10 ms·

I didn't read the whitepaper for years because I assumed I wouldn't understand it. When I finally (recently) did I was dumbstruck by its simplicity. This was

I didn't read the whitepaper for years because I assumed I wouldn't understand it. When I finally (recently) did I was dumbstruck by its simplicity. This was a big lesson for me: I should always at least try to understand these big ideas even if deep understanding will probably elude me.

ashleyn 9y ago
I think I see where you're coming from here. When I see something typeset with Latex/in the Computer Modern font...the quick assumption I make is that I'm not going to understand a single word of it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- knight17 9y ago
  That is my default assumption too, that I will not get what they are saying. OT: This paper is produced using a wordprocessor; my PDF reader says it is produced by OpenOffice.org 2.4. The word spacing and justification of paragraphs makes me think that this is not LaTeX, nevertheless it looks professional. Tex experts have also come to this conclusion [1]. But is it the original PDF or someone's version/copy of it? [1] : https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-in-satoshi-nakamotos-original-bitcoin-paper-compiled-in-latex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-...
  - computerfriend 9y ago
    It's the original. Satoshi used Computer Modern for the headers, which is kind of strange. I guess they wanted to give it the TeX vibe, but didn't want to use LaTeX for some reason. If anyone wants to collaborate on a TeX version, let me know!
- betterunix2 9y ago
  There are two sides to that issue. On the one hand, the point of publishing research is to make knowledge available to humanity, so if you are having trouble understanding even the basic premise of a research paper (what problem it is addressing, etc.) then the authors are failing to achieve that goal. On the other hand, if every published paper was written to be accessible for non-experts in the field, papers would become longer and longer over time as lines of research progressed. Unfortunately there is no reward for researchers taking the time to write tutorial and survey papers that give more readable explanations of particular lines of work.
  - leshow 9y ago
    Should there be? Seems pointless to target every paper for entry level understanding, paper length would grow exponentially and it would quickly become unreadable.
Frogolocalypse 9y ago
That is the beauty of it. It is only eight pages long, but fundamentally changes the concept of money. The only thing that people should recognize is that it doesn't really try to explain the game theory behind it. It is a technical paper. When it all sinks in, it becomes clear that it is pure genius, but that certainly took me a while to grasp.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- betterunix2 9y ago
  "That is the beauty of it. It is only eight pages long, but fundamentally changes the concept of money." Not really; it only serves to validate the beliefs of people who already agreed with the basic premise that money is something that can exist without central authority. That view was already common long before the Bitcoin paper. Plenty of libertarians believe that money is an emergent phenomenon of free markets, something which arises on its own as the market converges on a common currency as its medium of exchange. On the other hand, if you are aligned with the mainstream of economics, the entire premise of the paper is easily dismissed. In that view, money can never be separated from banks, the paper is basically nonsense.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    What it did, was it made it possible to create a decentralized store of value without the need of a central authority. And that has definitely made people question their understanding of what money even is.
    - betterunix2 9y ago
      Not really. Anyone who is confident in the mainstream view of money, which requires the existence of a bank or government of some kind, would quickly dismiss Bitcoin. If I cannot pay my taxes or mortgage with it, why should I accept it? (And of course, if I can pay my taxes and mortgage, how can anyone claim to have removed the central authority from money? Just like the gold standard, nothing would prevent a government from changing its mind about whether or not to accept Bitcoin for tax payments.) Like I said, if you already believe that money can exist without a central authority, Bitcoin simply serves as validation. Otherwise it does not really change anything, because if you accept mainstream views of money, then the premise of Bitcoin makes no sense at all. You think Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value? Tell that to all those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding, which is being resolved by paying for the lost BTC according to the price in Yen at the time Mtgox declared bankruptcy which is a tiny fraction of the current prices. When push comes to shove the "value" being stored is measured in fiat currency, with all its associated central authorities.
Alex3917 9y ago
> I should always at least try to understand these big ideas even if deep understanding will probably elude me. To be fair, even Satoshi apparently didn't understand the applications of blockchain beyond currency.
- gwern 9y ago
