Reflections on Trusting ‘Trustlessness’ in the Era of “Crypto”/Blockchains [pdf]

cs.umd.edu

35 points·zdw··7 comments

Good writing, novel and original points made.

Terrible writing! The author uses too many parenthetical phrases. And he adds nothing substantial merely standing on other people's work. And for goodness sakes, latex has ways of providing links sensibly. Please use it!

what’s the problem with the links? They’re clickable in the document and still state the URL if it’s printed to paper.

anyway to your other point: synthesizing concepts from many writers to join them into one new framework is an age-old style of writing. There’s nothing particularly strange about it; it’s putting the author’s viewpoint in context with other prior writing that the audience is either familiar with or may be interested in reading to see those viewpoints further explored.

@scrubs: i hear and feel u. Four points. 1. I agree about the aesthetics of the URLs -- grotesque! The URLs were provided in explicit form for reasons of transparency (aka trust/lessness) -- sometimes aesthetics is orthogonal to being transparent. 2. I suppose your background isn't TCS otherwise, we wouldn't have the debate about parenthetical expressions. 3. If you read the piece closely, you might realize some extensions of Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture (which in itself should be a must read!). 4. Thanks for taking the time to vocalize your sentiment.

@zemo: Wow! I'm impressed; that's a strong synopsis. Happy that at least some people understood some of the value.

@sb: thanks for the kind, almost hyperbolic gesture.

Do not trust anything outside the security boundary.

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