminating laptop — it prevented sharing the story via direct message. Ditto any skepticism about COVID policies or the climate 'emergency.' But things are different now: Musk transformed Twitter into X and made it a free-speech platform, not a conventional-wisdom echo chamber. Today it's the leading news source in many countries. A plethora of independent media platforms, like Canada's Rebel News, Great Britain's GB News, and PJ Media, Substack and many other American outlets, make sure that truth gets out, despite the old-line media's best efforts. Independent reporters like Andy Ngo and Brandi Kruse brave Antifa beatings and harassment to expose the reality of leftist 'protests.' As Ngo posted Monday, 'Without independent journalists covering the violence of Antifa in the Seattle area, you'd only have the Seattle Times setting the false narrative through lies.' The leftist paper's misleading headlines, he wrote, made 'no mention of the organized rioters blockading [a federal] building, creating a dangerous hostage situation.' Like CNN describing a 2020 George Floyd protest as 'mostly peaceful' despite the arsonists' flames in the background, the mainstream media downplay the left's lawlessness while trying to pin blame on law enforcement. But people are catching on. We've learned that the legacy media routinely peddle lies: A dramatic story about a racist incident, a la Jussie Smollett, once provoked instant outrage. Now, many start out assuming the incident is a hoax — and they're often right. Gallup recently discovered that 69% of Americans distrust the media; only 31% generally believe their reporting. That's a huge change: In 1976, after Watergate, 76% trusted the media. The social and political consequences are big, and likely growing. Traditional media in America have served three different roles, and they're losing influence in all three realms. First, they have stifled conservative perspectives. The leftist echo chamber in entertainment and the press drowned out many voices and left others hesitant or afraid. That's mostly over. 'Cancel culture' has lost its sting, and the right has its own platforms now. Second, the traditional media set narratives for the people in the middle — the disengaged, passive news consumers who assumed what they heard was true. As Gallup's results demonstrate, that group is nothing like a majority anymore. Finally, the traditional media served to keep the left's true believers fired up. Constant repetition of talking points, nonstop targeting of whoever counts as Hitler this week and an unending sense of crisis meant that hard-core supporters stayed engaged and motivated. That's still going on, but the plummeting audiences for networks like MSNBC and CNN mean it's a lot less effective than it used to be. One reason why young people are much more supportive of President Donald Trump and his policies is that few of them consume traditional news; they prefer podcasts, X and other social media. Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters The core of anti-Trump activism, as many of Saturday's 'No Kings' crowds demonstrated, is geezers — people old enough to still get most of their news from a television set. Does this matter? Yes. In 2011 Tim Groseclose, then a political scientist at UCLA who now teaches at George Mason University, analyzed media bias and its impact on American politics. Without media distortions, he found, US voting patterns as a whole would look very different: 'Media bias really does make us more liberal,' he wrote in his book 'Left Turn.' 'The political views that we . . . see in Americans [in 2011] are not their natural views [but] an artificial, distorted version of those views,' he asserted Back then, Groseclose calculated that the slanted media 'aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election' — enough to have won the White House for Barack Obama. Not so much anymore. Independent media: Making America more American, year by year. Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the blog.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Rich in gold bars but poor in Trump pardons
For months, former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez has praised President Donald Trump. The Democrat has explicitly echoed Trump's criticism of the president's own criminal prosecutions, which Trump likes to describe, without evidence, as the political weaponization of the justice system. Now Menendez is reporting to federal prison, beginning his 11-year sentence after these months of attempts to sweet-talk Trump failed to win him the pardon or commutation for which he appeared to be angling. That's even as other allies of the president and those who had cozied up to him saw their prosecutions and sentences dropped. The 71-year-old Menendez, who spent more than 30 years in the House and later the Senate and rose to become the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, resigned in disgrace last year after being convicted of accepting bribes — including gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and cash — in exchange for helping three businessmen and the Egyptian government. He arrived on Tuesday to the Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pennsylvania. Nine days after Trump's inauguration — the day Menendez was sentenced — the former senator tagged the president in a social media post in which he claimed that 'this whole process has been nothing but a political witch hunt.' 