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

121–130 of 147 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#121

Post by EthanHeilman »

lewi wrote: post #71
EthanHeilman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Academia and industry both have filtering problems, how to tell good ideas from bad ideas.

The industry solution tends to be to try things and see what works in practice. This is extremely expensive in time and only a small number of ideas can be tried. Furthermore the success or failure depends on the execution and marketing. If Bitcoin had not had the developer commitment in the early stage it would be dead and forgotten despite the great ideas.

The academic solution is that ideas should come with detailed arguments about why the solution works, what its flaws are and how it compares to other work. This allows ideas to be compared and judged more quickly at a lower expense. However constructing these arguments is hard, requires rare knowledge and is not always possible.

Academics dismissed Bitcoin because it did not have these arguments. They had no way to know if it would work when it was running with real money on the line. Distributed systems ideas are very hard to get right and Bitcoin had all sorts quirks that Satoshi didn't foresee, however PoW turns out to be a very robust mechanism.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#122

Post by gtrubetskoy »

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

Thank you, this is what I was looking for. It'll probably take the whole upcoming weekend for me to grok this, but the first thing that caught my eye was that SPECTRE still has PoW, while byteball somehow claims that is isn't necessary... OR may be I'm misreading something. Thanks again.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#123

Post by Ar-Curunir »

jameskegel wrote: post #111
arca_vorago wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Zerocash was developed by (and is still being improved by) full time academics.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#124

Post by newforice »

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…

> This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new.

The same can be said for any good or bad idea.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#125

Post by ringaroundthetx »

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, and all crypto-note infrastructure, is about 2 years behind transparent blockchain technology, and thus has a lot of growth as it becomes a viable option for more use cases.

For example:

Multisignature transactions are just becoming available. The lack of multisignature made it a non-starter for many applications, including on darknet marketplaces, because rudimentary escrow or deposits were needed. When the operator goes down, all your funds are on their server and are gone with it, but with multisignature as seen in bitcoin and ethereum, you always have control of your funds and they are never in limbo.

Meta-assets are not possible yet. Asset creation is one of the big tenants of Ethereum right now, and there are many assets on bitcoin as well for even longer. Many organizations use this as a way to raise capital, bringing in a lot more capital into the base currency's economies. Monero and crypto note doesn't have this capability yet, but being able to issue and hold balances of these privately, with audit capabilities, will be powerful.

2nd layer scaling solutions are not even on the roadmap yet in any crypto note network. Cryptonote has the same scaling problems as bitcoin or ethereum, but the key sizes accelerate that. Cryptonote coins have dynamic block sizes already, but it may react too slow to really help periods of many transactions. Monero already encounters this issue. Bitcoin style cryptocurrencies have Lightning Network via Segwit. Ethereum has Raiden on the roadmap.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#126

Post by ringaroundthetx »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #115
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.

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

:) lets educate them all

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#127

Post by ringaroundthetx »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #123
jameskegel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Zerocash was developed by (and is still being improved by) full time academics.

Which is probably why they have no idea that the user experience is irreparably broken to ensure privacy.

The same criticisms exist as since Zerocash was just a white paper.

I will say that there is the possibility that they can make the optional opaque transactions the more ready option, but you can look at the blockchain and see that nobody uses those addresses. Zerocash is just a bitcoin clone if you don't use the opaque addresses.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#128

Post by ChrisClark »

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.

> Confused characters in alphabet?

That's really the only reason I was saying I liked base58. Because it removes those confusing characters compared to base64 or others.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#129

Post by bhaak »

decentralised wrote: post #87
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.

You forgot an important word there that's also your username.

There were lots of digital money systems that worked but were centralized.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#130

Post by sillysaurus3 »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #125
arca_vorago wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, and all crypto-note infrastructure, is about 2 years behind transparent blockchain technology, and thus has a lot of growth as it becomes a viable option for more use cases. For example: Multisignature transactions are just becoming available. The lack of multisignature made it a non-starter for many applications, including on darknet marketplaces, because rudimentary escrow or deposits were needed. When the…

Do you have an email I can reach you at? I have a quick question.

(HN hides the email field in your profile, so if you want to make it publicly visible you'll have to put it in your profile's "about" field.)

Post reply on HN