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Comment by randomwalker | Hacker News Reader

Coauthor here. Here's some context for how this essay came about.

When we released a draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook [1], one piece of feedback was that we focused on cryptocurrency technology as it is today, and ignored the juicy and tumultuous history of how the ideas developed over the last few decades. So I invited Jeremy Clark, who's connected to some of this history, to write a preface to the book. If you're interested in the history, you might enjoy that chapter. [2]

Jeremy and I then got together to develop the ideas further, resulting in the present article, where we also provide some commentary on the current blockchain hype and draw lessons for practitioners and academics.

[1] http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/

[2] https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p...

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Thank you for writing this, and for posting here.

We need more people like you to write about and help demistify Bitcoin, to counter the hype surrounding blockchain technology.

I hope you get an opportunity to write about this for a lay audience too, because mainstream media, with few exceptions, has done a poor job at covering the technology.

When you were researching the ledger part, I'm curious whether you've come across a DAG-based ledger. I've been reading the byteball [1] paper and still can't tell whether it's baloney or really the DAG is a consensus that does not require PoW... I suspect it's neither, there are trade offs, but I could not find much anything good on the subject to read.

[1] https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf

A great DAGchain paper is "SPECTRE - Serialization of Proof-of-work Events: Confirming Transactions via Recursive Elections". Its peer reviewed and contains rigorous security proofs.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf

Interesting read, quite a unique perspective.

One thing found interesting about the conclusion of OP's article is the role of academia vs practical implementation.

> Many academic communities informally argued that Bitcoin couldn't work, based on theoretical models or experiences with past systems, despite the fact that it was working in practice.

It will be interesting to see the Academically based SPECTRE competing with another DAG based coin such as Byteball. Well measured research and a peer-reviewed foundation against practical implementation, first to market and continuous improvement.

Academia and industry both have filtering problems, how to tell good ideas from bad ideas.

The industry solution tends to be to try things and see what works in practice. This is extremely expensive in time and only a small number of ideas can be tried. Furthermore the success or failure depends on the execution and marketing. If Bitcoin had not had the developer commitment in the early stage it would be dead and forgotten despite the great ideas.

The academic solution is that ideas should come with detailed arguments about why the solution works, what its flaws are and how it compares to other work. This allows ideas to be compared and judged more quickly at a lower expense. However constructing these arguments is hard, requires rare knowledge and is not always possible.

Academics dismissed Bitcoin because it did not have these arguments. They had no way to know if it would work when it was running with real money on the line. Distributed systems ideas are very hard to get right and Bitcoin had all sorts quirks that Satoshi didn't foresee, however PoW turns out to be a very robust mechanism.

Thank you, this is what I was looking for. It'll probably take the whole upcoming weekend for me to grok this, but the first thing that caught my eye was that SPECTRE still has PoW, while byteball somehow claims that is isn't necessary... OR may be I'm misreading something. Thanks again.

The most fundamental question in any DAG chain is how they address conflicting transactions in two different paths.

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