Ledger – the first peer-reviewed journal on blockchains and cryptocurrencies | Hacker News Reader

Ledger – the first peer-reviewed journal on blockchains and cryptocurrencies

ledger.pitt.edu

179 pointsaspenmayer56 comments

I didn’t see a single disclosure of any of the authors’ personal holdings of the discussed coins, though maybe I missed it. The tone and topics seem neutral and levelheaded, in fairness.

I think it is just as important as a disclosing who sponsored your research and being transparent about any potential conflicts of interest.

The listed Bitcoin wallet address of “Peter R. Rizun, Co-Managing Editor” (1BWZe6XkGLcf6DWC3TFXiEtZmcyAoNq5BW) has some pretty juicy trade volume. There’s no way to tell if that’s all there is to see, of course.

Framed another way, would it be expected for a shareholder of a company writing a paper about that company (or its direct competitors) to disclose their stake and relationships?

Being employed by a crypto project is reportable conflict of interest, but not simple holdings.

I privately asked one of the editor exactly that and was told that they don't consider it reportable CoI unless you own "a significant stake in the project." They are effectively applying the same standard to crypto that other journals apply to stockholding and companies. Here is the policy,

https://ledgerjournal.org/ojs/ledger/conflicts

So basically if you own 200k USD of bitcoin you don't have to report it because it's not a significant stake of all bitcoins. Similarly, someone who owns 200k USD of Google stock wouldn't (in most scientific journals that I have checked) have to report it when peer reviewing a paper from Google, because it's not a large stake of Google's business.

Now, whether that makes sense for crypto (as opposed to stocks in public companies) or stocks is another question. Personally I would prefer that scientists (and specifically peer reviewers) report all financial stakes in companies or projects that are worth more than some amount, but that's not common.

It's definately something to remember when reading ANY peer-reviewed journal article that directly relates to someone's business.

(Also it's fairly common to see an article in a big journal with no CoI statement because the author went on to start a company based on that publication AFTER it was reviewed. Did they plan to do this? Hard to say.

IMO, it's important to google authors of dubious articles because CoI statements are almost never updated, even if the conflict is clear in retrospect. And journals should be pushed to update CoI on previously published work.)

I was about to post their responsible disclosure policy, but your explication went much further. Kudos.

In fairness however, just yesterday there was an usenix paper about "slicer", a large scale sharding system developed at google.

Some of the authors were listed as google employees but it wasn't if any of them owned google shares. They probably do, but you can't really tell.

To me the difference is the @google.com email addresses at the top makes their intentions and motivations clear. It tells us that the authors were paid a salary by a known entity to do their research. Especially coming from Google, they get paid their plush SV salary either way if their project fails or becomes the next Gmail.

The financial incentives around cryptocurrencies are different. Eminem just bought a link to a picture of a bored ape for 123 ETH ($450k USD). I'd love to read a neutral and rational explanation for the social and technical merits of that in a peer reviewed paper. Who would write such a thing who wasn't either selling their own NFTs or holding a shitload of ETH?

Disclosure: I have a wallet with ~0.11 Ethereum that I mined myself a few years ago.

> (1BWZe6XkGLcf6DWC3TFXiEtZmcyAoNq5BW) has some pretty juicy trade volume. There’s no way to tell if that’s all there is to see, of course.

Can you clarify this for me? Isn't the listing of a wallet address a form of disclosure? Or would it be common to have holdings in other coins or something like that?

Any user can have any number of wallets on any number of blockchains. So they could have other Bitcoin wallets that they haven't disclosed, or they could have wallet(s) containing other coins like Ethereum. In general you can't tie a wallet to its owner's identity, or know all wallets owned by an individual.

It’s common to have lots of wallets, even for a single coin. It might be tedious to list everything, so it would be better to just to say “as of $(date) the authors in sum hold roughly 100,000,000 Dogecoin, <15 ETH, and participate in the following DAOs: …”

Is that unreasonable? I’m looking for transparency.

I think posting wallet addresses is a great way to do disclosure, but it could be limited. They might have funds in an exchange for all I know, right?

No that's not unreasonable. Thanks for clarifying.

What do you use to find the "juicy trade volume"? Could you share a link.

Any blockchain explorer will do.

maybe not amount they hold but definitely their holdings would be very reasonable to disclose.

Current issue (2021)

https://ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/issue/view/7

Seems to be published annually, so we’re due for another issue any day now!

> Ledger was launched in 2015 to address the growing need for a traditional academic journal dedicated to cryptocurrency research. Ledger aims to encourage greater involvement by academics in cryptocurrency and foster a culture of rigorous analysis and peer-review within the Bitcoin community. It also aims to spur the aggregation and filtering of important content generated across relevant communication channels. The journal strives to serve both the general public and the Bitcoin research community through the dissemination of high-quality and timely scholarly content. Ledger is published in an open-access format by the University of Pittsburgh.