  Of course he did. Smart contracts had been floating around for a while. And that's why he included all those operators in the Bitcoin scripting language which then had to be disabled early on because their security & resource consumption were totally unpredictable.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  There's an argument that Satoshi is Nick Szabo, the person who invented the term 'smart contract'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract > The phrase "smart contracts" was coined by Nick Szabo in 1996, and reworked over several years. Szabo's first publication, "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Free Markets" was published in Extropy #16,[3] and then later reworked as "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks."[4]
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    I doubt it: he explicitly denied it in a blog post, and it's not clear how good he is at programming and system design (for all that he's obviously smart). More speculatively, I kind of doubt his personality as shown by his writing is that compatible with maintaining Nakamoto's personality as shown by theirs. Also, your prior shouldn't be too high: although Szabo is well-known from his writings now, they didn't come out of nowhere. He previously worked for Agorics, Inc., which was founded to develop these ideas: https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.htm... which I think of as more fundamental than Szabo's smart-contracts paper. (Admittedly I never finished slogging through that one.) If you think of smart contracts as emerging from nowhere then it probably seems more likely for Nick Szabo to be the lone genius behind it all.
mathgenius 9y ago
It's always good to read the masters.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zeven7 9y ago
Yeah, the whitepaper is very approachable. It's amazing how simple it is. Along similar lines (complex topics explained beautifully and simply by their creators), I recommend Relativity: The Special and General Theory[1] by the man himself. It's a great explanation of relativity without the need to have a strong math background. He explains it in the form of thought experiments, as only he could do. "What if you were in a cage in space with a rope tied to the top and it was being pulled upward by a giant at a constant acceleration (simulating gravity)? How would you perceive the world?" (Spoiler: This is gravity.) "What if you were on a spinning disk and had a ruler and tried to calculate pi?" "What if you were on a train moving really fast and two lightning bolts struck at the same time?" [1] https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Albert-Einstein/dp/1420946331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512784473&sr=8-1&keywords=the+special+and+general+theory https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Albert-Ein...
- mrschwabe 9y ago
  Difference is that Bitcoin actually works, Relativity on the other hand remains a theory.
  - pablobaz 9y ago
    A theory that makes verifiable predictions is one that "works". Relativity fulfills this criteria.
  - cdancette 9y ago
    Relativity is hugely useful for scientists and make predicted with extreme accuracy. So it's a theory, but one could say that it is much more useful than Bitcoin. Btw, Bitcoin also works based on mathematical theories. If someone were to prove P = NP, Bitcoin doesn't work any more, because I can now steal all your money. The current belief is P != NP, that's why people trust bitcoin, and crypto in general. But it's still a theory.
  - 0x264 9y ago
    Says the guy who probably uses the GPS (one of the most visible application of Relativity) on his phone every other day. Like we don't already have enough problem with trolls on other sites, we now have them on HN. Sigh
MycroftJones 9y ago
Kind of like LISP. When I read McCarthy's original papers, it had that same feeling of simplicity, and you could easily see how it mapped directly to the hardware. Original papers are often the best. Chuck Moores book on FORTH was finally released as a PDF, but he wrote it in the early 1970's. Amazing. I knew FORTH was linked to LISP, and the link is explained in there.
- DennisP 9y ago
  Do you mean Programming a Problem-Oriented Language? http://www.forth.org/POL.pdf http://www.forth.org/POL.pdf This is really great, I didn't know about this.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Yeah it was hilarious for me too. When I first started learning about Bitcoin, I automatically assumed that the whitepaper would be filled with all kinds of fluff like most other research papers, so I never read it. Instead I tried to learn from all the "Learn Bitcoin in 10 minutes", "Build your own Blockchain in 200 lines", and all that stuff, all of which are nothing more than a shallow scraping the surface type of pop-sci content. The problem with these Medium articles and "intro to Bitcoin" posts is that they're trying too hard to abstract out something that's already simple, that the abstraction itself is much more complex than what it actually is. Not to mention the fact that after reading all that stuff, all you come away with is some abstraction, not the actual Bitcoin. Anyway, so I thought why not just take a look at the whitepaper. And I was blown away. I've never seen a "research paper" with so little fluff. The whitepaper helped me understand Bitcoin much better than all the weird analogy intro blog posts that litter the web. I recommend anyone to just start from the whitepaper.

