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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#131

Post by googletazer »

corford wrote: post #40
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.

Agree it has the potential to be as disruptive to world society as the web or smartphone. I mined a few satoshis in early 2014, stopped when hash difficulty got too hard and didn't pay Bitcoin much attention for the next few years. A couple of months ago I decided to jump back in to the whole crypto coin ecosystem and check out what's going on and, honestly, it's staggering how fast this space is evolving. I'm gettin…

>The whole vibe reminds me of geocities / audiogalaxy / slashdot in the late nineties.

I get the same feeling, its as if we just discovered what we can do with Macromedia Flash after only having html and rudimentary JS + VBScript :)

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#132

Post by xorcist »

wslh wrote: post #103
xorcist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth repeating: This is a C++ codebase. It listens to open ports on the public Internet. One single remote exploit and you lose all your money. The author basically threw code over the wall and the open source community where contributors come and go all the time took over. And one single remote exploit is all it takes. (This causation is perhaps less true today when it is more common to use encrypted or even h…

> One single remote exploit and you lose all your money. That's not true. Few people use the wallet included in the Bitcoin node, most people use nodes indirectly to broadcast transactions and sync the blockchain.

Hence the sentence in parentheses. It used to be true for everyone. Now there are other options, but there's still a lot of people who use the standard one in absolute numbers. Plus all the exchanges, payment processors and other third party services which all rely on it.

Even if you don't personally keep your coins online, a hacker that scores a million coins on a zero day is enough to plunge the value for a long time. You still lose either way.

The point is that this hasn't happened. Even though it sort of should have. That's remarkable.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#133

Post by Ar-Curunir »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #127
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is ongoing work to speed up private transactions that should make it possible to make privacy the default. At that point Zerocash will essentially be a completely private version of Bitcoin.

And Zerocash wasn't just a white paper, it was peer reviewed and analyzed by security and cryptography experts.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#134

Post by ringaroundthetx »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #133
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is ongoing work to speed up private transactions that should make it possible to make privacy the default. At that point Zerocash will essentially be a completely private version of Bitcoin. And Zerocash wasn't just a white paper, it was peer reviewed and analyzed by security and cryptography experts.

What are the current limitations of private transactions, are they slower than the normal ones?

Not sure what you are trying to say about the papers. I saw they were academic and theoretical.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#135

Post by mike_hearn »

ploggingdev wrote: post #98
mike_hearn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was more than one critical protocol bug. But yes, it was an impressive effort. It used the STL well, was tightly written, and of the security bugs that did exist none were buffer overflows, stack smashes or double frees from what I recall. There were some issues in the interpreter opcodes but I think they may have been crashes (DoS). The code was clearly the work of one person though. There were not enough comm…

Since you were around in the early days, how did you get involved with Bitcoin and how did Satoshi get people interested in it since he was anonymous and did not have any social media following or email list? It's incredible that he has managed to stay anonymous for so long, how on earth did he manage to do that? Any thoughts on the scaling debate?

I had a long term interest in internet money, from before Bitcoin existed. The path to Bitcoin was kind of convoluted.

About 20 years ago I was interested in environmentalism. I was persuaded by arguments that humanity was damaging the environment because of the system of money it used, in which sustainably managing a forest might be profitable at, say, interest rates of 2%, but if interest rates went up to 5% then the rational thing to do was clear cut the forest and invest the returns.

This led me to a book called The Future of Money by Bernard Leitaer. This book talked about "community currencies". The idea you could design currencies to achieve particular social goals was very interesting to me. The book referenced a publication called the International Journal of Community Currency Research. This organisation turned out to have a Yahoo Group, which I joined. I felt that if there were other people discussing this idea, they would surely be found on the internet.

One day the Yahoo Group received a mail talking about a project called Ripple. This was an initiative by Ryan Fugger to create a system that could locate and manage debt in a decentralised way. It proposed an economic system without cash, in which all payments were in the form of debt in whatever units people found convenient (dollars, hours of work, loaves of bread baked etc). So I joined the Ripple mailing list too, and engaged in much fruitful discussion with Ryan about the nature of money.

