I made the short bibliography of the original bitcoin paper because of Merkle trees. Damn, I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.
A pure mathematician far from CS, I nevertheless wondered about digital timestamps, and convinced myself they were impossible. Then I went to a talk by Stuart Haber, supported by a paper with funny quotes starting each section. He explained the purpose of an observer to make timestamps work, but they were using a linear linked list.
As a coauthor of the original Macaulay computer algebra system, with some low-level coding chops, it was obvious to me a tree would help here. And there had just been a NYTimes story about how the nascent internet was accelerating research in CS, people would be on vacation for a week and miss entire start-to-finish events.
I stayed up to dawn writing a polite parody of their paper, introducing the use of a tree, emailed it to everyone I recalled had been at the talk, and went to sleep. That's all I ever contributed; I ended up on the joint paper even though my contribution turned out to be a "Merkle tree".
ilya_m•7mo ago
> I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.
These are not mutually exclusive statements. Actually, this is how Ponzi schemes work ; -)
(Somehow I never connected Bayer et al. and Bayer & Diaconis. Wow!)
robertlagrant•7mo ago
It's not a Ponzi scheme, because those have a specific definition. But it does sort of look like one. And all of the "meme" coins seem to be actual, if incredibly short-lived Ponzi schemes.
Pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, MLMs, NFTs, Crypto, Memecoins... they're all greater fool scams. All based around playing "hot potato" with investments, where early adopters push the potato on later & greater fools.
Memecoins are the most fascinating type of it because with other schemes, there's usually some veneer of legitimacy (i.e. you gotta actually try to scam somebody). I imagine at this point everybody involved with memecoins understands they're scam, and they're essentially just gambling instead of getting scammed. Although, effectively, gambling is its own type of scam.
lawlessone•7mo ago
I think you add some stocks there too. Particularly meme stocks.
Many people "investing" in crypto don't understand that stocks/shares give you have extra value because they pay dividends and give you voting rights for the direction a company takes.
robertlagrant•6mo ago
Yes, exactly.
taneq•7mo ago
Well then it isn’t not one either. :P
dummydummy1234•6mo ago
Yeah, I thought bitcoin could never really be used as a currency because it is inherently deflationary, and therefore the price would only go up...
I was not wrong...
antithesizer•7mo ago
You were basically right about Bitcoin, but tragically mistaken about the wisdom of getting in on the ground floor of the biggest Ponzi(-ish) scheme in history.
HelloNurse•7mo ago
Is there any similar algorithm that trades degraded performance for a guaranteed maximum node size? Using fixed size buffers can be more important than average-case performance.
Syzygies•7mo ago
I made the short bibliography of the original bitcoin paper because of Merkle trees. Damn, I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.
A pure mathematician far from CS, I nevertheless wondered about digital timestamps, and convinced myself they were impossible. Then I went to a talk by Stuart Haber, supported by a paper with funny quotes starting each section. He explained the purpose of an observer to make timestamps work, but they were using a linear linked list.
As a coauthor of the original Macaulay computer algebra system, with some low-level coding chops, it was obvious to me a tree would help here. And there had just been a NYTimes story about how the nascent internet was accelerating research in CS, people would be on vacation for a week and miss entire start-to-finish events.
I stayed up to dawn writing a polite parody of their paper, introducing the use of a tree, emailed it to everyone I recalled had been at the talk, and went to sleep. That's all I ever contributed; I ended up on the joint paper even though my contribution turned out to be a "Merkle tree".
ilya_m•7mo ago
These are not mutually exclusive statements. Actually, this is how Ponzi schemes work ; -)
(Somehow I never connected Bayer et al. and Bayer & Diaconis. Wow!)
robertlagrant•7mo ago
archievillain•7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
Pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, MLMs, NFTs, Crypto, Memecoins... they're all greater fool scams. All based around playing "hot potato" with investments, where early adopters push the potato on later & greater fools.
Memecoins are the most fascinating type of it because with other schemes, there's usually some veneer of legitimacy (i.e. you gotta actually try to scam somebody). I imagine at this point everybody involved with memecoins understands they're scam, and they're essentially just gambling instead of getting scammed. Although, effectively, gambling is its own type of scam.
lawlessone•7mo ago
Many people "investing" in crypto don't understand that stocks/shares give you have extra value because they pay dividends and give you voting rights for the direction a company takes.
robertlagrant•6mo ago
taneq•7mo ago
dummydummy1234•6mo ago
I was not wrong...
antithesizer•7mo ago