ashleyn 9y ago

I think I see where you're coming from here. When I see something typeset with Latex/in the Computer Modern font...the quick assumption I make is that I'm not going to understand a single word of it.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
knight17 9y ago
That is my default assumption too, that I will not get what they are saying. OT: This paper is produced using a wordprocessor; my PDF reader says it is produced by OpenOffice.org 2.4. The word spacing and justification of paragraphs makes me think that this is not LaTeX, nevertheless it looks professional. Tex experts have also come to this conclusion [1]. But is it the original PDF or someone's version/copy of it? [1] : https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-in-satoshi-nakamotos-original-bitcoin-paper-compiled-in-latex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-...
- computerfriend 9y ago
  It's the original. Satoshi used Computer Modern for the headers, which is kind of strange. I guess they wanted to give it the TeX vibe, but didn't want to use LaTeX for some reason. If anyone wants to collaborate on a TeX version, let me know!
betterunix2 9y ago
There are two sides to that issue. On the one hand, the point of publishing research is to make knowledge available to humanity, so if you are having trouble understanding even the basic premise of a research paper (what problem it is addressing, etc.) then the authors are failing to achieve that goal. On the other hand, if every published paper was written to be accessible for non-experts in the field, papers would become longer and longer over time as lines of research progressed. Unfortunately there is no reward for researchers taking the time to write tutorial and survey papers that give more readable explanations of particular lines of work.
- leshow 9y ago
  Should there be? Seems pointless to target every paper for entry level understanding, paper length would grow exponentially and it would quickly become unreadable.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago

That is the beauty of it. It is only eight pages long, but fundamentally changes the concept of money. The only thing that people should recognize is that it doesn't really try to explain the game theory behind it. It is a technical paper. When it all sinks in, it becomes clear that it is pure genius, but that certainly took me a while to grasp.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
betterunix2 9y ago
"That is the beauty of it. It is only eight pages long, but fundamentally changes the concept of money." Not really; it only serves to validate the beliefs of people who already agreed with the basic premise that money is something that can exist without central authority. That view was already common long before the Bitcoin paper. Plenty of libertarians believe that money is an emergent phenomenon of free markets, something which arises on its own as the market converges on a common currency as its medium of exchange. On the other hand, if you are aligned with the mainstream of economics, the entire premise of the paper is easily dismissed. In that view, money can never be separated from banks, the paper is basically nonsense.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  What it did, was it made it possible to create a decentralized store of value without the need of a central authority. And that has definitely made people question their understanding of what money even is.
  - betterunix2 9y ago
    Not really. Anyone who is confident in the mainstream view of money, which requires the existence of a bank or government of some kind, would quickly dismiss Bitcoin. If I cannot pay my taxes or mortgage with it, why should I accept it? (And of course, if I can pay my taxes and mortgage, how can anyone claim to have removed the central authority from money? Just like the gold standard, nothing would prevent a government from changing its mind about whether or not to accept Bitcoin for tax payments.) Like I said, if you already believe that money can exist without a central authority, Bitcoin simply serves as validation. Otherwise it does not really change anything, because if you accept mainstream views of money, then the premise of Bitcoin makes no sense at all. You think Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value? Tell that to all those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding, which is being resolved by paying for the lost BTC according to the price in Yen at the time Mtgox declared bankruptcy which is a tiny fraction of the current prices. When push comes to shove the "value" being stored is measured in fiat currency, with all its associated central authorities.

