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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#71

Post by lewi »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #70
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting read, quite a unique perspective.

One thing found interesting about the conclusion of OP's article is the role of academia vs practical implementation.

> Many academic communities informally argued that Bitcoin couldn't work, based on theoretical models or experiences with past systems, despite the fact that it was working in practice.

It will be interesting to see the Academically based SPECTRE competing with another DAG based coin such as Byteball. Well measured research and a peer-reviewed foundation against practical implementation, first to market and continuous improvement.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#72

Post by tonyarkles »

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?

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/24.pdf

"Rough consensus and running code"

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#73

Post by feelix »

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…

I'm curious as to why you consider brilliant, production ready code.

I also read through the original codebase and I came to a different conclusion. To me it looks like something that was hacked at for a year or so, and was all just glued together. It looked like the first iteration of a codebase, the thing that you usually don't release, but then re-work so it is presentable to the outside world and then release.

To me that says a couple of things. One is that Satoshi is one, normal, human. Another is that he is very human. For example, a lot of the OP codes have had to be disabled because they were totally insecure. In early versions of bitcoin there were bugs that allowed anyone to spend anyone's bitcoins, and so forth.

Not that I mean to attack Satoshi, he was a good coder who started what could become a revolution. But he was a human like the rest of us, and it shows.

What is it about his code that makes you consider it brilliant and production ready?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#74

Post by nullnilvoid »

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…

Interesting code. Some first impressions. 1. This gigantic file can be split into multiple smaller files. It takes even a while for my browser to render the whole source file. 2. There is inline assembly in the code. Is this for performance or some other purposes?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#75

Post by csomar »

nullnilvoid wrote: post #74
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…

Interesting code. Some first impressions. 1. This gigantic file can be split into multiple smaller files. It takes even a while for my browser to render the whole source file. 2. There is inline assembly in the code. Is this for performance or some other purposes?

The code is in smaller files but that link was for demonstration purposes I guess.

Here is the most updated bitcoin repo: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#76

Post by csomar »

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…

My impression being in the bitcoin community and talking to some core dev is the opposite. The code was rushed and rather amateurish that there were bugs professional developers should not make.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#77

Post by jhall1468 »

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?

Both of which have been around for more than 30 years. I agree that both were significantly greater inventions, but I wouldn't put Bitcoin far behind them.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#78

Post by wslh »

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…

To be 100% fair you should recognize that Wei Dai was very close.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#79

Post by keymone »

feelix wrote: post #73
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…

I'm curious as to why you consider brilliant, production ready code. I also read through the original codebase and I came to a different conclusion. To me it looks like something that was hacked at for a year or so, and was all just glued together. It looked like the first iteration of a codebase, the thing that you usually don't release, but then re-work so it is presentable to the outside world and then release. To…

in a codebase of tens of thousands of non trivial C++ after 8 years there was found one critical protocol bug. one. if this doesn't blow your mind - i don't know what will.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#80

Post by mbrock »

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.

I mentioned to an academic computer scientist that I worked with blockchains. He immediately asked "So these blockchains, how do they do consensus? Isn't it some kind of majority vote?" I said "Well, kind of, in combination with economic incentives to follow the longest chain." He just said "Well, come on! That's the whole problem! That's not a solution!" or something like that. Not impressed at all!
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