'President Trump is right. This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system,' Menendez said. Last week, he again took to X and lambasted prosecutors in a series of posts he titled 'How weaponization works.' He noted that the US attorney for the Southern District of New York — the office that prosecuted Menendez — also oversaw 'investigations of the Trump organization, the Trump inauguration committee and others associated with DJT and the Republican Party.' Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gutted the federal government's ability to fight public corruption, shrinking its public integrity section — created in the wake of the Watergate scandal — and stripping it of much of its power. The start of Menendez's prison sentence comes after a federal appeals court last week denied his bid to remain out of prison on bail as he appeals his conviction. A judge did allow Menendez to attend his stepdaughter's wedding in Massachusetts over the weekend and to escort his wife, Nadine Menendez, who was also convicted on corruption charges and is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. (Her own sentencing will take place in September.) The president has issued a flurry of pardons and halted prosecutions for his political allies. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected as a Democrat and is seeking reelection this year as an independent, saw his corruption charges dropped by Trump's Justice Department, as Adams helped the Trump administration enact its immigration agenda. Trump in February pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who was removed from office and later convicted of charges that included a scheme to sell an appointment to fill the vacant Senate seat left by then-President Barack Obama. Blagojevich long sought to align himself with Trump and called himself a 'Trumpocrat' — a Democrat who supports Trump. Trump has also pardoned a long list of political allies — including nearly all of the January 6, 2021, defendants. Trump pardoned reality television stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were serving prison sentences following their 2022 conviction on fraud and tax charges, after their daughter, Savannah Chrisley, cozied up to the Trump family and appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. 'No MAGA left behind,' Ed Martin, Trump's short-lived interim US attorney for Washington, DC, said on X after Trump pardoned a former Virginia sheriff, Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of conspiracy, honest services fraud and — just like Menendez — bribery.
Coin Geek
3 days ago
- Politics
- Coin Geek
Put it on chain!
Homepage > News > Editorial > Put it on chain! Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... If you think fake news is bad, you're going to be sick when you really start to dig into history. Let's start with a story most people know about. Until the last decade or so, Richard Nixon was the most controversial President in modern American history due to the Watergate scandal and everything surrounding it. But what if everything we thought we knew about Watergate is wrong? Richard Nixon, despite being re-elected in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history, was swiftly dismantled, but not for crimes of war or corruption. Instead, he was taken down for a third-rate burglary he may not have even known about. Is it possible the real scandal wasn't what Nixon did, but who wanted him gone? Bob Woodward, one half of the duo credited with exposing the affair, was a former naval intelligence officer with curious access and connections, including ties to the Pentagon and possibly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some researchers have suggested he may have been more than just a reporter with a nose for news. And what of the whispers that elements of the CIA or other federal agencies had motivations to oust Nixon, whose independence and moves toward détente may have threatened deep state interests? Nixon stated more than once, in his recordings, that he assumed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Deputy Director Director Mark Felt was working to oust him, for example. Tucker Carlson explains how the FBI & CIA conducted a coup to take out President Richard Nixon with help from journalist Bob Woodward.'Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA, and with the help of Bob Woodward.' 