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by lewi
3221 days ago
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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. |
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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.