This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades.
Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoin was invented.
Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]
--
[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double-spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I've spent a lot of time reviewing the original Bitcoin codebase.
It's brilliant code. It's production-grade C++. There's nothing in it that hints at academic origins. Most people are either academics or professional coders -- to be both is a rare exception.
The codebase seemed to materialize out of nowhere. One of the earliest commits in the SVN repo contains 36 thousand lines of code. "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.
The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin integrates so many standard tactics so well in addition to its academic work.
> This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades.
Yes, the debts Satoshi owed to others were obvious right from the start. I made pretty much exactly the same argument as OP over 6 years ago in my then-widely-read essay "Bitcoin is Worse is Better" https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better - Bitcoin built on many established tools and concepts and its true contribution was putting them together in a way that was conceptually alien and disgusted people immediately on arrival. (Proof of Work still viscerally disgusts many people! _plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose_ eh? Anyone can invent something that everyone wants - everyone wants a cheaper or faster computer, for example - but it takes genius to invent something that everyone hates, thinks is useless, wasteful, evil, or all three simultaneously, and eventually wins grudging acknowledgement that it may actually be a good idea.)
It's nice that Arvind & Clark have gone into more detail about the predecessors, though, I suspect that most Bitcoiners these days have little idea about it (although I think they overstate a few of them - Satoshi didn't know about B-money until he was told by Back and so most accounts of Bitcoin's genesis overstate its influence).
If that counts as "not a new idea, but just a new combination of existing ideas" then it's hard for me to think of anything that does count as a "new idea."
Everything is built on top of previous work which I do not intend to diminish here. But, Satoshi is a total genius. The complexity and ingenuity of Bitcoin are just amazing.
The genius idea of bitcoin, afaik, is that Satoshi created a brilliant incentive scheme, which was the reason why the nodes decided to join the network. Without this factor it would have been impossible for bitcoin to grow this far.
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.
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.
It's more than just science.
I believe it changes the world more than anything in the last 30 years.
I have been thinking of what the world would be without internet / computers / mobile phones, but having a great liquid store of value. If I had to choose only 1 of these technologies for my life, I would pick Bitcoin.
Its amazing to me it took 15 years to go from hashcash to Bitcoin. I think it speaks to the strangeness of Bitcoin, and its niche idealogical underpinnings. Bitcoin solved a problem that most of the people never thought about. Yet if you're looking to solve Bitcoin's problem set, calibrated hashcash to secure a ledger seems completely obvious.
I also thought that Bitcoin's asic-vulnerability (and thus mining centralization) would be fatal. It turned out to be not fatal (yet), but thats not something which could be determined on paper. It needed real-world use before people knew if it could work or not.
One of the points of the article is that the field wasn't idle during those 15 years; bit gold, b-money, and Finney's RPOW made incremental improvements on hashcash that led to Bitcoin.
Also, Bitcoin is kind of a "dirty" solution to the consensus problem; if all the academics were looking for an elegant solution it's not surprising that they didn't discover it.
"asic-vulnerability" is actually an asset. If Bitcoin were mined with CPUs or GPUs, any large organization or government could just point their computing power at Bitcoin and disrupt it.
Bitcoin is truly something worth more than the sum of its parts. I don't feel that the creative combination and implementation of existing ideas diminishes the achievement one bit. (Not that the article made it out this way, just my 2 satoshis)
Anyone serious about crypotcurrencies will know at least know two ideas not being Satoshi originals - 1. Ecash, Digicash - author's refer to it in paragraph one as something people are aware of. 2. PoW/Hashcash - Sure people might not be aware of the anti-spam but they are aware of Hashcash and Adam Back.
That being the case, I think author's assumption that everyone in the bitcoin space thinks Satoshi as the one inventing everything and hence the article needs to prove otherwise is..well false at best.
i completely agree. there is nothing new to somebody a bit involved into bitcoin. there is even a website which is old and widely known (http://nakamotoinstitute.org) where all the referenced literature is listed...
/me waits for the citation for the prior fault tolerant 'consensus' with O(N) scaling; or for the consensus process that doesn't have approved membership but still achieves some useful security properties
This was a great read. I've been in a pretty heated debate with one of my friends (As BTC seems to do) about the origins of the technical under pinnings of Bitcoin. I'm relatively new to the cryptocurrency space, but it seems like there is huge political push (Cypherpunk ideology) promoted by a vocal slice of the BTC community. Every time I ask for the history and origins, my friend credits everything to the Cypherpunk community.
[+] [-] cs702|8 years ago|reply
Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoin was invented.
Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]
--
[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double-spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
It's brilliant code. It's production-grade C++. There's nothing in it that hints at academic origins. Most people are either academics or professional coders -- to be both is a rare exception.
The codebase seemed to materialize out of nowhere. One of the earliest commits in the SVN repo contains 36 thousand lines of code. "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.
The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin integrates so many standard tactics so well in addition to its academic work.
Here it is as one gigantic file: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242...
[+] [-] gwern|8 years ago|reply
Yes, the debts Satoshi owed to others were obvious right from the start. I made pretty much exactly the same argument as OP over 6 years ago in my then-widely-read essay "Bitcoin is Worse is Better" https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better - Bitcoin built on many established tools and concepts and its true contribution was putting them together in a way that was conceptually alien and disgusted people immediately on arrival. (Proof of Work still viscerally disgusts many people! _plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose_ eh? Anyone can invent something that everyone wants - everyone wants a cheaper or faster computer, for example - but it takes genius to invent something that everyone hates, thinks is useless, wasteful, evil, or all three simultaneously, and eventually wins grudging acknowledgement that it may actually be a good idea.)
It's nice that Arvind & Clark have gone into more detail about the predecessors, though, I suspect that most Bitcoiners these days have little idea about it (although I think they overstate a few of them - Satoshi didn't know about B-money until he was told by Back and so most accounts of Bitcoin's genesis overstate its influence).
[+] [-] baddox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullnilvoid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mayank|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clu3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decentralised|8 years ago|reply
What makes it special is that it was the first digital money that actually works.
[+] [-] kobeya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newforice|8 years ago|reply
The same can be said for any good or bad idea.
[+] [-] wslh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] just_one_time_|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] randomwalker|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] cs702|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gtrubetskoy|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf
[+] [-] toomim|8 years ago|reply
And it came from outside the academy.
[+] [-] xiphias|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aakilfernandes|8 years ago|reply
I also thought that Bitcoin's asic-vulnerability (and thus mining centralization) would be fatal. It turned out to be not fatal (yet), but thats not something which could be determined on paper. It needed real-world use before people knew if it could work or not.
[+] [-] wmf|8 years ago|reply
Also, Bitcoin is kind of a "dirty" solution to the consensus problem; if all the academics were looking for an elegant solution it's not surprising that they didn't discover it.
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hippocrates|8 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is truly something worth more than the sum of its parts. I don't feel that the creative combination and implementation of existing ideas diminishes the achievement one bit. (Not that the article made it out this way, just my 2 satoshis)
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
That being the case, I think author's assumption that everyone in the bitcoin space thinks Satoshi as the one inventing everything and hence the article needs to prove otherwise is..well false at best.
[+] [-] la_fayette|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|8 years ago|reply
https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better
[+] [-] vocatus_gate|8 years ago|reply