Bitcoin Forum

I checked many whitepapers of crypto projects and ICO's and found out some problems.

1. Almost all disclaimers are similar.

2. Description of the history of bitcoin and crypto itself including Nakamoto's "biography" are almost same.

3. When it comes to coins (Not ERC20 based projects) description How PoW  (Proof of work) works are similar and the same situation is with PoS.

Now my friend is planing to launch a PoS coin and I checked his whitepaper via (plagiarism check tool) In some parts of that whitepaper I found almost 90 matches to other sources, but that sources were not copyright protected. The problem is that it is almost impossible to write yourself how PoS works because there is only one way of it and it is impossible to add something new to it. Also it is impossible to rewrite the history of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. He tried to hire a crypto journalist to rewrite his whitepaper, but was told that it is impossible. The description of the new coin and its futures are of course unique but description how PoW and PoS works is not. I found many similar problems in other projects, but as I understood nobody cares about that. So my question is. Is that legal to write (copy) the description of crypto scripts or algorithms that are standard and can't be changed?        

In college, I read through multiple organic chemistry textbooks.  There's only one Diels-Alder reaction (my favorite), so you would think there would be only one way to write about it and that all the organic chemists would plagiarize the best description.

Do you think that's the case?  Let me tell you:  It isn't.  There's no excuse for what you described.  It's just being lazy if you can't write out a description of POS (or anything else) in your own words.  That's a ridiculous, dishonest excuse if someone tells you it's impossible.

Well you can describe them in your own words, just like you can describe how a dienophile interacts in a concerted rearrangement of bonds with a diene to form the Diels-Alder conjugate.  There's infinite ways of rearranging words to describe the same phenomenon.  There's no need to copy/paste something.

You mean that you can rewrite the rules how POW or POS works using hour own words ?

If you can't and you have to refer to others work, then that would mean that you don't fully understand it yourself.

I mean, you can't rewrite the rules themselves, but you can talk about them in different ways.

https://medium.com/novamining/main-differences-between-pow-and-pos-cryptocurrency-mining-c4cc279d9739

https://www.quora.com/What-is-PoW-and-PoS-in-bitcoin

Check the 2 links, the answers are fairly different even tho ultimately they are describing the same thing.

OK Thanks. That's the most adequate answer to my question.

Just one more short question. Hiring someone for that job (Describing how POW and POS works) to avoid any copyrights problems, is also unethical and illegal ? :) If not, could you recommend me someone?

I looked up "dienophile interacts in a concerted rearrangement of bonds with a diene to form the Diels-Alder conjugate" because i didn't understand the phrase. The rearrangement of bonds looks interesting. I wonder if that could become a more efficient way to manage a "blockchain" in a distributed environment.

Apologies - it's a bit off topic.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain enterprise as a whole is still undergoing standardization. While copyright issues might not be so much of a concern to the end of describing a concept or how stuff works in crypto-sphere, it's imperative to maintain objectivity and not delude the audience or consumers into thinking your explanation is exclusive. Unethical would be plagiarising someone's work and passing it on as your own.

I wouldn't recommend that you hire someone to do that job. Usually the problem start there, projects hire to write for them, they didn't check, release their whitepaper and then boom, someone notice the plagiarism and you can't really defend yourself because the one that supposed to do the job copy it somewhere. And that's a negative impact and as much as you are truly legit and no intention to scam, that mistakes will cost your project bigtime.

So you want the biography of same person to be different everywhere ?

You can always cite your source?  Why re-write something that is explained and common knowledge...  I don't see why you can't cite Satoshi's white paper as the source for an explanation on POW mining.

Plagiarism is taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own.

Just give credit to the original author and highlight what you're changing IMO.

How come it's not possible that both of us have the same face or at-least my one matches with few other peoples in the world? After all, there are over 7 billions of people we are in the world right now.

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Well said.

That's a nice idea. I just have to mention the sources I used right ? Complete reference should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper ? Because I was offered some rewriting services here on the forum and all of them are using paraphrasing tools..  ;D So most likely I will follow your suggestion. Thanks.

You should probably do a bit of research about properly citing reference sources. If all your doing is explaining POW mining give the man that created it the credit with a source and move on.