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Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

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Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#31

Post by virtuexru »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26
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.

There's so much like that. I'm going to try to write a blog post highlighting all the gems. My favorite is: IMPLEMENT_SERIALIZE ( READWRITE(prevout); READWRITE(scriptSig); READWRITE(nSequence); ) It's a C++ macro that implements reading and writing member variables to/from disk/network. It uses C++ templates to figure out the sizes of everything, so it winds up packing items efficiently. We used something similar in…

I really hope you make that post highlighting your favorite parts of the C++ Bitcoin codebase; it is super interesting! Keep up the great work.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#32

Post by sillysaurus3 »

mrb wrote: post #28
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…

I recovered and archived version 0.1.0 (directly from Hal Finney): http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz It has 19k lines of code. That's certainly a few months of work minimum. Fun fact: I was contacted by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View since this tarball (and the .rar) hosted on my site is the earliest known public copy of the source code.

Notice how all the files use \r\n for newlines. Satoshi was a Windows programmer! They used Windows.

Anyone who has tried to do cross-platform development knows it's extremely difficult in C++. You can do it, but it's not a trivial thing. I guess it's no surprise that Satoshi used Visual Studio. If you start out writing code in not-Visual-Studio, it's far harder to go back and make it run on VS.

I vividly remember how maligned Windows programmers were in 2008. I felt like a black sheep getting my start in the gamedev industry, because if you wanted to do Big League Programming in gamedev, that meant one thing: Windows. Microsoft has finally made some inroads in hacker culture. It's far less common now to be dismissed as less talented just because you used Windows. But in 2008 this feeling was very much alive.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#33

Post by baddox »

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."

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#34

Post by cs702 »

mayank wrote: post #29
axus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think mayank wanted you to say "Bitcoin's peer-to-peer protocol, on the other hand, is a new distributed algorithm"

I can get on board with that :)

Me too. I updated my original comment to state exactly that.

I love HN :-)

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#35

Post by gwern »

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. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades.

Yes, the debts Satoshi owed to others were obvious right from the start. I made pretty much exactly the same argument as OP over 6 years ago in my then-widely-read essay "Bitcoin is Worse is Better" https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better - Bitcoin built on many established tools and concepts and its true contribution was putting them together in a way that was conceptually alien and disgusted people immediately on arrival. (Proof of Work still viscerally disgusts many people! _plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose_ eh? Anyone can invent something that everyone wants - everyone wants a cheaper or faster computer, for example - but it takes genius to invent something that everyone hates, thinks is useless, wasteful, evil, or all three simultaneously, and eventually wins grudging acknowledgement that it may actually be a good idea.)

It's nice that Arvind & Clark have gone into more detail about the predecessors, though, I suspect that most Bitcoiners these days have little idea about it (although I think they overstate a few of them - Satoshi didn't know about B-money until he was told by Back and so most accounts of Bitcoin's genesis overstate its influence).

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#36

Post by omarchowdhury »

xiphias wrote: post #25
toomim wrote: post #3

After 12 years as an academic computer scientist, Bitcoin was the most impressive computer science research I saw. And it came from outside the academy.

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?

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#37

Post by nullc »

/me waits for the citation for the prior fault tolerant 'consensus' with O(N) scaling; or for the consensus process that doesn't have approved membership but still achieves some useful security properties

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#38

Post by cs702 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20
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…

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.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#39

Post by colordrops »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #8

Its amazing to me it took 15 years to go from hashcash to Bitcoin. I think it speaks to the strangeness of Bitcoin, and its niche idealogical underpinnings. Bitcoin solved a problem that most of the people never thought about. Yet if you're looking to solve Bitcoin's problem set, calibrated hashcash to secure a ledger seems completely obvious. I also thought that Bitcoin's asic-vulnerability (and thus mining centrali…

"asic-vulnerability" is actually an asset. If Bitcoin were mined with CPUs or GPUs, any large organization or government could just point their computing power at Bitcoin and disrupt it.

Re: Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

#40

Post by corford »

xiphias wrote: post #25
toomim wrote: post #3

After 12 years as an academic computer scientist, Bitcoin was the most impressive computer science research I saw. And it came from outside the academy.

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 getting the same feelings I had in 1997/1998 with the web: there's something big going on and it feels exciting.

Playing around with Ether Delta, watching smart contracts execute on etherscan, syncing my wallets up with blockchains, anonymously trading coins & tokens on exchanges, chatting to believers/trolls/curious peeps on forums. The whole vibe reminds me of geocities / audiogalaxy / slashdot in the late nineties.

I think the ideas (technical & political) Satoshi Nakamoto crystallised in to Bitcoin represent the beginning of something fundamentally transformative and can't wait to see where it ends up.

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