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"It made no claims which have been demonstrated to be false" That is because no falsifiable claims were made. (Edit: Strictly speaking, this is not true. Fa

"It made no claims which have been demonstrated to be false" That is because no falsifiable claims were made. (Edit: Strictly speaking, this is not true. Falsifiable claims were made; this, for example: An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent. This claim has already been falsified: an attacker who can control the block chain can also selectively deny transaction verifications and prevent miners from receiving the mining reward.) "you're the one inventing criteria for it that it doesn't meet" No, I am just stating the criteria that determine how well-researched a paper is. If a paper does not cite the relevant previous work, it is poorly researched -- that is the standard that every other paper is held to. If a cryptography paper does not have a well-formed or clearly articulated security definition, it is poorly researched -- that is the standard other cryptography papers are held to. If a security paper breaks from widely accepted notions of security but never bothers to justify that, it is poorly researched. These are not unheard-of criteria, these are standard fare. "The white paper is also remarkably readable" What is your point? Readability is orthogonal to how well-researched a paper is.

nullc 13y ago
> If a paper does not cite the relevant previous work, This is elevating form above substance. Ron & Shamir's work has the proper form, the proper names, and yet the material it contains is rubbish. It cites "relevant previous work", so long as you think that none of the work in industry is relevant. The gold standard should not be if a work follows a set of practices, advisable as they may be, it should be if a work advances the understanding of mankind. One of these papers did, the other does not.
- jeremyjh 13y ago
  Reference to previous work is not some perfunctory requirement to satisfy for academic due process. It is critical for the advancement of knowledge. Also, its pretty much entirely the definition of "well-researched". Work that is done completely independent of the established base of knowledge in a field can be valuable but someone has to do the work of integrating it and contrasting it with what was already known or else how can you weed out the cranks without many people spending many hours working through their enormous stacks of drivel? G. H. Hardy said that his most important contribution to the study of mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan. One could easily make the mistake of thinking this contribution could have been easily replicated by someone else, but its entirely likely that never would have happened at all because Ramanujan was not aware of much of the contemporary work that he blitzed past.

nullc 13y ago

> If a paper does not cite the relevant previous work, This is elevating form above substance. Ron & Shamir's work has the proper form, the proper names, and yet the material it contains is rubbish. It cites "relevant previous work", so long as you think that none of the work in industry is relevant. The gold standard should not be if a work follows a set of practices, advisable as they may be, it should be if a work advances the understanding of mankind. One of these papers did, the other does not.

jeremyjh 13y ago
Reference to previous work is not some perfunctory requirement to satisfy for academic due process. It is critical for the advancement of knowledge. Also, its pretty much entirely the definition of "well-researched". Work that is done completely independent of the established base of knowledge in a field can be valuable but someone has to do the work of integrating it and contrasting it with what was already known or else how can you weed out the cranks without many people spending many hours working through their enormous stacks of drivel? G. H. Hardy said that his most important contribution to the study of mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan. One could easily make the mistake of thinking this contribution could have been easily replicated by someone else, but its entirely likely that never would have happened at all because Ramanujan was not aware of much of the contemporary work that he blitzed past.