Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 147 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#51

Post by caoxuwen »

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.

I think it's very hard for a group of people to coordinate behind a pseudonym that's so high profile.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#52

Post by jameskegel »

colordrops wrote: post #39
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…

"asic-vulnerability" is actually an asset. If Bitcoin were mined with CPUs or GPUs, any large organization or government could just point their computing power at Bitcoin and disrupt it.

> any large organization or government

China is already well on their way to doing this, with Jihan Wu and the emergence of larger mining 'cartels'.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#53

Post by SilasX »

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…

Hashcash was still missing a major piece: the idea of the blockchain as a solution to Byzantine fault tolerance.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#54

Post by SilasX »

Marazan wrote: post #49
wmf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That wasn't the key insight -- it was the idea that you could get a working solution under the assumption that 50%+1 of the hashing power is from honest nodes as long as those nodes agreed to coordinate on the ledger with the most proven work invested in it.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#55

Post by pash »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20
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 pe…

> "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.

In one [0] of his emails to Mike Hearn [1] Satoshi Nakomoto wrote that he worked on Bitcoin for two years before releasing the paper and code:

> I must admit, this project was 2 years of development before release, and I could only spend so much time on each of the many issues.

His emails to Hearn and others make clear that his creative process consisted mainly of writing code until he was convinced things worked. In my opinion, Satoshi Nakomoto was a lone hacker.

0. https://pastebin.com/wA9Jn100

1. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2080206.0

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#56

Post by feelin_googley »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #43
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.

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.

"... not some group of smart people who try to come to a consensus."

You mean like the IETF?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#57

Post by Hippocrates »

I loved reading this.

Bitcoin is truly something worth more than the sum of its parts. I don't feel that the creative combination and implementation of existing ideas diminishes the achievement one bit. (Not that the article made it out this way, just my 2 satoshis)

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#58

Post by CyberDildonics »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #23
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…

When you were researching the ledger part, I'm curious whether you've come across a DAG-based ledger. I've been reading the byteball [1] paper and still can't tell whether it's baloney or really the DAG is a consensus that does not require PoW... I suspect it's neither, there are trade offs, but I could not find much anything good on the subject to read. [1] https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf

The most fundamental question in any DAG chain is how they address conflicting transactions in two different paths.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#59

Post by CyberDildonics »

colordrops wrote: post #39
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…

"asic-vulnerability" is actually an asset. If Bitcoin were mined with CPUs or GPUs, any large organization or government could just point their computing power at Bitcoin and disrupt it.

Should I really explain why that doesn't make sense? With GPUs or CPUs individuals can outweigh large organizations. With ASICs, the 'many' are far less because the barrier to entry is so high, so the many can't easily outweigh the few and centralization occurs.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#60

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

feelin_googley wrote: post #56
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"... not some group of smart people who try to come to a consensus." You mean like the IETF?

Yes, like IETF. Not discrediting their contribution. Organizations like those are needed, just like how a non-founder operator CEO can be beneficial once a startup takes off.
Post reply on HN