The Ripple mailing list eventually received a mail that pointed to the bitcoin website and suggested we check it out. This was a few months after the project was launched. I did so, and started emailing Satoshi.

I don't know how Satoshi remained anonymous for so long. I suspect that if his identity is ever revealed, people will think: it was so obvious? Why didn't anyone see that? When the operator of the Silk Road was revealed, it turned out he'd made basic and obvious errors very early on and anyone could have figured out the Dread Pirate's identity through basic web searches. But only the FBI actually bothered to do it. I suspect Satoshi hasn't been looked for as thoroughly as people tend to imagine.

I discussed Bitcoin's scaling extensively two years ago. You can find those discussions on my blog if you like. Nothing has changed and I have nothing further to say on the matter.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#136

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

ploggingdev wrote: post #98
mike_hearn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was more than one critical protocol bug. But yes, it was an impressive effort. It used the STL well, was tightly written, and of the security bugs that did exist none were buffer overflows, stack smashes or double frees from what I recall. There were some issues in the interpreter opcodes but I think they may have been crashes (DoS). The code was clearly the work of one person though. There were not enough comm…

Since you were around in the early days, how did you get involved with Bitcoin and how did Satoshi get people interested in it since he was anonymous and did not have any social media following or email list? It's incredible that he has managed to stay anonymous for so long, how on earth did he manage to do that? Any thoughts on the scaling debate?

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/

He used the cryptography mailing list. Then the P2P forums.

I highly recommend reading through the archives. There are several good observations to make there, like how scaling was basically the first issue he addressed (or failed to address, depending on your view).

Another interesting thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15121#msg151...

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#137

Post by Ar-Curunir »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #134
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ongoing work to speed up private transactions that should make it possible to make privacy the default. At that point Zerocash will essentially be a completely private version of Bitcoin. And Zerocash wasn't just a white paper, it was peer reviewed and analyzed by security and cryptography experts.

What are the current limitations of private transactions, are they slower than the normal ones? Not sure what you are trying to say about the papers. I saw they were academic and theoretical.

The current limitations of private transactions are essentially that they are slow and that they don't support things like multisig or timelocks. All of these limitations are being worked on.

The academic paper you refer to had both a theoretical construction and an implemented system.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#138

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

mike_hearn wrote: post #135
ploggingdev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you were around in the early days, how did you get involved with Bitcoin and how did Satoshi get people interested in it since he was anonymous and did not have any social media following or email list? It's incredible that he has managed to stay anonymous for so long, how on earth did he manage to do that? Any thoughts on the scaling debate?

I had a long term interest in internet money, from before Bitcoin existed. The path to Bitcoin was kind of convoluted. About 20 years ago I was interested in environmentalism. I was persuaded by arguments that humanity was damaging the environment because of the system of money it used, in which sustainably managing a forest might be profitable at, say, interest rates of 2%, but if interest rates went up to 5% then t…

Do you think you might write about Bitcoin's development ecosystem in the future? Since XT, Unlimited, and Classic, there has now been 2X and Bitcoin Cash. It's probably too early yet to see if things have/will change substantively, but I would enjoy reading your thoughts if the time comes where you feel like writing.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#139

Post by feelix »

mike_hearn wrote: post #135
ploggingdev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you were around in the early days, how did you get involved with Bitcoin and how did Satoshi get people interested in it since he was anonymous and did not have any social media following or email list? It's incredible that he has managed to stay anonymous for so long, how on earth did he manage to do that? Any thoughts on the scaling debate?

I had a long term interest in internet money, from before Bitcoin existed. The path to Bitcoin was kind of convoluted. About 20 years ago I was interested in environmentalism. I was persuaded by arguments that humanity was damaging the environment because of the system of money it used, in which sustainably managing a forest might be profitable at, say, interest rates of 2%, but if interest rates went up to 5% then t…

I'm just reading your blog now. The first article has this statement in it:

>The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.

That was written back in January 2016. I think you were wrong about that.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#140

Post by kobeya »

ChrisClark wrote: post #128
kobeya wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, but it doesn't do a very good job of that. It only removed a few pairings, and made some odd choices at that. Hence why I list it as one of the issues.
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