3 ms·

I love reading papers that solve fundamental, well-known problems. They frequently seem so obvious after-the-fact, like "how did we miss this?" Like, here, sta

I love reading papers that solve fundamental, well-known problems. They frequently seem so obvious after-the-fact, like "how did we miss this?" Like, here, stated in just a few pages, is an idea that so many smart people have been chasing after for years. And it's presented so well that it seems intuitive, when in reality it was a very difficult challenge.

garmaine 9y ago
> "how did we miss this?" If anyone is wondering, the answer is that the academics had blinders on in their search for a cryptographic solution to the problem of decentralized transaction ordering, an impossible thing. Satoshi's solution is to accept that impossibility and use economic incentives to achieve eventual consensus instead, and it turns out eventual consensus is good enough.
- nhaehnle 9y ago
  I doubt that that's the one true answer. If I had been researching the topic at the time, I would have accepted eventual consensus. As somebody who has done research into algorithms, the reason why I would have disregarded Bitcoin's approach is that it's inherently terribly inefficient.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    Many cryptographic protocols are much less efficient. I asserted that only as someone who was in that space an personally knows the people who were doing research on this in the 90’s and 00’s. Nearly all effort was focused on finding a solution that had finality of settlement guarantees. There was also some work on hashcash money, but it made the economically naive and inaccurate assumption that value of the currency must be linked to the cost of production, which is also explicitly not the case in bitcoin.
- eternalban 9y ago
  > it turns out Reality check: nothing conclusive has been proven yet. IFF we get to the VISA network level of activity, then it has "turned out" to be "good enough".

3 ms·

I love reading papers that solve fundamental, well-known problems. They frequently seem so obvious after-the-fact, like "how did we miss this?" Like, here, sta

by 2bitencryption 9y ago

garmaine 9y ago
> "how did we miss this?" If anyone is wondering, the answer is that the academics had blinders on in their search for a cryptographic solution to the problem of decentralized transaction ordering, an impossible thing. Satoshi's solution is to accept that impossibility and use economic incentives to achieve eventual consensus instead, and it turns out eventual consensus is good enough.
- nhaehnle 9y ago
  I doubt that that's the one true answer. If I had been researching the topic at the time, I would have accepted eventual consensus. As somebody who has done research into algorithms, the reason why I would have disregarded Bitcoin's approach is that it's inherently terribly inefficient.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    Many cryptographic protocols are much less efficient. I asserted that only as someone who was in that space an personally knows the people who were doing research on this in the 90’s and 00’s. Nearly all effort was focused on finding a solution that had finality of settlement guarantees. There was also some work on hashcash money, but it made the economically naive and inaccurate assumption that value of the currency must be linked to the cost of production, which is also explicitly not the case in bitcoin.
- eternalban 9y ago
  > it turns out Reality check: nothing conclusive has been proven yet. IFF we get to the VISA network level of activity, then it has "turned out" to be "good enough".