[Cryptography] Electronic currency revived after 20-year hiatus

[Jerry Leichter]

>> Not trying to make it seem magic. Just emphasizing that the approach is unique.
>> 
> There are many unique idea out there.
I should expand on this a bit.  There are results of great theoretical interest, in that they increase our understanding of how things work and lead to other results; and there are results of great practical interest in that they solve a real-world problem that people want solved.  There are even some results that are both.

The blockchain appears to be of great practical interest.  It does not appear to be of great theoretical interest.

The Byzantine Generals problem was of great theoretical interest.  There's a ton of research following up on variations of the original, and the Fischer/Lynch/
Patterson result, for example, has had a profound impact on our understanding of the limitations of asynchronous systems.  However, in and of itself, the Byzantine Generals problem had little practical interest (even though it was a formalization of a practical problem), mainly because it was deliberately set in the most general possible setting, which required expensive solutions.

In fact, the generality of the setting is often what distinguishes solutions of practical interest from those of theoretical interest.  The whole point of theoretical work is to get to some kind of fundamental understanding, and to do that you need to make your assumptions as inclusive as possible.  Typical solutions of practical interest then narrow the problem domain down by dismissing cases that aren't going to arise and finding efficient approaches.

There are plenty of useless (both to theory and to practice) theoretical results; in fact, the vast majority of published theory papers probably include just such results!  And there are plenty of useful but not very deep practical results.  But trying to argue that Bitcoin "solved this problem the theory people couldn't solve" is just silly.
                                                        -- Jerry


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