3 ms·

What novel crypto is there in Bitcoin?

• chm 14y ago
  This thread is full of claims like this... without evidence to back them up. "I know who wrote the protocol, but I can't tell you. Do your homework." "The protocol is years ahead of everything else, but I can't talk about it."
  • rdl 14y ago
    "Novel" or "difficult to implement" doesn't actually mean better or years ahead. Researchers tweak things to be novel when standard tools will work just for the purposes of experimenting sometimes. I've been arguing that 1981-tech is superior to Bitcoin, even though Bitcoin is novel.
• rdl 14y ago
  The distributed proof of work and ledger system at the core of bitcoin is fundamentally more novel than, say, a new block cipher mode of operation, and less novel than e.g. the concept of asymmetric cryptography. It would certainly be worthy of a PhD or two in theory alone. The practical deployment could get an econ PhD too I think.
  • javert 14y ago
    The distributed proof of work / ledger system is an extremely cool insight, but that's what it is - an insight. Typically, a computer science PhD involves doing a lot of actual _work_ proving things and so on, which hasn't happened here. This isn't to put it down, at all. It's just to say that the two things are kind of orthogonal. No PhD-granting econ department would grant a PhD for this. They'll just keep laughing and nay-saying until bitcoin goes out of fashion, or proves them completely obsolete and out of touch with reality. At which point they'll just keep going on, just as the philosophy departments have despite their proven irrelevance.