
Peer review of "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph"  - wglb
https://gist.github.com/3901921
======
kmontrose
Calling this peer review is... charitable. Glancing over the commenters, most
of them have some bitcoin related activity and none of them have any
cryptography related publications or notable work (that I can easily find
anyway).

So far as I can see, this is just bitcoin fans trying to discredit a paper co-
written by Adi "I helped invent RSA" Shamir which is somewhat unflattering to
bitcoin.

~~~
oleganza
Adi Shamir claims to have understanding of Bitcoin network, yet downloads and
parses HTML files instead of a raw structured and ready to use blockchain.

Jeff Garzik makes two very important comments. First, that the blockchain is
not a website and is very easy to tinker with as it is. Second, that many
"rich" bitcoin owners might very well be web wallet servers that do not really
"own" bitcoins, but simply store other's money in their vault (like in old
days banks were storing gold).

Calling this "peer review" is less funny than being a security expert and
parsing HTML to get the blockchain.

------
wmf
A few people have gotten hung up on the word "owner", but clearly all the
addresses used by a Web wallet are under the de facto _control_ of a single
party, even if that party is not the legal _owner_. This does make it hard to
estimate how many Bitcoin "owners" there really are.

I would also guess that Ron and Shamir didn't look too deeply into the Bitcoin
community since they use slightly different terminology, but the paper is
still interesting.

