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I'm not so sure the bitcoin required a cryptography genius. I would say it has more to do with the elegant way of dealing with the Byzantine Generals problem,

by j1vms 10y ago

I'm not so sure the bitcoin required a cryptography genius. I would say it has more to do with the elegant way of dealing with the Byzantine Generals problem, applied to evolving a distributed ledger from purely untrusted parties. I would argue it represents a key development in the history of computing & networks, and possibly a new subdomain of Computer Science, with its main influences and precursors dating back no earlier than the mid-90s (very new in the CS research sense). Open to other people's thoughts.

gnaritas 10y ago
> I'm not so sure the bitcoin required a cryptography genius. > I would argue it represents a key development in the history of computing & networks, and possibly a new subdomain of Computer Science Those two statements are in conflict. Anyone who's changed the history of computing and created a new subdomain of computer science by doing something no other modern cryptographer thought to do is a fucking genius.
- j1vms 10y ago
  But is it a development in the crypto field, requiring someone super talented in crypto? From my understanding (though no deeper than what's in the Bitcoin whitepaper), the central new idea (and it is indeed a significant contribution to CS in general) is laying out of how to build a distributed timestamp server, and then distributed ledger from only untrusted peers by using existing technologies circa 2009 such as p2p, hashing data blocks, priv/public key for verify/sign, etc.
  - gnaritas 10y ago
    OK, fair point; he is a genius for sure but not a genius cryptographer.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Like the other commenter said, we've been doing stuff like this for a long time. Satoshi combined some existing ideas with an uncommon area of application, currency instead of mere transactions, to create Bitcoin. It's clever and a lot of activity happened but its components aren't original and similar things were promoted before. For instance, people in auditing and anti-subversion fields promoted schemes that allowed multiple, untrusted parties to accept a result by one party doing something whose logs were checked by others, partly (esp randomly) or totally. The scheme required nothing but a database or filesystem on inexpensive hardware for most of it. Only crypto was hash of some set of transactions or big file with a signature on it. Soooo efficient. Also builds on stuff we have decades of work on securing with full, battle-tested stacks for internal components. And then there was Bitcoin with its long transaction times and insane work in mining. And use of begging to avoid a key risk at one point. That's innovative as it's the first time I've seen it in decentralized security.
  - gnaritas 10y ago
    > Satoshi combined some existing ideas with an uncommon area of application, currency instead of mere transactions, to create Bitcoin. It's clever and a lot of activity happened but its components aren't original and similar things were promoted before. That's pretty much how genius works much of the time, seeing possibilities that exist with existing stuff that haven't been done yet.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      I agree. It's what I did in high-assurance security. Almost everything I built was composed of premade parts and ideas. Usually in a way that was straight-forward with some really clever. Really just recycling ideas, though, into hopefully better ones. Doesn't make me feel dumber when I realize how few programmers or systems people are re-using or recombining the best stuff from CompSci or past commercial activities. Versus how many ignore it to repeat same crap and failures. :)

by j1vms 10y ago

gnaritas 10y ago

> I'm not so sure the bitcoin required a cryptography genius. > I would argue it represents a key development in the history of computing & networks, and possibly a new subdomain of Computer Science Those two statements are in conflict. Anyone who's changed the history of computing and created a new subdomain of computer science by doing something no other modern cryptographer thought to do is a fucking genius.

j1vms 10y ago
But is it a development in the crypto field, requiring someone super talented in crypto? From my understanding (though no deeper than what's in the Bitcoin whitepaper), the central new idea (and it is indeed a significant contribution to CS in general) is laying out of how to build a distributed timestamp server, and then distributed ledger from only untrusted peers by using existing technologies circa 2009 such as p2p, hashing data blocks, priv/public key for verify/sign, etc.
- gnaritas 10y ago
  OK, fair point; he is a genius for sure but not a genius cryptographer.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Like the other commenter said, we've been doing stuff like this for a long time. Satoshi combined some existing ideas with an uncommon area of application, currency instead of mere transactions, to create Bitcoin. It's clever and a lot of activity happened but its components aren't original and similar things were promoted before. For instance, people in auditing and anti-subversion fields promoted schemes that allowed multiple, untrusted parties to accept a result by one party doing something whose logs were checked by others, partly (esp randomly) or totally. The scheme required nothing but a database or filesystem on inexpensive hardware for most of it. Only crypto was hash of some set of transactions or big file with a signature on it. Soooo efficient. Also builds on stuff we have decades of work on securing with full, battle-tested stacks for internal components. And then there was Bitcoin with its long transaction times and insane work in mining. And use of begging to avoid a key risk at one point. That's innovative as it's the first time I've seen it in decentralized security.
- gnaritas 10y ago
  > Satoshi combined some existing ideas with an uncommon area of application, currency instead of mere transactions, to create Bitcoin. It's clever and a lot of activity happened but its components aren't original and similar things were promoted before. That's pretty much how genius works much of the time, seeing possibilities that exist with existing stuff that haven't been done yet.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I agree. It's what I did in high-assurance security. Almost everything I built was composed of premade parts and ideas. Usually in a way that was straight-forward with some really clever. Really just recycling ideas, though, into hopefully better ones. Doesn't make me feel dumber when I realize how few programmers or systems people are re-using or recombining the best stuff from CompSci or past commercial activities. Versus how many ignore it to repeat same crap and failures. :)