'Woodward was that guy. And who is his main source for… When you line this up against decades of genuinely criminal activity that Washington has quietly buried, you have to ask: was Nixon's fall a morality play, or was it a meticulously engineered takedown of an inconvenient maverick? We may never know. So, I will recount a history with quite a bit less at stake, and one that I have dug into recently due to the work of legendary Jiu-Jitsu competitor Robert Drysdale, who has spent the last five years digging up the buried history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Which he published in his book Opening Closed‑Guard: The Origins of Jiu‑Jitsu in Brazil. I am happy to announce that after a 3-year hiatus we are back into production on the Opening Closed Guard film, moving forward for Summer 2023. In the meantime, check out my new book release! Also, Opening Closed Guard now available in Spanish, Portuguesese and Polish. — ROBERT DRYSDALE (@robertdrysdale) February 3, 2023 If you have ever trained at a Jiu-Jitsu academy in the Western Hemisphere, you have likely heard the basic history of how Jiu-Jitsu made its way from Japan to Brazil and to the USA. In the late 1800s, Jigoro Kano revolutionized Japanese martial arts by creating Judo: an art rooted in traditional jiu-jitsu but distilled for effectiveness, efficiency, and the principle of 'maximum efficiency with minimum effort.' One of his top students, Mitsuyo Maeda, became a global ambassador for the art. In 1914, Maeda arrived in Brazil, where he formed a friendship with Gastão Gracie. As a gesture of gratitude, Maeda took Gastão's young son, Carlos Gracie, under his wing, teaching him the fundamentals of his fighting system. Carlos Gracie trained diligently and eventually began teaching the art himself, refining the techniques with his brothers—most notably Helio Gracie—who, due to his smaller frame and health limitations, adapted the techniques further to rely on leverage and timing rather than brute strength. This evolution became known as Gracie Jiu-Jitsu: a uniquely Brazilian interpretation of Kano's original teachings, optimized for real-world self-defense. Over the decades, the Gracie family rigorously tested their style in challenge matches across Brazil and later the U.S., proving its supremacy against boxers, wrestlers, and other martial artists. The culmination of their efforts came in 1993 with the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), where Royce Gracie, representing the family, dominated much larger opponents using pure jiu-jitsu. This moment marked the global awakening to the effectiveness of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, and forever changed the landscape of martial arts, all thanks to Grandmaster Carlos and his brother, Helio. Today we celebrate the birthday of Grand Master Carlos Gracie Sr. The originator of the gentle art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We thank you for paving the way and are immensely grateful for your achievements. It is with great honor to celebrate your life and legacy. — IBJJF (@ibjjf) September 14, 2023 Great story! Except it's probably not true. According to Drysdale, before the name Gracie became synonymous with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the art had already taken root in Brazil through a cast of overlooked pioneers. Mitsuyo Maeda arrived in Belém and passed his knowledge not just to the eager Carlos Gracie, but more immediately to local athletes like Jacyntho Ferro: a wrestler who quietly became one of Brazil's first true students of Jiu-Jitsu. Donato Pires dos Reis, a verified Maeda disciple, opened the first official Jiu-Jitsu academy in Rio and gave Carlos Gracie his start as an assistant instructor, only to be later erased from the record after a falling out. In São Paulo, Geo Omori was staging public matches and running his own academy well before the Gracies appeared on the scene. And why wouldn't he? Brazil had a significant Japanese immigrant population that would have carried the martial arts with them. Amid this vibrant, contested, multicultural stew of martial development, Carlos Gracie managed something far more enduring than victory in the ring: he branded a myth. By simplifying the story, framing himself as Maeda's direct protégé and his family as the sole stewards of the art, he created a lineage as sleek as it was selective. The others, some of them better fighters and more established instructors, quietly faded into the footnotes. They were written out not because they lost but because they didn't own the pen, they didn't etch their story in stone, and they didn't control the history they made. It's a tale less of deceit and more of historical convenience, where the founders of the art were slowly turned into ghosts, and a single surname became the banner under which a much more complex story was flattened and sold to the world. Is this a Bitcoin article, Kurt? Haha! Of course, it is. You see, every subculture has a story full of half-truths. My focuses in life have been Bitcoin, BJJ, and the Christian Church, so you can be glad this article isn't about why the Pope isn't actually the rightful Bishop of Rome! But while I am often called out as something of a conspiracy theorist in the Bitcoin space, I decided I would preface my thoughts with some really inconvenient, contentious history of Jiu-Jitsu as a backdrop, so the Jiu-Jitsu hierarchy can hate me over there too. In the Bitcoin world, there is a very real problem of provenance about who owns the name, who owns the code, who owns the protocol, who owns the database… There's also a huge amount of nonsense about the history and mythos of Satoshi Nakamoto. So, does anyone know the real history of Satoshi Nakamoto or Bitcoin? We know that