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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#81

Post by arca_vorago »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #63
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…

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.

Since you seem familiar with Monero, I would like to ask what you think of it? I ask from the perspective of one who thinks the anonymous function of cash is a key factor bitcoin doesn't provide, and I've heard monero is one of a few options that does.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#82

Post by lemonycracket »

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?

Tell me more. So interesting. How does it work. What an insightful observation

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#83

Post by lemonycracket »

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.

You do realize that everything is pretty much re-used and not new?

99.99% of all creation is Synthetic.

The other 0.01% is very rare and looks more like abstract art.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#84

Post by rvern »

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…

From Eigenmorality (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820):

“I was also impressed by a similar research project called PageRank, which was proposed later by two guys at Stanford named Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Brin and Page dispensed with Kleinberg’s bipartite hubs-and-authorities structure in favor of a more uniform structure, and made some other changes, but otherwise their idea was very similar. At the time, of course, I didn’t know that CLEVER was going to languish at IBM, while PageRank (renamed Google) was going to expand to roughly the size of the entire world’s economy.

In any case, the question I asked myself about CLEVER/PageRank was not the one that, maybe in retrospect, I should have asked: namely, ‘how can I leverage the fact that I know the importance of this idea before most people do, in order to make millions of dollars?’

Instead I asked myself: ‘what other “vicious circles” in science and philosophy could one unravel using the same linear-algebra trick that CLEVER and PageRank exploit?’ After all, CLEVER and PageRank were both founded on what looked like a hopelessly circular intuition: ‘a web page is important if other important web pages link to it.’ Yet they both managed to use math to defeat the circularity. All you had to do was find an ‘importance equilibrium,’ in which your assignment of ‘importance’ to each web page was stable under a certain linear map. And such an equilibrium could be shown to exist—indeed, to exist uniquely.”

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#85

Post by FooHentai »

FooHentai wrote: post #62
pash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Hmm, I think this comment was taken little more negatively than I had intended. My fault of course for not expanding on the point, which is this:

Satoshi maintains anonymity, by choice. Therefore, any information about Satoshi's identity, directly stated or inferred from things said by them, logically have to be treated as unreliable. With the goal of remaining anonymous, Satoshi has nothing to gain and a lot to lose from providing true information about themselves. It is in their interest to not provide any information about themselves, and for any information that is provided them be inaccurate.

None of this casts any aspersions on either Bitcoin or Satoshi.

Ah heck, I sound like Vizzini. Maybe I should just drink the damn wine ;)

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#86

Post by [deleted] »

keymone wrote: post #79
feelix wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#87

Post by decentralised »

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…

That is known from the very beginning, Bitcoin is the culmination of years of research and prior work done in the fields of economy and cryptography.

What makes it special is that it was the first digital money that actually works.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#88

Post by kobeya »

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…

The economic incentives underlying bitcoin mining, the Nakamoto consensus solution to the Byzantine fault tolerance problem, is new.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#89

Post by kobeya »

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

Or Linus and Linux?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#90

Post by kobeya »

ChrisClark wrote: post #24
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…

Just clicked to check it out and was reminded about how much I like the base-58 scheme they used for addresses.

Even people working on bitcoin aren't fans of base58. Variable length serialization? Bignums in the serializer? Poor error detection? No error correction? Confused characters in alphabet? Case sensitivity? Lots of reasons to dislike.
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