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

61–70 of 147 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#61

Post by wmf »

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?

IETF doesn't create the vision (and the results are embarrassing when they try); it standardizes stuff (and lets people add tons of optional complexity) after the initial prototype is done. IEEE and ECMA have similar attitudes while ISO seems to do more design-by-committee.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#62

Post by FooHentai »

pash wrote: post #55
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…

> "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 a…

Also, an unreliable narrator.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#63

Post by ringaroundthetx »

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…

Monero's codebase uses an array of subdomains which return a list of other seed nodes in a GET response, and then the codebase appends the appropriate port number onto those

All the cryptocurrencies built on top of techniques that worked on other cryptocurrencies. I really like the iteration speed as well as how non-finite any limitation today is.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#64

Post by keypusher »

pash wrote: post #55
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…

> "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 a…

> It'd be worth implementing some kind of more robust auto update mechanism, or a schedule for the phase in of this [the block size], if only because when people evaluate "is BitCoin worth my time and effort" a solid plan for scaling up is good to have written down.

Prescient words from Mike Hearn.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#65

Post by colordrops »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #59
colordrops wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Don't be condescending. There are a couple more factors at play that make this more nuanced. First is that entering the ASIC field requires more time and economic outlay, so it's not something an attacker will do overnight. Also, it removes anonymity from an attacker as it's hard to hide the source of a large ASIC farm. Lastly, because of the investment in time and money, the existing well known players are not incentivized to turn their farms into attack vectors. I do recognize that the gov of China could force all miners there to do that, but I didn't claim that ASICs made BTC invulnerable, only that they are safer than CPU/GPU mining.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#66

Post by nadapkoe »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #32
mrb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recovered and archived version 0.1.0 (directly from Hal Finney): http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz It has 19k lines of code. That's certainly a few months of work minimum. Fun fact: I was contacted by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View since this tarball (and the .rar) hosted on my site is the earliest known public copy of the source code.

Notice how all the files use \r\n for newlines. Satoshi was a Windows programmer! They used Windows . Anyone who has tried to do cross-platform development knows it's extremely difficult in C++. You can do it, but it's not a trivial thing. I guess it's no surprise that Satoshi used Visual Studio. If you start out writing code in not-Visual-Studio, it's far harder to go back and make it run on VS. I vividly remember h…

Most CIA and NSA code that has been leaked has been developed on Windows using Visual Studio IIRC.

The bitcoin code looks and feels a lot like of their projects but could easily be some NSA programmers side project.

Any hacker can tell this was a one person project from looking at the code.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#67

Post by feelin_googley »

wmf wrote: post #61
feelin_googley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IETF doesn't create the vision (and the results are embarrassing when they try); it standardizes stuff (and lets people add tons of optional complexity) after the initial prototype is done. IEEE and ECMA have similar attitudes while ISO seems to do more design-by-committee.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#68

Post by feelin_googley »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #60
feelin_googley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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.

The problem I see is when in their supposed wisdom they discredit the potential contribution of some lone visionary. And this goes back to your original premise, with which I strongly agree. History shows that sometimes one highly skilled programmer working alone has accomplished things that teams of programmers could not.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#69

Post by EthanHeilman »

SilasX wrote: post #53
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.

Yes, this is the Satoshi idea. PoW to create consensus in an unpermissioned and open system.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#70

Post by EthanHeilman »

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

A great DAGchain paper is "SPECTRE - Serialization of Proof-of-work Events: Confirming Transactions via Recursive Elections". Its peer reviewed and contains rigorous security proofs.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf

Post reply on HN