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The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes, and not everyone involved has a year to devote to learning about Bitcoin, so it essentia

The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes, and not everyone involved has a year to devote to learning about Bitcoin, so it essentially amounts to "just trust us, we won't enrich ourselves by fucking you". Which has been said by people involved in banks and currencies for centuries. If you want to say something like that, better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed, otherwise I have no way of verifying that the problem is more difficult than my current understanding says it is. Furthermore, a year is a really silly measurement of time for how long learning something will take. If you have some background knowledge in the field, then most individual blind spots can be cleared up in a month or two of full time study. It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach. This stuff isn't that hard.

zzalpha 11y ago
If you want to say something like that, better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed, otherwise I have no way of verifying that the problem is more difficult than my current understanding says it is. Totally agreed. Just because you're an expert, that doesn't absolve you from having to make your case. But the same is true of anyone else, and that necessarily excludes non-experts who will not be able to make their case effectively.
Taek 11y ago
> The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes. That is the crux of why this is a huge deal, and Linus changing the Linux scheduling algorithm is not a huge deal. People are afraid that Bitcoin is going to break, or meet an obstacle that prevents them from making massive ROI on their speculation, and they have a lot of stake in the game in protecting Bitcoin. > It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach. "It took me about 2 months from not knowing how cryptographic hashing worked to implementing my own hash with a novel sponge function." The hard part is not making a cryptocurrency that works when people use it normally. The hard part is making a cryptocurrency that works when people around the world can profit tens of millions of dollars by breaking the cryptocurrency (either abusing the mining, spending coins that don't belong to them, DoS'ing competing miners, etc.) I don't know which cryptocurrency you made (I tried to look it up via your HN profile, but didn't find anything), but if you get it peer reviewed I imagine that experts will quickly be able to find a reason or two for why it is either broken or uninteresting. Anyone can make a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break. Bitcoin is among the most complex and cutting edge cryptosystem we have today. Even in the past few months, several important and severe flaws in Bitcoin have been discovered and fixed. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-July/009697.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015... https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsw60/upcoming_dos_vulnerability_announcements_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsw60/upc... Decisions as seemly small as updating the blocksize limit are enormously nuanced. It changes the entire game theory behind the mining, affects how people will be running validation nodes, and requires a strong understanding of how blocks propagate around the world, and what a nice 'average' block looks like vs. a block that was made maliciously. > better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed This is a very difficult thing to do, especially because Bitcoin is so new. Much of the important discussion that has happened resides only in mailing lists, blog posts, irc logs, github issues, and forum posts. But here is a good set of papers to get started: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/ http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/ A smaller, more focused list: http://bitcoin.ninja/ http://bitcoin.ninja/ It will also help if you read the full #bitcoin-wizards log, dating back to around 2013 I believe. There you will find lots of highly technical discussion with links to more discussion and research papers. It's probably got the highest signal to noise ratio of any public discussion.

zzalpha 11y ago

If you want to say something like that, better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed, otherwise I have no way of verifying that the problem is more difficult than my current understanding says it is. Totally agreed. Just because you're an expert, that doesn't absolve you from having to make your case. But the same is true of anyone else, and that necessarily excludes non-experts who will not be able to make their case effectively.

Taek 11y ago

> The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes. That is the crux of why this is a huge deal, and Linus changing the Linux scheduling algorithm is not a huge deal. People are afraid that Bitcoin is going to break, or meet an obstacle that prevents them from making massive ROI on their speculation, and they have a lot of stake in the game in protecting Bitcoin. > It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach. "It took me about 2 months from not knowing how cryptographic hashing worked to implementing my own hash with a novel sponge function." The hard part is not making a cryptocurrency that works when people use it normally. The hard part is making a cryptocurrency that works when people around the world can profit tens of millions of dollars by breaking the cryptocurrency (either abusing the mining, spending coins that don't belong to them, DoS'ing competing miners, etc.) I don't know which cryptocurrency you made (I tried to look it up via your HN profile, but didn't find anything), but if you get it peer reviewed I imagine that experts will quickly be able to find a reason or two for why it is either broken or uninteresting. Anyone can make a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break. Bitcoin is among the most complex and cutting edge cryptosystem we have today. Even in the past few months, several important and severe flaws in Bitcoin have been discovered and fixed. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-July/009697.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015... https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsw60/upcoming_dos_vulnerability_announcements_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsw60/upc... Decisions as seemly small as updating the blocksize limit are enormously nuanced. It changes the entire game theory behind the mining, affects how people will be running validation nodes, and requires a strong understanding of how blocks propagate around the world, and what a nice 'average' block looks like vs. a block that was made maliciously. > better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed This is a very difficult thing to do, especially because Bitcoin is so new. Much of the important discussion that has happened resides only in mailing lists, blog posts, irc logs, github issues, and forum posts. But here is a good set of papers to get started: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/ http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/ A smaller, more focused list: http://bitcoin.ninja/ http://bitcoin.ninja/ It will also help if you read the full #bitcoin-wizards log, dating back to around 2013 I believe. There you will find lots of highly technical discussion with links to more discussion and research papers. It's probably got the highest signal to noise ratio of any public discussion.