Alex3917 9y ago

> I should always at least try to understand these big ideas even if deep understanding will probably elude me. To be fair, even Satoshi apparently didn't understand the applications of blockchain beyond currency.

gwern 9y ago
Of course he did. Smart contracts had been floating around for a while. And that's why he included all those operators in the Bitcoin scripting language which then had to be disabled early on because their security & resource consumption were totally unpredictable.
Frogolocalypse 9y ago
There's an argument that Satoshi is Nick Szabo, the person who invented the term 'smart contract'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract > The phrase "smart contracts" was coined by Nick Szabo in 1996, and reworked over several years. Szabo's first publication, "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Free Markets" was published in Extropy #16,[3] and then later reworked as "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks."[4]
- abecedarius 9y ago
  I doubt it: he explicitly denied it in a blog post, and it's not clear how good he is at programming and system design (for all that he's obviously smart). More speculatively, I kind of doubt his personality as shown by his writing is that compatible with maintaining Nakamoto's personality as shown by theirs. Also, your prior shouldn't be too high: although Szabo is well-known from his writings now, they didn't come out of nowhere. He previously worked for Agorics, Inc., which was founded to develop these ideas: https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.htm... which I think of as more fundamental than Szabo's smart-contracts paper. (Admittedly I never finished slogging through that one.) If you think of smart contracts as emerging from nowhere then it probably seems more likely for Nick Szabo to be the lone genius behind it all.

mathgenius 9y ago

It's always good to read the masters.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zeven7 9y ago

Yeah, the whitepaper is very approachable. It's amazing how simple it is. Along similar lines (complex topics explained beautifully and simply by their creators), I recommend Relativity: The Special and General Theory[1] by the man himself. It's a great explanation of relativity without the need to have a strong math background. He explains it in the form of thought experiments, as only he could do. "What if you were in a cage in space with a rope tied to the top and it was being pulled upward by a giant at a constant acceleration (simulating gravity)? How would you perceive the world?" (Spoiler: This is gravity.) "What if you were on a spinning disk and had a ruler and tried to calculate pi?" "What if you were on a train moving really fast and two lightning bolts struck at the same time?" [1] https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Albert-Einstein/dp/1420946331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512784473&sr=8-1&keywords=the+special+and+general+theory https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Albert-Ein...

mrschwabe 9y ago
Difference is that Bitcoin actually works, Relativity on the other hand remains a theory.
- pablobaz 9y ago
  A theory that makes verifiable predictions is one that "works". Relativity fulfills this criteria.
- cdancette 9y ago
  Relativity is hugely useful for scientists and make predicted with extreme accuracy. So it's a theory, but one could say that it is much more useful than Bitcoin. Btw, Bitcoin also works based on mathematical theories. If someone were to prove P = NP, Bitcoin doesn't work any more, because I can now steal all your money. The current belief is P != NP, that's why people trust bitcoin, and crypto in general. But it's still a theory.
- 0x264 9y ago
  Says the guy who probably uses the GPS (one of the most visible application of Relativity) on his phone every other day. Like we don't already have enough problem with trolls on other sites, we now have them on HN. Sigh

MycroftJones 9y ago

Kind of like LISP. When I read McCarthy's original papers, it had that same feeling of simplicity, and you could easily see how it mapped directly to the hardware. Original papers are often the best. Chuck Moores book on FORTH was finally released as a PDF, but he wrote it in the early 1970's. Amazing. I knew FORTH was linked to LISP, and the link is explained in there.

DennisP 9y ago
Do you mean Programming a Problem-Oriented Language? http://www.forth.org/POL.pdf http://www.forth.org/POL.pdf This is really great, I didn't know about this.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

Yeah it was hilarious for me too. When I first started learning about Bitcoin, I automatically assumed that the whitepaper would be filled with all kinds of fluff like most other research papers, so I never read it. Instead I tried to learn from all the "Learn Bitcoin in 10 minutes", "Build your own Blockchain in 200 lines", and all that stuff, all of which are nothing more than a shallow scraping the surface type of pop-sci content. The problem with these Medium articles and "intro to Bitcoin" posts is that they're trying too hard to abstract out something that's already simple, that the abstraction itself is much more complex than what it actually is. Not to mention the fact that after reading all that stuff, all you come away with is some abstraction, not the actual Bitcoin. Anyway, so I thought why not just take a look at the whitepaper. And I was blown away. I've never seen a "research paper" with so little fluff. The whitepaper helped me understand Bitcoin much better than all the weird analogy intro blog posts that litter the web. I recommend anyone to just start from the whitepaper.