What is the difference between whitepaper and threads ?

[Namek]

Hello

I always asked to myself what was the real purpose of whitepapers... How are they different from what it's written in coin's thread ?
Can someone explains me the difference ?

Thanks,
Best

[kelsey]

a white paper simply tis a way to pretend it somehow has cred, talk a bit of tech pseudo science hogwash, ad a diagram....wham instant crypto street cred 

[muddafudda]

About 5 minutes.

[MaxDZ8]

You probably know threads. Everyone is free to write whatever they want.

Whitepapers in general contain at least an overlook on what's going on, as well as the theory and eventually detailed looks at at the most interesting specifics.
When it comes to coins, whitepapers are usually way less informative. They range from "we copypasted the announce thread in a PDF and pretend it's a whitepaper" to "let's just assume everyone and his/her dog has a master degree in cryptography and applied mathematics".
As you might guess, both extremes produce useless "whitepapers".

[Namek]

You probably know threads. Everyone is free to write whatever they want.

Whitepapers in general contain at least an overlook on what's going on, as well as the theory and eventually detailed looks at at the most interesting specifics.
When it comes to coins, whitepapers are usually way less informative. They range from "we copypasted the announce thread in a PDF and pretend it's a whitepaper" to "let's just assume everyone and his/her dog has a master degree in cryptography and applied mathematics".
As you might guess, both extremes produce useless "whitepapers".

Thanks you for reply.
But when you see at ziftrCOIN, what's the difference between the thread and the white paper ? What did they wrote in the whitepaper ?

Thread : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970363.0
Whitepaper : https://d19y4lldx7po3t.cloudfront.net/assets/docs/ziftrcoin-whitepaper-120614.pdf

[Hazard]

All the "whitepapers" you'll find on here are rubbish.

[MaxDZ8]

Thanks you for reply.
But when you see at ziftrCOIN, what's the difference between the thread and the white paper ? What did they wrote in the whitepaper ?

This is a whitepaper just because they declared so. It's not quite the thread copypasted, but pretty much on that end of the spectrum. You get nice colors.

[pazor_true]

whitepaper: one person talks about bullshit (sometimes)
thread: many persons talk about this bullshit (often)

[ed_teech]

The whitepaper is the first thing to read, the thread is the next to question it.

[Namek]

The whitepaper is the first thing to read, the thread is the next to question it.

What did you except to read inside it ?

[Lorenzo]

I thought one of the goals of a technical whitepaper is that you should be able to read it and implement a roughly equivalent version from scratch using just the information given. The Bitcoin whitepaper, for example, provides a reasonably detailed explanation of how Bitcoin works so that it would be enough for someone to read it and implement their own version of Bitcoin using whatever programming language they're familiar with. (That isn't to say that I haven't seen many whitepapers fall far short of this standard however.)