| Alternatively, the people who wax lyrical for 60 or so pages don't understand much either, and are compelled to pad out their document. I remember seeing this a while ago, but I didn't pay much attention to it then, because punishing those who understand the problems with a lengthy verbose soliloquy isn't a good strategy for disseminating information. :-) The other problem is that something 60 pages long without any references or citations beyond an occasional casual link to wikipedia, smacks of reinventing the wheel. This would be why he can go for 60 pages without mentioning known terms like "Cybil Attack", or "Onion Routing". This white paper smells more of bikeshedding - there was no code and right at the bottom of the document, you can see the caveat & apology "This white paper is in no way a complete protocol specification, far from it actually. Its main goal is rather to provide suggestions for solutions for several typical problems [...] which could hopefully work as some kind of reference point for any discussions that may be inspired by it." I think my favourite part of the paper is where he handwaves PKI & Voting atop of a DHT to 'solve' lots of problems, without realising those are the genuinely hard problems people are still working on. A close runner-up is in the slides he talks about "no central point of failure" and then explains his "Manual Override Command Support", which is a central point of abuse. It is nice to see that someone is finally writing code for it, and I wish them luck working out all of the details left out in the paper, especially the organisation and management of addresses. |