42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Taxes included.

In April 2020, the Digital Gold Institute shared a humorous comment by Ferdinando Ametrano on a discover about the number 42, which has recently become relevant again with unfair 42% tax rates

The (true) news

Mathematicians have finally solved a problem that was posed in 1954: is it possible to express integers as the sum of three cubes? The question asks, given an integer k, for a solution to the equation

k = x³ + y³ + z³

While it was relatively easy to find the answer for most numbers under 100, the answer for 33 and 42 had been elusive. In 2019, Andrew Booker found the solution for 33 after three weeks of work by the supercomputers at the Advanced Computing Research Centre of the University of Bristol, but 42 remained extremely difficult. Finally, together with Andrew Sutherland from MIT, an expert in massively parallel computing, the pair finally discovered that

42 = -80538738812075974³ + 80435758145817515³ + 12602123297335631³

Ferdinando Ametrano’s (humorous) comment

42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as calculated by an enormous supercomputer called Deep Thought over 7.5 million years. Satoshi Nakamoto chose 21 million #bitcoin as a humble homage to this ultimate truth, hoping that his invention could be at least half as relevant as the answer 42.

Digital Gold Institute’s share

That 42 was extraordinarily elusive was first revealed by Douglas Adams in 1983; in fact, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams claimed that 42 was the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as calculated by a powerful supercomputer called Deep Thought after 7.5 million years of computations. The connection with Bitcoin was clarified by the director of our Institute, Ferdinando Ametrano, who was the first to reveal a previously unknown fact:

Satoshi Nakamoto chose the 21 million limit for Bitcoin as a humble homage to the number 42. The creator of Bitcoin wanted to express the hope that his invention could be the answer to all the monetary needs of the universe, but he humbly limited it to 21, hoping it could be at least as relevant as half of 42, the answer to the ultimate question of meaning.

We are confident that these scientific results will play a decisive role in the debate in the coming years.

Post Scriptum (2024)

It is clearly a misunderstanding by Deputy Minister Leo to infer from the above that 42% is the appropriate tax rate for Bitcoin capital gains. It should obviously be 21%. 😉

References

• Originally published in the fourth DGI report (April 2020)
• Sum of three cubes
• Announcement of the discovery
• Check the sum on WolframAlpha
• 42 in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy