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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#111

Post by jameskegel »

arca_vorago wrote: post #81
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Monero is the -only- option that offers fungible currency. Monero Research Lab is actively employing full time PHD researchers to asses and improve where needed the strength of the underlying crypto and the implementation thereof. Zcash is not an acceptable substitute, as is the common opinion- I mention this only because you say "monero is on of a few options".

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#112

Post by the_rosentotter »

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…

It's mostly posers who malign others for their choice of platform or tools. Show me what you built. Usually guys like that have never built shit, but still ruthlessly criticize others.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#113

Post by purplethinking »

rvern wrote: post #84
cs702 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

I always thought it would be neat to use something similar to determine "UserRank" in order to solve Eternal September.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#114

Post by gruez »

kobeya wrote: post #90
ChrisClark wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Poor error detection? No error correction?

It's implemented at a higher level. For bitcoin, a 32 bit check field is appended to the data to serve as a checksum. If you want parity, I'd imagine that could be done as well.

>Confused characters in alphabet? Case sensitivity?

Some look alike letters are excluded, hence why base58 rather than base62.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#115

Post by vocatus_gate »

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.

Just chiming in to say your username gave me a chuckle. Big Monero fan as well.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#116

Post by vocatus_gate »

arca_vorago wrote: post #81
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zcash has opt-in private transactions which are computationally very expensive. So, they do work, but being opt-in they might as well not exist. In my opinion full privacy must be mandatory for all participants for it to be truly effective. Monero is currently the only project that fits this criteria.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#118

Post by CyberDildonics »

xorcist wrote: post #95
CyberDildonics wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CPU-, and to a certain extent, GPU-based mining is problematic because in the real world today all mining is concentrated in the hands of botnet operators. That used to be a mounting problem in the Bitcoin world which began to fade away with the introduction of FPGA-based miners, but it's still a problem with a couple of altcoins. There are pros and cons with both compute-hard and memory-hard PoW but many seem to lea…

> all mining is concentrated in the hands of botnet operators

Do you have a source for this? I'm not even sure what CPU based currencies you are talking about. GPU based proof of work seems like even more of a stretch seeing as particular high end cards that are better with integers and bit shifting are usually used.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#119

Post by ryanmarsh »

keypusher wrote: post #64
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…

> 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.

I think I'm going to print this out and frame it on my wall.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#120

Post by CyberDildonics »

colordrops wrote: post #65
CyberDildonics wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incen…

> it removes anonymity from an attacker as it's hard to hide the source of a large ASIC farm

This has already been shown to be untrue, an anonymous pool has mined both bitcoin cash and the segwit bitcoin chains.

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