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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#141

Post by iso-8859-1 »

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…

Are you tempted into joining vastly superior solutions like MimbleWimble, with a blockchain that doesn't always grow?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#142

Post by drrty »

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?

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical...

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#143

Post by keymone »

drrty wrote: post #142
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?

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical... https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

thanks, sounds promising. might toy around with that over weekend.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#144

Post by clu3 »

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…

The genius idea of bitcoin, afaik, is that Satoshi created a brilliant incentive scheme, which was the reason why the nodes decided to join the network. Without this factor it would have been impossible for bitcoin to grow this far.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#145

Post by xiphias »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #36
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.

You do realize you need internet / computers for Bitcoin to exist, right?

Yes, I know how things work. I just imagined my life if none of the technologies were invented, except an amazing store of value + great currency at the same time.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#146

Post by mike_hearn »

feelix wrote: post #139
mike_hearn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I think that everything in my blog post was correct.

The statement about the price was deliberately vague ("long term", "should probably") because the Bitcoin price hasn't reflected the fundamentals for a very long time. You can't go straight from "this project is broken" to "thus the price will fall" because it's not an informed market, because of the large quantity of shady exchanges and so on. Take a look at what's been going on with Bitfinex to get a flavour.

If you assume that eventually, one day, reality re-asserts itself, then the price should come to reflect the systems actual utility, which is very low. But you know the old saying about how markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent? I wouldn't try shorting BTC regardless of how much you know about it.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#147

Post by decentralised »

bhaak wrote: post #129
decentralised wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

:-)

All money systems are digital money systems. Source: 20 years in FinTech.

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