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

101–110 of 147 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#101

Post by Normal_gaussian »

seanwilson wrote: post #100
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…

I'm super curious why C++ was chosen when the risks are so high. Performance?

Likely experience. Most would write something so large in a language they are comfortable in.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#102

Post by seanwilson »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #101
seanwilson wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm super curious why C++ was chosen when the risks are so high. Performance?

Likely experience. Most would write something so large in a language they are comfortable in.

That's a really bad reason for something you'll be working on for a few years where a single bad bug could ruin it when it goes live. You'd think picking a language where buffer overflows and memory management bugs were impossible would be a minimum requirement. If you're good at C++ most other languages are a breeze in comparison as well.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#103

Post by wslh »

xorcist wrote: post #97
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…

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.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#104

Post by farhanhubble »

cs702 wrote: post #38
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…

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.

Careful analysis of the source code might offer some clues regarding whether it's the handiwork of a person or a group.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#106

Post by joeblau »

This was a great read. I've been in a pretty heated debate with one of my friends (As BTC seems to do) about the origins of the technical under pinnings of Bitcoin. I'm relatively new to the cryptocurrency space, but it seems like there is huge political push (Cypherpunk ideology) promoted by a vocal slice of the BTC community. Every time I ask for the history and origins, my friend credits everything to the Cypherpunk community.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#107

Post by bhouston »

keymone wrote: post #99
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…

interesting points, thanks. also thanks for your contributions to the project. i wonder if stylometry could be (was?) applied to C++ code to have better evidence about authorship?

Only if other open code exists?

Most code produced is not open source.

But given he open sourced Bitcoin, he may have open sourced something else.

Code style does change over time, I know mine has. But I wonder if there are invariants as well. That would be a fascinating research project.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#108

Post by bhouston »

baddox wrote: post #33
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…

If that counts as "not a new idea, but just a new combination of existing ideas" then it's hard for me to think of anything that does count as a "new idea."

This. True originality doesn't exist if you want to be reductionist. This is a game people use to minimize contributions of others.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#109

Post by keymone »

bhouston wrote: post #107
keymone wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting points, thanks. also thanks for your contributions to the project. i wonder if stylometry could be (was?) applied to C++ code to have better evidence about authorship?

Only if other open code exists? Most code produced is not open source. But given he open sourced Bitcoin, he may have open sourced something else. Code style does change over time, I know mine has. But I wonder if there are invariants as well. That would be a fascinating research project.

stylometry of just bitcoin source code could at least establish if there was one author or multiple.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#110

Post by jameskegel »

mike_hearn wrote: post #96
keymone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Thank you for your contributions.
Post reply on HN