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Am I the only one who thought this was about BitCoins.

Because I think Bitcoin wont work in it's current form.



Honestly, if you haven't heard of BitC, you most likely haven't studied enough cpunk literature to have a meaningful opinion on bitcoin.


That doesn't follow at all. Programming language research and crypto research are different fields. There are likely lots of mathematicians who could provide opinions on bitcoin that have never heard of BitC.


BitC is often referenced from object-capability literature, which is one way of decomposing problems to mutually-trustable solutions. It's certainly possible to understand adversarial system design without having come across the ocap model, which is why I said 'most likely'.

Question: What is the fundamental problem that bitcoin solved in a novel way? If your answer is something from cryptography, you don't know its context.


I would say the fundamental problem is some sort of distributed knowledge proof system, and in my taxonomy of learning, that'd definitely be near the cryptology department.

To be honest, I think I'd been lumping bitc in too much with PL research, and hadn't considered that other people may have an interest.


I was just going to say that until Bitcoin are safe and easy to use for the average consumer it will never gain mainstream use.


I think the other way...




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