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by thaumaturgy 2658 days ago
I would expect that about zero of the propositions have ever been serious. It's just a well-known, long-running amusement among programmers.

An IEEE 754 double type has a range from about 10^−324 to about 10^308. You start losing precision once you exceed 2^51, but beyond that it should be possible to add an extra byte or a few as an offset.

So a handful of bytes would get us addresses far in excess of the current storage capacity of the internet (estimated around 10^24 bytes a few years ago) ... if only pi were certain to contain every possible number sequence up to some arbitrary length (which last I heard isn't known yet) and if we had some reasonable way to search and index all of that content (which we don't).