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Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

Coming from academia, these sort of papers would not pass any sort of double-bind peer review process. Where's the actual science? Where are the experiments?

It seems to be just a document describing the protocol of Filecoin, which is fine. The problem is that all these "whitepapers" coming from these cryptocurrency communities seem to be promoted as scientific papers, but in reality do not stand a chance in any science/academic-related setting.

I'd wish they'd give more attention towards the science, if there's any. Otherwise, hey, sure it's just a PDF on some site - but don't call them "papers".

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Meh. This article doesn't claim to be a scientific paper, so I don't see any reason to complain. I understand that some people will be confused because it has similar formatting to a "scientific" paper. But what are we going to do about it? Regulate LaTeX templates?

On the other hand, this is massively better to what normal corporate types call a "whitepaper" (usually just a glossy brochure that tells you nothing new.)

> Where are the experiments?

The experiments are in the markets. :) I.e. "here's a new coin, will it make money?"

> Coming from academia, these sort of papers would not pass any sort of double-bind peer review process. Where's the actual science? Where are the experiments?

Also coming from academia, I'm surprised with the amount of crap that makes it through "peer review". And there's nothing wrong with concept papers as long as they don't purport to be more than that. Lastly, I don't think the review stage is ever truly double-blind. In a niche field, you almost always have some idea of who the paper's authors are.

I don't think this or any paper like it pretends to be academic or scientific.

don't call them papers

This is ridiculous and elitist. Papers outside of peer reviewed academia can and do exist. If anything, academics ought to qualify what they mean when they say "paper".

Also satoshi nakamotos original bitcoin whitepaper wouldn't pass as academic paper. However it still is veey useful at explaining the basic idea behind bitcoin. In this context whitepaper means a little bit different thing than in scientific context.

Actually there were experiments in the original Bitcoin paper. And it would've probably passed a workshop-related setting for academia.

More than the academic presentation though, I'm just baffled by the lack of science that these projects with huge followings have.

Please be honest. When the original Bitcoin or Ethereum whitepapers came out, wouldn't your original comment, of these wp not passing any science/academia setting, still ring true then?

Also, even if they don't pass an academia setting, what is your point? So many papers actually pass academia setting but does it do anything worthwhile? Filecoin is a project in existence for the past 3yrs working on top of IPFS, a popular file sharing protocol, and being built by a venture funded startup. Its founder has a vision of a decentralized future which makes intuitive sense.

Care to elaborate on the "intuitive sense" part?

Also coming from academia, experimentation is not necessary for publication - both reviews and observational studies exist and are published in peer reviewed journals quite often.

In engineering (although I worked in neuroscience, I worked with many academic engineers and read way too many of their papers), whitepapers and concept papers are also often published - there's nothing to indicate here that this was a reviewed journal article. It's just a formatted PDF.

The fact that this paper uses a very vanilla LaTeX format is almost taunting to academia. At least many other "whitepapers" (e.g. Gnosis) format theirs more like a corporate brochure.

It's a math paper so I would expect proofs, not experiments. But interesting conjectures are still valuable even if they haven't been proven yet.

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