Bitcoin Forum

in what field precisely? computer science? applied mathematics? economics? social science?

No one will choose it as their Ph.D project, the project is so massive in scale that it will take 10 years for a relatively talented postgraduate to lay down all the foundations. The field should definitely be cryptography, that's where all the works before his(b-money, bit gold, etc) were done.

Nope. A Masters or PhD thesis with less than 50 pages is too little.
This could be published as an article on a journal of Cryptography, though.
Or maybe a journal of Computing or Applied Maths.

only a Nobel Prize would be worthy

Closed minds might end up rejecting it, without giving it a good try.

Sadly that is true. A Ph.D thesis should have a minimum of 200-300 pages. That said, I don't think that it will be that hard to add some of the finer details to the original BTC paper and "elongate" it a bit.

Has anyone tried printing out the original bitcoin source code yet? :P

That would be an interesting piece of art if done correctly!

It's not too big for an academic project, as in a project driven by a group of students, professors and researchers. It would be a particularly remarkable one.

By the end of the project some of the students involved could have obtained a PhD degree for the work they have done.

Just not the one single paper he published in the beginning. That said, John Nash's 28-page thesis on equilibriums of games was already enough for his PhD degree...

A masters by the way is dead easy. Even at the highest standards you just have to do grunt work for the professor, some semi-original research over a few  semesters, and pass all courses.

If you need length, you can always attach the blockchain in printed form for proof of concept and proof of work.

This is why I hate academia. It's based on rubbish like how many references your paper gets, or how big your vocabulary is. Not so much the actual idea you're writing about. Sometimes I read an entire page which could be summarised in one sentence without losing any content at all.

Source: I work with academics/researchers and see this every single day.

Probably computer science. The Satoshi-paper mostly describes the setup of the Bitcoin network and doesn't really analyze the economic or social implications.

The worked out concept of Bitcoin should be more than enough to earn a PhD, but typically a thesis is based on the contents of 3-4 papers (varies by country and field). A PhD degree for a single paper is exceptionally rare. There's plenty more to write about Bitcoin than what is in the Satoshi paper though.

there is at least 1 PhD with 32 pages:

https://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf

IMO (having last read it a few months ago) the paper is not that great of an academic paper.  I felt it left quite a few ideas undeveloped and glossed-over.  We know Satoshi had answers to the things he left unfinished in the paper based on his source code, and the community has filled in gaps over the years, but the paper, while briefly introducing some revolutionary ideas, is fairly basic.

Even from a computer science perspective, it is not a rigorous specification of the protocol, tx construction, script language, etc.  The source code has served that purpose.

I get the impression he wrote the paper to give people something to chew on, while writing the code which he considered more interesting or important ("I'm better with code than with words" (http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014853.html)).  If you were "there", feel free to correct any of this. :)

From his early email messages he clearly says somewhere, that he wasn't sure whether or not he could fix all the problems code wise. When finished working out all the major problems in the code, he wrote the white paper convinced it was possible. So in my opinion, his original code is what was most revolutionary.

I've seen a 1 page PhD thesis before. It was just a single but mind-blowing equation.

My own PhD thesis was only about 60 pages long.  In mathematics and computer science it's the content that counts, not the length (unless you have a terrible supervisor or examiner).

I believe that the content of the whitepaper is easily worthy of a PhD.  However, it's not a thesis, it's a whitepaper.  For a PhD thesis I expect Satoshi would be required to expand on most of the points made.  Accompanied by some working code (bitcoin v0.1 alpha) and perhaps some data from a short simulation, I see no reason to dismiss the work.

Show it.

Isn't satoshi electible for economic noble prize?
I mean how many of those "pontes" has already been proven wrong just by the existence of bitcoin?

the Satoshi School of CryptoCurrency

Very few if any.

Not necessarily too short, formatting considered.  If Satoshi's paper had complete dissertation-style references, citations, and a lot more raw data in tables, figures, and proofs it could easily hit the 100+ page mark without adding a single extra word of narrative description. It would only need some minor restructuring to accommodate these additional elements.  Also, critical portions of the proof of concept client source code would be considered 'pages' in the overall paper length as well.  On a side note, for hard sciences, there almost isn't a separate dissertation writeup any more - instead I am seeing a trend toward taking 3 or 4 graduate level papers and/or articles you've already written and have them worked thematically into one dissertation since, for practical reasons, they typically share a lot the same research data you have already compiled. Satoshi's paper (if complete citations and references were added) would easily equate to one or two of these since it addresses multiple disciplines.

Gotta get out of the rut, really. In Academia yes, lots of Socratic rhetoric with little proof, but in the scientific community... you gotta build your own project and prove it works, submit it to others to reproduce the results and confirm the findings.

I don't know what Satoshi would get, probably a PhD for the work, but for that white paper... It's readable, It was no doubt written for the masses, an excellent work of advertisement.

I have always wondered though, can we find others work by Satoshi from simply examining their writing style and coding methods? Off topic but, it would be nice to see if we could find examples of their work elsewhere.