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I thought I understood Bitcoin, until now – by Jurjen Bos – Mar, 2024

4 points by janandonly 3y ago

arrowsmith 3y ago
I'm sorry to be that guy, but this could be a textbook example of how _not_ to write a book review.: - Most of it barely mentions the book, consisting instead of irrelevant ramblings about the reviewer's personal life. - When it does mention the book's contents, it's mostly just disjointed technical snippets ("there is a tiny cryptographic detail of the working of the Diffie-Hellman protocol that is not exactly correct") that make no sense without context if you haven't read the book yourself. - The actual assessment of the book is super-vague and teaches us nothing (the book is "well researched" and the reviewer "learned a lot".) After reading this "review" I still barely even understand what this book is about or what makes it different from the million other new Bitcoin books that flood the Kindle store every time there's another bear market.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  *bull market, not bear market
tromp 3y ago
> Comments on the book > The restrictions on hash bits used by “hashcash” are just a variant of the “puzzles” that Ralph Merkle envisioned decades earlier; this is not noted in the book. Merkle's puzzles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles) aim to establish a shared key between 2 parties and involve breaking encryption with a short key by brute force. Hashcash involves finding inputs to a hash function, commiting to some message, whose output is below a target threshold, also by brute force. Similar in their brute force nature, but not a variant. > The current situation, where there are only a few giant mining pools that in a way act as mint, and a few trading sites that act as banks, is not mentioned. The pools have hundreds of individual independent contributors. > This has resulted in limiting privacy (because the network that exchanges transactions is small), and also in less democracy (because the mining network operators determine the code base). Miners have only limited influence over the code base. They cannot make any consensus changes. They can only enforce soft-forks that further restrict existing rules.

4 points by janandonly 3y ago

I'm sorry to be that guy, but this could be a textbook example of how _not_ to write a book review.: - Most of it barely mentions the book, consisting instead of irrelevant ramblings about the reviewer's personal life. - When it does mention the book's contents, it's mostly just disjointed technical snippets ("there is a tiny cryptographic detail of the working of the Diffie-Hellman protocol that is not exactly correct") that make no sense without context if you haven't read the book yourself. - The actual assessment of the book is super-vague and teaches us nothing (the book is "well researched" and the reviewer "learned a lot".) After reading this "review" I still barely even understand what this book is about or what makes it different from the million other new Bitcoin books that flood the Kindle store every time there's another bear market.

arrowsmith 3y ago
*bull market, not bear market

tromp 3y ago

> Comments on the book > The restrictions on hash bits used by “hashcash” are just a variant of the “puzzles” that Ralph Merkle envisioned decades earlier; this is not noted in the book. Merkle's puzzles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles) aim to establish a shared key between 2 parties and involve breaking encryption with a short key by brute force. Hashcash involves finding inputs to a hash function, commiting to some message, whose output is below a target threshold, also by brute force. Similar in their brute force nature, but not a variant. > The current situation, where there are only a few giant mining pools that in a way act as mint, and a few trading sites that act as banks, is not mentioned. The pools have hundreds of individual independent contributors. > This has resulted in limiting privacy (because the network that exchanges transactions is small), and also in less democracy (because the mining network operators determine the code base). Miners have only limited influence over the code base. They cannot make any consensus changes. They can only enforce soft-forks that further restrict existing rules.