Interview with co-founder Christopher Wilmer (2018)

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/qa-inside-story-ledger-academi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledger_(journal)

Everyone in the blockchain space self-publishes all relevant material hence a journal like this is completely pointless. It also slows down the rate of publishing by requiring ridiculously tedious formatting requirements all so a self-elected panel of experts can deem if a piece of content is worthwhile. Of course, to get through this process we end up with a 'paper' with no runnable code, and its considered a good academic result even if no users ever benefit from it. Waste of time, just a circle jerk for status.

Also didn't even mention the most important part: that major contributions to the blockchain space have notably come from outsiders. No thanks to these 'academic' 'experts.'

Blockchain stuff is also pretty famous for fraudsters writing technical gobbley-gook in order to hoodwink investors,so its not like the current system is without issue.

> Blockchain stuff is also pretty famous for fraudsters writing technical gobbley-gook in order to hoodwink investors

Caveat emptor [1] in particular holds for investors who invest huge sums of money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveat_emptor

I was sure that your footnote would be some link about the increasing danger of being say 90% of a liquidity pool, made me chuckle when I realized it was just defining the term

> Everyone in the blockchain space self-publishes all relevant material hence a journal like this is completely pointless.

Hopefully one can do both, as is standard practice for lots of institutions these days.

> It also slows down the rate of publishing by requiring ridiculously tedious formatting requirements all so a self-elected panel of experts can deem if a piece of content is worthwhile.

One can self-publish simultaneously and continuously post revised editions as review is received. This is pretty ubiquitous.

> Of course, to get through this process we end up with a 'paper' with no runnable code.

This is entirely voluntary. The most frequent offenders when it comes to not uploading code are companies who think they're giving up IP by publishing research code. Institutions (and companies, lately) frequently cite github.com url's in papers in the machine learning space. I see no reason why they couldn't with a journal submission.

Self publishing has value, and its value is not reduced by peer review publications. No one sets to lose anything from this, except maybe dishonest people.

Lol do you even know what the concept of peer review means? Not a big fan of what it’s current iteration is in academia but it has its place.

Peer reviews will just nitpick and point out that the tech solves none of the alleged problems and instead adds a whole nother layer of problems on top of them and is mostly used for pump and dump schemes and money laundering. Totally pointless.

We should just mint all the research papers as NFTs and use smart contracts to vet them.

Shouldn't those issues be addressed head-on for the field to flourish though? It seems to me that if peer reviewers in the field hold this perception, many more outside of the fields do as well. If a paper makes a claim that a technology solves a problem, and then fails to support that claim to a sufficient degree such that it cannot pass peer review, that sounds like way more than a nitpick.

Not sure if this comment is brilliant satire or serious.

Doesn't that in itself say more about the crypto tech space than I could ever have tried to spell out?

I don't know. I would find it to be useful if I am doing research based investing in Crypto.

I have skimmed through two papers- the intraday behavior one and the abnormal return one. I enjoyed some of the insights as a layperson. Those methodology can be applied to other coins that are not bitcoin or other investable assets. Also these papers have aggregated a pretty good collection of other papers in their citations. So all in all, I see value in this journal.

Historically it's been shown that academia can be a very successful incubator of nascent technologies, ones that often bloom into billion dollar industries. From the internet to robotics to medicine, it's been shown time and again that academia is effective in this regard. If you like blockchain technology, you should want academics focused on this work; they have access to millions of dollars in government grants just waiting to be applied to this area. Academics need legitimate venues to publish peer reviewed-research (because that's how they convince the government to give them millions of dollars in grants. You don't get grants by self-publishing).

I do agree that structuring this as a print journal is pointless and a relic if a past era.

This should be something implemented using something like science-octopus.org or osf.io

Of course the crypto space is allergic to accountability mechanisms.

From the abstract of an article in vol. 6 (most recent):

> We show that, contrary to the usual implications of network effects, they do not serve to concentrate the cryptocurrency market, nor do they accord any one cryptocurrency a definitive competitive advantage, nor are they consistent enough to be reliable valuation tools. Therefore, while network effects do occur in cryptocurrency networks, they are not (yet) a defining feature of the cryptocurrency market as a whole.

In the paper:

> we acknowledge that addresses with non-zero balance still do not reflect a one-to-one mapping between addresses and actual users. Not only can a single user have multiple addresses, but also a single address can represent multiple users

So, I can understand their arguments and their research, but it feels fundamentally flawed, because it's impossible to quantify the number of users of a blockchain. Am I wrong here?