by 2014, critical infrastructure tied to the Satoshi alias (his email accounts, SourceForge repository access, and various online profiles) had been compromised. Some of these were used in extortion attempts, and others to post strange or suspicious content. But what's less clear and more troubling is how early that compromise began. Amid the heated Bitcoin XT debates in 2015, a message posted from a Satoshi-linked account surfaced that read like poorly veiled propaganda for Bitcoin Core, advocating small blocks in a tone that clashed starkly with Satoshi's prior writings. It didn't sound like him at all. Was it a forgery? A hijacked account? A puppet of the Core devs? We simply don't know. That's the real problem: we don't know. Was his last commit on SourceForge actually his? Was his final year of forum posts really written by Satoshi, or was it written by someone who had already wormed their way into his credentials? Somewhere between 2010 and 2014, the real Satoshi disappeared, not just from public view but from the keys, accounts, and infrastructure that defined his presence in the Bitcoin project. The lack of clarity on this timeline has real implications for the legitimacy of development decisions, the centralization of narrative control, and the moral authority invoked by those claiming to act for 'Satoshi's vision.' Without knowing when the mask was stolen, we can't say for sure who anyone has been listening to ever since. And in its place, usurpers have created a massive meme of Satoshi remade in their own vision! Furthermore, we have observed the power in the control of the Bitcoin and Satoshi narratives many times now. During the scaling battles of the Bitcoin Civil War, people bringing up Satoshi's writings were deemed suspect for appealing to authority, while the small blocker faction pointed to the power of people to choose what version of bitcoin to run on their mom's computer to the #UASF and #No2X portion of the war in 2017. But then, claiming true succession from Satoshi's code repo, they claimed simply that they were extending the Satoshi client and that they were honoring his vision by whatever it was that they were doing because Satoshi put Gavin in charge, and Gavin put Greg and his friends in charge, so if you agree on dynastic succession, Greg Maxwell was basically Satoshi! (eyes roll out of head) So, a couple of lessons so far: 1. Logins and keys aren't identity.2. The Core Devs want you to think they are King Satoshi the 3rd. 3. History is only as reliable as the CIA agent who wrote it. But wait! Bitcoin fixes this! Imagine if Bitcoin was in wide use for the last hundred years! We might have stayed out of The Great War, World War 2, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and never had a President Ford (or a few others…) and whole industries and nations would be entirely different. But let's not speculate too hard! Today, we may not know definitively who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but I sure know we are not ' ALL SATOSHI,' and we wouldn't have to be subjected to yearly unveilings of this guy around the globe either if we were properly using attestation systems on Bitcoin! While public key signing alone isn't definitive proof of identity, it is a powerful building block in a broader framework of verifiable attestation. When combined with a robust identity protocol on a public blockchain— one that anchors credentials, behavior, and social context to immutable records—signatures become meaningful components of long-term trust. The result is a system where identity isn't just, but earned and proven over time. In such a world, signing important messages or documents with a well-attested key could anchor reputational integrity to recorded history. Imagine a blockchain entry from 1929 with Carlos Gracie signing that he was enrolling as a student under Donato Pires dos Reis, years before the Gracie Academy banner was unfurled. A single transaction could upend a century of mythmaking. The integrity of historical records isn't just about identity, but also resilience against tampering. By hashing business ledgers, social events, and public statements into a timestamped, proof-of-work-secured chain, we make retroactive falsification nearly impossible, and that changes the nature of trust and economics for everyone! Lastly, garbage in still means garbage out, and critics of these ideas will often say that just because it's on chain doesn't mean it's true. They're right, so filtering matters. Proof of work (PoW), properly implemented, serves as both a cost and a filter: it slows down spam, raises the stakes of fraud, and privileges the sincere. Imagine if each person had to record their economically or historically meaningful actions using their verified digital identity and back it up with sufficient PoW, on a device cryptographically linked to that identity. Bad news for Bob Woodward's anonymous sources. Bad news for Helio Gracie's post hoc origin story. Maybe even bad news for Pope Leo XIV! But good news for Satoshi Nakamoto and for anyone who believes that truth deserves to outlive the agenda of whoever holds the pen when history is being written. Watch: History of Bitcoin with Kurt Wuckert Jr.
