Agree with most of what you say, but isn’t the blockchain the one invention where you can really say that it definitely wasn’t created at a centralized institution? Or are you saying that it’s likely that Satoshi was an academic, or got most of his ideas from the academy?
I assume you’re referring to the ‘vault’ thing WP mentions there as “Recently credited by Alan Sherman”? Then no, Chaum is irrelevant to Satoshi except inasmuch as his Digicash was a negative example to the cryptopunks about the vulnerability of trusted third parties & centralization to government interference & micromanagers (some of whom, like Szabo, worked for him). The vault thing didn’t inspire Satoshi because it inspired no one; if it had, it wouldn’t need any Alan Sherman to dig it up in 2018. You will not find it cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper, it was never mentioned in any of the early mailing list discussions or private emails, it is not in any of Szabo’s essays, it’s not in the Cyphernomicon, etc etc. Nor could anyone have easily gotten it as it wasn’t published and wasn’t available online then or apparently until quite recently (given that the IA has no mirrors of the copy on Chaum’s website—I’ve added a direct link in the WP article so hopefully availability will improve). In fact, this is the very first time I’ve so much as heard of it. If Satoshi ‘got most of his ideas from the academy’, it was definitely a different part of the academy… Chaum was irrelevant*.
Claiming Chaum’s vault directly inspired Satoshi is just the typical academic colonizing practice of post hoc ergo propter hoc in fabricating an intellectual pedigree for a working system (Schmidhuber being the most infamous practitioner of this particular niche); it is not true, as a matter of causality or history. (And to their credit, they admit that, like most unpublished theses which are promptly buried in the university library never to be read again, it went “largely unnoticed”, which is rather an understatement; looking at the citations of it in GS, they are all secret-sharing related, ignoring any proto-blockchain aspect, and skimming a few, I doubt any of the citers actually read it, which is pretty typical especially for hard-to-get theses.)
* Actually, I’d say Chaum’s ideas were a huge obstacle for Satoshi. My read of the e-cash literature is that he was a deeply negative influence in creating a mathematically-seductive dead end that academics could, and did, mine for decades, coming up with countless subtle variants. But no amount of moon math turns Chaumian blinded credentials into Bitcoin. Satoshi’s success could only have come from ignoring the entire literature springing from Chaum and coming up with a fundamentally different approach. Given the profoundly negative reaction to Bitcoin even among non-academics not sworn to Chaumian approaches, I am unable to imagine Bitcoin ever arising in American academia. That’s just a radically ahistorical reading which requires assuming that anything which can be remotely associated with academics must be solely causally due to them.
Huh, interesting. Indeed it seems post hoc-ed in this case, I should’ve looked at bitcoin’s history more closely before making a confident statement. Thanks!
Thanks. Sounds like he had a lot of the pieces beforehand, although I didn’t find strong evidence that Satoshi got them from him. Could be an independent re-invention.
Agree with most of what you say, but isn’t the blockchain the one invention where you can really say that it definitely wasn’t created at a centralized institution? Or are you saying that it’s likely that Satoshi was an academic, or got most of his ideas from the academy?
Yes, in a very strong sense of “most”. Check out David Chaum.
I assume you’re referring to the ‘vault’ thing WP mentions there as “Recently credited by Alan Sherman”? Then no, Chaum is irrelevant to Satoshi except inasmuch as his Digicash was a negative example to the cryptopunks about the vulnerability of trusted third parties & centralization to government interference & micromanagers (some of whom, like Szabo, worked for him). The vault thing didn’t inspire Satoshi because it inspired no one; if it had, it wouldn’t need any Alan Sherman to dig it up in 2018. You will not find it cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper, it was never mentioned in any of the early mailing list discussions or private emails, it is not in any of Szabo’s essays, it’s not in the Cyphernomicon, etc etc. Nor could anyone have easily gotten it as it wasn’t published and wasn’t available online then or apparently until quite recently (given that the IA has no mirrors of the copy on Chaum’s website—I’ve added a direct link in the WP article so hopefully availability will improve). In fact, this is the very first time I’ve so much as heard of it. If Satoshi ‘got most of his ideas from the academy’, it was definitely a different part of the academy… Chaum was irrelevant*.
Claiming Chaum’s vault directly inspired Satoshi is just the typical academic colonizing practice of post hoc ergo propter hoc in fabricating an intellectual pedigree for a working system (Schmidhuber being the most infamous practitioner of this particular niche); it is not true, as a matter of causality or history. (And to their credit, they admit that, like most unpublished theses which are promptly buried in the university library never to be read again, it went “largely unnoticed”, which is rather an understatement; looking at the citations of it in GS, they are all secret-sharing related, ignoring any proto-blockchain aspect, and skimming a few, I doubt any of the citers actually read it, which is pretty typical especially for hard-to-get theses.)
* Actually, I’d say Chaum’s ideas were a huge obstacle for Satoshi. My read of the e-cash literature is that he was a deeply negative influence in creating a mathematically-seductive dead end that academics could, and did, mine for decades, coming up with countless subtle variants. But no amount of moon math turns Chaumian blinded credentials into Bitcoin. Satoshi’s success could only have come from ignoring the entire literature springing from Chaum and coming up with a fundamentally different approach. Given the profoundly negative reaction to Bitcoin even among non-academics not sworn to Chaumian approaches, I am unable to imagine Bitcoin ever arising in American academia. That’s just a radically ahistorical reading which requires assuming that anything which can be remotely associated with academics must be solely causally due to them.
Huh, interesting. Indeed it seems post hoc-ed in this case, I should’ve looked at bitcoin’s history more closely before making a confident statement. Thanks!
Thanks. Sounds like he had a lot of the pieces beforehand, although I didn’t find strong evidence that Satoshi got them from him. Could be an independent re-invention.