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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#41

Post by tylersmith »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #36
xiphias wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than just science. I believe it changes the world more than anything in the last 30 years. I have been thinking of what the world would be without internet / computers / mobile phones, but having a great liquid store of value. If I had to choose only 1 of these technologies for my life, I would pick Bitcoin.

You do realize you need internet / computers for Bitcoin to exist, right?

The p2p network could be implemented over radio and without computers we'd just have a far lower hashrate and probably a different PoW algorithm. I don't see any reasonable way we would have discovered cryptocurrencies before the internet and computers though.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#42

Post by busterarm »

cs702 wrote: post #38
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a tightly-knit team of people , including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

> too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

It's been done before... for example, djb

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#43

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

cs702 wrote: post #38
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a tightly-knit team of people , including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

From my experience truly visionary project never comes from a group of "talented" people but a single person who had a laser focused vision and did whatever possible to make that happen. Having a focused vision is what drives the brilliant solution, not some group of smart people who try to come to a consensus.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#44

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

busterarm wrote: post #42
cs702 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a tightly-knit team of people , including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

> too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation. It's been done before... for example, djb

Could you explain what his accomplishment was in terms a non-cryptographer could understand?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#45

Post by xutopia »

cs702 wrote: post #38
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a tightly-knit team of people , including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

It's hard to tell though. It may well be a single person who was inspired by multiple people's work and ideas. I like to compare works of single individual work is with how amazing Lord of the Rings is. I'm impressed it took a single person to write the whole thing.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#46

Post by vocatus_gate »

gwern wrote: post #35
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…

> 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. Yes, the debts Satoshi owed to others were obvious right from the start. I made pretty much exactly the same argument as OP over 6 years ago in my then-widely-read essay "Bitcoin is Worse is Better" https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better…

Hey gwern, it's you! I remember reading "Bitcoin is Worse is Better" and forwarding to quite a few friends. Great article, really like the pieces you've written over the years. Keep up the good work.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#47

Post by btilly »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #44
busterarm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation. It's been done before... for example, djb

Could you explain what his accomplishment was in terms a non-cryptographer could understand?

First of all djb is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein and the accomplishment was releasing a secure email server (qmail), a secure webserver (publicfile), and a secure BIND server (djbdns). Both qmail and djbdns became widely used, and the main alternatives were projects supported by large teams.

It took 8 years before the first bug was found in these projects.

I highly recommend reading through the guidelines in https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html for how to write secure software. In particular point 5, Don't Parse, is broadly applicable and under appreciated. A well-known class of bugs arising from this error are SQL injection attacks.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#48

Post by la_fayette »

thisisit wrote: post #10

Anyone 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 inv…

i completely agree. there is nothing new to somebody a bit involved into bitcoin. there is even a website which is old and widely known (http://nakamotoinstitute.org) where all the referenced literature is listed...

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#49

Post by Marazan »

wmf wrote: post #14
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.

The repeated claim that Bitcoin came up with a totally new and unknown way of solving the problem always irks me.

Everyone keeping a complete history of all actions is, like, consensus 101.

Research is based around not having to do that.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#50

Post by jameskegel »

busterarm wrote: post #42
cs702 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a tightly-knit team of people , including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

> too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation. It's been done before... for example, djb

Wow, this was a path I did not expect this conversation to take. Thank you for mentioning this.
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