
Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree - kushti
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559
======
cs702
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 Bitcoin was invented.

Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he
(or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]

\--

[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-
Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double-
spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized
control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to
fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of
cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at
[https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

~~~
sillysaurus3
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 people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on
source control.

The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects
to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running
bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed
nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin
integrates _so many_ standard tactics so well in addition to its academic
work.

Here it is as one gigantic file:
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242a428b5)

~~~
cs702
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.

~~~
busterarm
> too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in
> isolation.

It's been done before... for example, djb

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Could you explain what his accomplishment was in terms a non-cryptographer
could understand?

~~~
btilly
First of all djb is
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein)
and the accomplishment was releasing a secure email server (qmail), a secure
webserver (publicfile), and a secure BIND server (djbdns). Both qmail and
djbdns became widely used, and the main alternatives were projects supported
by large teams.

It took 8 years before the first bug was found in these projects.

I highly recommend reading through the guidelines in
[https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html](https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html)
for how to write secure software. In particular point 5, Don't Parse, is
broadly applicable and under appreciated. A well-known class of bugs arising
from this error are SQL injection attacks.

------
randomwalker
Coauthor here. Here's some context for how this essay came about.

When we released a draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook [1], one piece of
feedback was that we focused on cryptocurrency technology as it is today, and
ignored the juicy and tumultuous history of how the ideas developed over the
last few decades. So I invited Jeremy Clark, who's connected to some of this
history, to write a preface to the book. If you're interested in the history,
you might enjoy that chapter. [2]

Jeremy and I then got together to develop the ideas further, resulting in the
present article, where we also provide some commentary on the current
blockchain hype and draw lessons for practitioners and academics.

[1]
[http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/](http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/)

[2]
[https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p...](https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf)

~~~
gtrubetskoy
When you were researching the ledger part, I'm curious whether you've come
across a DAG-based ledger. I've been reading the byteball [1] paper and still
can't tell whether it's baloney or really the DAG is a consensus that does not
require PoW... I suspect it's neither, there are trade offs, but I could not
find much anything good on the subject to read.

[1] [https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf](https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf)

~~~
EthanHeilman
A great DAGchain paper is "SPECTRE - Serialization of Proof-of-work Events:
Confirming Transactions via Recursive Elections". Its peer reviewed and
contains rigorous security proofs.

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf)

~~~
lewi
Interesting read, quite a unique perspective.

One thing found interesting about the conclusion of OP's article is the role
of academia vs practical implementation.

> Many academic communities informally argued that Bitcoin couldn't work,
> based on theoretical models or experiences with past systems, despite the
> fact that it was working in practice.

It will be interesting to see the Academically based SPECTRE competing with
another DAG based coin such as Byteball. Well measured research and a peer-
reviewed foundation against practical implementation, first to market and
continuous improvement.

~~~
EthanHeilman
Academia and industry both have filtering problems, how to tell good ideas
from bad ideas.

The industry solution tends to be to try things and see what works in
practice. This is extremely expensive in time and only a small number of ideas
can be tried. Furthermore the success or failure depends on the execution and
marketing. If Bitcoin had not had the developer commitment in the early stage
it would be dead and forgotten despite the great ideas.

The academic solution is that ideas should come with detailed arguments about
why the solution works, what its flaws are and how it compares to other work.
This allows ideas to be compared and judged more quickly at a lower expense.
However constructing these arguments is hard, requires rare knowledge and is
not always possible.

Academics dismissed Bitcoin because it did not have these arguments. They had
no way to know if it would work when it was running with real money on the
line. Distributed systems ideas are very hard to get right and Bitcoin had all
sorts quirks that Satoshi didn't foresee, however PoW turns out to be a very
robust mechanism.

------
toomim
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.

~~~
xiphias
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.

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

~~~
tylersmith
The p2p network could be implemented over radio and without computers we'd
just have a far lower hashrate and probably a different PoW algorithm. I don't
see any reasonable way we would have discovered cryptocurrencies before the
internet and computers though.

------
aakilfernandes
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
centralization) would be fatal. It turned out to be not fatal (yet), but thats
not something which could be determined on paper. It needed real-world use
before people knew if it could work or not.

~~~
wmf
One of the points of the article is that the field wasn't idle during those 15
years; bit gold, b-money, and Finney's RPOW made incremental improvements on
hashcash that led to Bitcoin.

Also, Bitcoin is kind of a "dirty" solution to the consensus problem; if all
the academics were looking for an elegant solution it's not surprising that
they didn't discover it.

~~~
Marazan
The repeated claim that Bitcoin came up with a totally new and unknown way of
solving the problem always irks me.

Everyone keeping a complete history of all actions is, like, consensus 101.

Research is based around not having to do that.

~~~
SilasX
That wasn't the key insight -- it was the idea that you could get a working
solution under the assumption that 50%+1 of the hashing power is from honest
nodes as long as those nodes agreed to coordinate on the ledger with the most
proven work invested in it.

------
Hippocrates
I loved reading this.

Bitcoin is truly something worth more than the sum of its parts. I don't feel
that the creative combination and implementation of existing ideas diminishes
the achievement one bit. (Not that the article made it out this way, just my 2
satoshis)

------
thisisit
Anyone serious about crypotcurrencies will know at least know two ideas not
being Satoshi originals - 1. Ecash, Digicash - author's refer to it in
paragraph one as something people are aware of. 2. PoW/Hashcash - Sure people
might not be aware of the anti-spam but they are aware of Hashcash and Adam
Back.

That being the case, I think author's assumption that everyone in the bitcoin
space thinks Satoshi as the one inventing everything and hence the article
needs to prove otherwise is..well false at best.

~~~
la_fayette
i completely agree. there is nothing new to somebody a bit involved into
bitcoin. there is even a website which is old and widely known
([http://nakamotoinstitute.org](http://nakamotoinstitute.org)) where all the
referenced literature is listed...

------
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

------
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.

------
davidgerard
Gwern Branwen noted all this ages ago, and should have been cited in this
paper.

[https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better](https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better)

~~~
vocatus_gate
Gwern actually replied elsewhere in this thread mentioning that paper. It's a
great read.

