I think it's important to note that this paper was a research paid by the Citi foundation, which belongs to Citi Group, a financial services corporation formed following the merger of banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate Travelers Group.
Why exactly is that important? Because it suggests that Citi is involved in hiding the identity of Satoshi and that implies their involvement in setting up Bitcoin? Or am I missing an angle here?
I think the claim made is that the powers that be are actively working against Bitcoin, here by tarnishing its reputation with sensationalist research.
I think we should look closer at the cryptography mailing list for evidence of Satoshi's identity. It seems likely that at some point Satoshi posted under his real name about something unrelated to BitCoin, before he decided to switch identities to release BitCoin under a pseudonym. I really doubt that Satoshi would have lurked silently there for many years before suddenly dropping the BitCoin whitepaper on the list…
Why does it really matter who Satoshi is? He didn't do anything illegal so why should anyone try to uncover his identity even though he's chosen anonymity for himself?
You could argue that it's in the public interest to know who created Bitcoin and why.
What if Satoshi were a NSA stooge and the algorithm had currently-unknown weaknesses that would allow a selected group of in-the-know people to generate BC at rates much higher than regular miners?
Cryptography does not lie, but we often don't know what (or how) to ask the right questions. Satoshi's identity could help shape those questions.
I'd be shocked if the NSA hadn't "invented" differential cryptanalysis long before Shamir.
Does that matter? If two people independently invent the same thing, they're both inventors with equal standing. The classic example being Leibniz and Newton with regards to calculus of infintesimals.
Apparently it matters to the good people of Marshall, Texas. According to them, Whitfield Diffie didn't invent public key encryption for exactly that reason.
Yeah, I'm more than a little bitter about the technologically illiterate being allowed to judge complex technology.
Why does it really matter who Satoshi is? He didn't do anything illegal so why should anyone try to uncover his identity even though he's chosen anonymity for himself?
You could argue that it's in the public interest to know who created Bitcoin and why. What if Satoshi were a NSA stooge and the algorithm had currently-unknown weaknesses that would allow a selected group of in-the-know people to generate BC at rates much higher than regular miners? Cryptography does not lie, but we often don't know what (or how) to ask the right questions. Satoshi's identity could help shape those q…
I'd rather not know. It's more fun this way - almost like a Banksy of cryptography.
"It made no claims which have been demonstrated to be false" That is because no falsifiable claims were made. (Edit: Strictly speaking, this is not true. Falsifiable claims were made; this, for example: An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent. This claim has already been falsified: an attacker who can control the block chain can also selectively deny transac…
> If a paper does not cite the relevant previous work, This is elevating form above substance. Ron & Shamir's work has the proper form, the proper names, and yet the material it contains is rubbish. It cites "relevant previous work", so long as you think that none of the work in industry is relevant. The gold standard should not be if a work follows a set of practices, advisable as they may be, it should be if a work…
Reference to previous work is not some perfunctory requirement to satisfy for academic due process. It is critical for the advancement of knowledge. Also, its pretty much entirely the definition of "well-researched". Work that is done completely independent of the established base of knowledge in a field can be valuable but someone has to do the work of integrating it and contrasting it with what was already known or else how can you weed out the cranks without many people spending many hours working through their enormous stacks of drivel?
G. H. Hardy said that his most important contribution to the study of mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan. One could easily make the mistake of thinking this contribution could have been easily replicated by someone else, but its entirely likely that never would have happened at all because Ramanujan was not aware of much of the contemporary work that he blitzed past.
Not sure what you mean by 'poorly researched'. Whatever it's flaws, it produced a hell of an innovative idea (or rather, a conglomeration of ideas into something innovative), and it has grown into something undeniably huge. Something people are building businesses upon. Something that is trading at over $900 USD/unit right now, despite countless rounds of naysayers decrying its intrinsic worthlessness and foretelling…
"Not sure what you mean by 'poorly researched'." I mean that it was poorly researched. There was no definition of security, no mention of the vast body of related work in digital cash or secure multiparty computation, a weak security analysis, no mention of the fact that polynomial time attacks are usually considered to indicate that a system is not secure (one would think that a different security model would requir…
Real-world cryptography often doesn't have security definitions, e.g. AES. In parts that is because security definitions tend to be asymptotic (which is a massive simplification), and real cryptography is working at a fixed parameter. Coming up with a good security definition is hard, the 2013 Turing award was given for one. I think it will take a long time before we get a realistic security definition for Bitcoin.
One of the consequences of a public transaction chain is the great potential for witch hunts. Here's one of the first examples, but it surely won't be the last.
Until Zerocoin gets kicking. Zerocoin is no longer to be integrated into bitcoin but released as an altcoin.
It would be entertaining if the NSA could use blockchain data as an aid to cracking systems which employ SHA-256. It would be doubly fun if bitcoin was originally some off-the-cuff gamification scheme to help generate lookup tables for the NSA.
Are there any papers about practical (slash nefarious) uses one could make from the work put into the blockchain? I had the same thoughts as you recently, but don't have the background to imagine what's possible.
Each miner includes their own address and a nonce value in the work they are doing. Most of the work that goes into mining is generating failed hashes and is discarded by the client. Assuming a lack of mathematical attacks on sha 256, there isn't really anything nefarious to do with the published blocks.