Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
queue.acm.org
Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
1–10 of 147 posts
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#2This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades.
Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoin was invented.
Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]
--
[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double-spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#3After 12 years as an academic computer scientist, Bitcoin was the most impressive computer science research I saw.
And it came from outside the academy.
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#4This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades. Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoi…
Isn't everything built in top of previous work?
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#5This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades. Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoi…
None of the ideas in PageRank were new either. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#6This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades. Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoi…
Isn't everything built in top of previous work?
Many people don't know this. Bitcoin in particular is often portrayed as coming out of nowhere.
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#7Coauthor here. Here's some context for how this essay came about.
When we released a draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook [1], one piece of feedback was that we focused on cryptocurrency technology as it is today, and ignored the juicy and tumultuous history of how the ideas developed over the last few decades. So I invited Jeremy Clark, who's connected to some of this history, to write a preface to the book. If you're interested in the history, you might enjoy that chapter. [2]
Jeremy and I then got together to develop the ideas further, resulting in the present article, where we also provide some commentary on the current blockchain hype and draw lessons for practitioners and academics.
[1] http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/
[2] https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p...
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#8Its amazing to me it took 15 years to go from hashcash to Bitcoin. I think it speaks to the strangeness of Bitcoin, and its niche idealogical underpinnings. Bitcoin solved a problem that most of the people never thought about. Yet if you're looking to solve Bitcoin's problem set, calibrated hashcash to secure a ledger seems completely obvious.
I also thought that Bitcoin's asic-vulnerability (and thus mining centralization) would be fatal. It turned out to be not fatal (yet), but thats not something which could be determined on paper. It needed real-world use before people knew if it could work or not.
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#9This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades. Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoi…
None of the ideas in PageRank were new either. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
I view Bitcoin as a more impressive achievement.
As far as I understand it, PageRank reduces to "find the principal eigenvector of a stochastic matrix," in which matrix elements represent the probability of transition from each web page to every other web page. To me PageRank is a successful application of a well-known algorithm.
Bitcoin's peer-to-peer protocol, on the other hand, is a new distributed algorithm. Prior to Bitcoin, no distributed algorithm existed capable of maintaining an agreed-upon blockchain of transactions in perpetuity.
EDIT: Removed the word "kind of" in response to mayank's and axus's comments below.
Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
#10Anyone serious about crypotcurrencies will know at least know two ideas not being Satoshi originals - 1. Ecash, Digicash - author's refer to it in paragraph one as something people are aware of. 2. PoW/Hashcash - Sure people might not be aware of the anti-spam but they are aware of Hashcash and Adam Back.
That being the case, I think author's assumption that everyone in the bitcoin space thinks Satoshi as the one inventing everything and hence the article needs to prove otherwise is..well false at best.