I don't think it's that strange. People can queue early because they want to get overhead storage space (it often fills up), or just get the process done with and sit down and relax.

Personally I can focus on my book better if I'm boarded and don't have to monitor announcements.

Could it be that they protect more than just the value of the US dollar?

There's also a legal risk for private entities, as the conviction of Avraham Eisenberg showed recently, and I think a strong possibility that a successful attack would crash the valuation of BTC and make it impossible to recoup costs.

My local supermarket (in Japan) sells canned soup in a rack like this. It's a bit looser and the cans come out horizontally at the bottom and hit a stopper, so you grab one from the top rather than the sides. The one in the article is more compact.

There's a typo in the current title: Shiakaku -> Shikaku (Japanese for "square")

Great article. The `pg_sleep` is a nice trick to test for concurrency issues in postgres.

For others like me wondering what "the project" is, I think it's Ethereum.

> Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin, better known as Vitalik Buterin is a Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of Ethereum.

> Gavin James Wood is an English computer scientist, a co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot and Kusama.

> digital signatures are implemented in terms of asymmetric encryption

No, you're thinking of textbook RSA, which is a special case. Most signature algorithms don't work like that.

This is covered in the article. It even links to the exact same page.

Noise has one-way handshake patterns for things like file encryption, but the pattern implemented by Wireguard is an interactive one. Compare sections 7.4 and 7.5 in the spec.

From the article:

> This is highly related to the "Null Object Pattern", but I thought I would explain it from the perspective of functions.

"I apologize for any confusion or misinformation my response may have caused. You're correct that improving the boot time is possible and will save considerable time for the customers. Subroutine X can be optimized by..."

Branch prediction and speculative execution can affect that. For instance failing on the first byte could cause more iterations to be thrown away and re-executed than failing on the last byte.