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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#11

Post by cs702 »

randomwalker wrote: post #7

Coauthor 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 y…

Thank you for writing this, and for posting here.

We need more people like you to write about and help demistify Bitcoin, to counter the hype surrounding blockchain technology.

I hope you get an opportunity to write about this for a lay audience too, because mainstream media, with few exceptions, has done a poor job at covering the technology.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#12

Post by mayank »

cs702 wrote: post #9
mayank wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Prio…

It's actually not a new kind of distributed algorithm:

1. Peer-to-peer algorithms: BitTorrent would like a word with you.

2. Distributed consensus: Paxos would like a word with you.

3. Proof of work: hashcash would like a word with you.

That said, I find the Bitcoin paper to be a delightful synthesis of a bunch of well known ideas.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#13

Post by 2_listerine_pls »

colordrops wrote: post #4
cs702 wrote: post #2

This 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?

No

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#14

Post by wmf »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #8

Its 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 centrali…

One of the points of the article is that the field wasn't idle during those 15 years; bit gold, b-money, and Finney's RPOW made incremental improvements on hashcash that led to Bitcoin.

Also, Bitcoin is kind of a "dirty" solution to the consensus problem; if all the academics were looking for an elegant solution it's not surprising that they didn't discover it.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#15

Post by imnotatwork »

mayank wrote: post #12
cs702 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Prio…

It's actually not a new kind of distributed algorithm: 1. Peer-to-peer algorithms: BitTorrent would like a word with you. 2. Distributed consensus: Paxos would like a word with you. 3. Proof of work: hashcash would like a word with you. That said, I find the Bitcoin paper to be a delightful synthesis of a bunch of well known ideas.

The total is much more than the sum of the parts in this case. You get whole new dynamics that were unpredictable from the single parts.

Like saying that the first calculator was not a new kind of machine because valves existed and people made calculations before.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#16

Post by cs702 »

mayank wrote: post #12
cs702 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Prio…

It's actually not a new kind of distributed algorithm: 1. Peer-to-peer algorithms: BitTorrent would like a word with you. 2. Distributed consensus: Paxos would like a word with you. 3. Proof of work: hashcash would like a word with you. That said, I find the Bitcoin paper to be a delightful synthesis of a bunch of well known ideas.

Prior to Bitcoin, there was NO distributed algorithm capable of maintaining an agreed-upon blockchain of transactions in perpetuity, in a manner resistant to attack by fraudulent nodes. Such an algorithm didn't exist prior to Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#17

Post by colordrops »

wmf wrote: post #6
colordrops wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I'm saying is that nothing comes out of nowhere, and plenty of things are portrayed as coming out of nowhere. Bitcoin isn't anything special. I believe all the hate it receives is simply because all of the extra attention it gets and the unsavory people that surround it, and not because it is any more or less of an achievement than anything else.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#19

Post by just_one_time_ »

cs702 wrote: post #2

This 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…

I still want to know why it has taken a better part of a decade for HN to finally stop shitting on Bitcoin and start learning about it finally.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#20

Post by sillysaurus3 »

cs702 wrote: post #2

This 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…

I've spent a lot of time reviewing the original Bitcoin codebase.

It's brilliant code. It's production-grade C++. There's nothing in it that hints at academic origins. Most people are either academics or professional coders -- to be both is a rare exception.

The codebase seemed to materialize out of nowhere. One of the earliest commits in the SVN repo contains 36 thousand lines of code. "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.

The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin integrates so many standard tactics so well in addition to its academic work.

Here it is as one gigantic file: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242...

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