4 of the 7 articles in vol. 6 are particularly about price activity, not underlying technology. I wonder why. I hope to see more peer-reviewed articles covering protocol-level advances, or perhaps more socioeconomic topics. Maybe that's too fuzzy for Ledger's editors?

> > We show that, contrary to the usual implications of network effects, they do not serve to concentrate the cryptocurrency market, nor do they accord any one cryptocurrency a definitive competitive advantage, nor are they consistent enough to be reliable valuation tools. Therefore, while network effects do occur in cryptocurrency networks, they are not (yet) a defining feature of the cryptocurrency market as a whole.

Interesting. If there are ways to quickly/cheaply "bridge" between blockchains, presumably the entire space will benefit as one from increasing network effects.

Haven't taken the time to read that quote in context.

It seems like they're making statements based on the possible nature of the network, not on the current specific distribution of users, no?

I hope their method of peer review allows anyone to be a reviewer and then the article gets published as long as >50% of the reviewers agree it is valid.

That wouldn't be in the spirit of all things blockchain.

What would stop a sybil-style attack of one bad actor reviewing a given article thousands of times?

> What would stop a sybil-style attack of one bad actor reviewing a given article thousands of times?

We could make it an energy consumption competition? Consume the energy output of a small town for a year and the authors can trust that adding that comma into the opening sentence is the correct editorial decision to make

Seriously cannot tell if you are joking or not. That in itself is scary.

Seems authors suggest three reviewers. from the website:

[...] suggests three potential reviewers. Reviewers should be:

    Experts in the subject matter,
    Disinterested (i.e. not collaborators or personal friends).
    You do not need to know the reviewers beforehand, and a good starting point for finding reviewers are the authors of the related work you cite in your paper.

Peer review is a waste of time, it becomes gatekeepers. Even Einstein got in a huge argument with a journal that went over his head because of this kind of gatekeeping. The best ideas can't be bought with money or PhDs. Bitcoin itself is a great example of this. But so is: geocentricism, relativity, quantum multiverse, etc etc.

I smell of big conflict of interests.

Peer review seems counter to the ethos of blockchain/crypto... no gatekeepers no longer.

Hmm... isn't consensus the inherent ethos of blockchain?

Yeah, but the consensus shouldn’t be held by experts, it should be held by whoever is willing to spend the most money on eth gas fees.

Not sure you meant in jest (if so, ignore me) or just displaying your misunderstanding on how "Consensus" works in computer science and more specifically in blockchains. Here is a starting point if so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)

The short answer is that Ethereum gas fees have nothing to do with consensus in the blockchain Ethereum maintains.

It was satire and take your point on gas fees (I thought eth gas fees sounded funnier than ownership of hash compute share), but the general point is that consensus in blockchains is really controlled by the richest participants (i.e. who can own and run the largest mining rigs and have the highest hash rate) rather than consensus being equal across all participants or held by experts.

The power of your consensus 'vote' is proportional to how rich you are (i.e. how much mine power you have), rather than one-person-one-vote.

> consensus in blockchains is really controlled by the richest participants

I think that remains to be seen. Bitcoin miners have tried to show their "control" over the network by forking the chain (see Bitcoin Cash and other forks) while Bitcoin mainline remained the leader. Ethereum is moving towards PoS even though current miners obviously don't want that. If successful, I think Ethereum will prove the opposite, the network is indeed controlled by it's participants and experts/developers, and not by the miners.

Moving to PoS is still control according to the richest participants - it's just changing the metric from how you measure wealth from 'hash power' to 'amount of eth owned'.

By some measure of “control” I guess. The BCash example is still valid for proof of stake, no matter how rich the miners are users still need to assign the forked chain value.

One person one vote got us the current mess of bad choices in federal Senate elections. The choices suck and are effectively controlled by insider power brokers and lobbyists.

Between direct election of Senate and creation of third central bank, 1913 was a really bad year. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing...

Doesn't seem to stop everyone from converging on centralized platforms like OpenSea (e.g. to prevent auctions of "stolen" NFTs).

Truly, someone producing a proof and that proof being verified by others before acceptance is anthemic to the idea of cryptocurrency.

Peer reviewed, as in... proof of stake?

No, you seem to be mixing things. To clear things up:

Proof of Stake:

> class of consensus mechanisms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)

Peer review:

> evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peer

Peer Review doesn't require people to have any stake in the outcome they propose, while in PoS they (obviously) do, as the protocol is based around the idea of stakes (surprise!).

Apologies, I was being sarcastic and I forgot the `/s`.

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