Adi Shamir's paper on bitcoin

[Meni Rosenfeld]

It'd be awesome to have the sources (tex or whatever they are).

I'll try to see if they're up to sharing the TeX source.

thx for trying.  it would indeed be helpful at some pt to see the changes they have acknowledged.

do you think they will update the paper once more? molecular already posted first diff few days ago.

I said it once and I'll say it again - molecular posted the minor diff between version 1.5 and 2. He did not post the substantial changes between versions 1 and 1.5..

molecular, you may want to clarify this in your post.

[molecular]

thx for trying.  it would indeed be helpful at some pt to see the changes they have acknowledged.

do you think they will update the paper once more? molecular already posted first diff few days ago.

unfortunately that diff was accidentally from some intermediate version to the newest, not as you rightfully assumed and as was intended from first to newest at the time ;|

yeah, would like to see them, too. I got stuck at trying to figure out wether it'd be more work/cost to do it manually, hack up a script, search for existing tools or put up a bounty in the newbie subforum

not sure how computer readable the sources are and how frequently they change but I'm sure ms word can compare two files (I'm thinking about copy-paste the versions into separate files and use standard office tool, not as elegant as diff but works as well) but will not fight in newbie section for the bounty. have thought colleagues at previous job how to use this. I even saw a manual how to do it. One must love public administration.

Thanks for your suggestion. I did pretty much exactly that: copy-paste from pdf-reader to text-files and diffed them. Diff (of kdiff which I used) doesn't work well because of line breaks and hyphenation that is "baked" into the pdf. This will likely also make your approach (using word as diff tool) fail in the same or a similar way.

btw: Cryptology ePrint Archive has different versions of the paper that can be selected here: http://eprint.iacr.org/cgi-bin/versions.pl?entry=2012/584. Unfortunately the only available download format is pdf.

Why don't they include a bitcoin address in the update? For R&D purposes ; ) read donations

We wouldn't want the press saying: "That paper was sponsored by the bitcoin crowd, so it's biased".

[molecular]

just used this new-fangled internet-thingy called "google": there are many pdf diff tools, trying this one: http://www.qtrac.eu/diffpdf.html ("Program that textually or visually compares two PDF files")

EDIT: that didn't work.

found an online text extractor: http://www.extractpdf.com/. Using that looked promising at first, but it seems to skip parts of text ;(

I'm done for tonight ;|

[Binford 6100]

I looked through the whole thread, seems nobody posted a link to previous versions of the paper.
Can you please PM me a URL where I can grab a copy?
edit: the later version replaced the original 1.0 and I have nothing to compare.

[molecular]

I looked through the whole thread, seems nobody posted a link to previous versions of the paper.
Can you please PM me a URL where I can grab a copy?
edit: the later version replaced the original 1.0 and I have nothing to compare.

meni posted a link earlier in this thread and here's a link to a page that lets you download any version of the paper (posted this earlier): http://eprint.iacr.org/cgi-bin/versions.pl?entry=2012/584

[Binford 6100]

meni posted a link earlier in this thread and here's a link to a page that lets you download any version of the paper (posted this earlier): http://eprint.iacr.org/cgi-bin/versions.pl?entry=2012/584

I was looking precisely for this ^^ thanks. I'm on it (diff)

[molecular]

meni posted a link earlier in this thread and here's a link to a page that lets you download any version of the paper (posted this earlier): http://eprint.iacr.org/cgi-bin/versions.pl?entry=2012/584

I was looking precisely for this ^^ thanks. I'm on it (diff)

awesome!

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I paid a visit to WIS today to meet the group of 8 people involved in Citi-funded research (which includes Adi, Dorit, my M.Sc advisor, and some other people I've known from my time there, which AFAIK was before this project started). Adi explained that this funding was given for doing banking-related research, and that each member of the group dedicates a small portion of his time to such research. He wished to emphasize again that other than this broad directive, the researchers are free to choose their agenda, and that no input was received from the Citi Foundation regarding the choice of topic, let alone the conclusions of the research.

Through most of the meeting I answered general questions about Bitcoin; we also spent some time brainstorming ideas for improving the paper. I will soon put up for discussion here some of the issues that were raised.

[molecular]

I paid a visit to WIS today to meet the group of 8 people involved in Citi-funded research (which includes Adi, Dorit, my M.Sc advisor, and some other people I've known from my time there, which AFAIK was before this project started). Adi explained that this funding was given for doing banking-related research, and that each member of the group dedicates a small portion of his time to such research. He wished to emphasize again that other than this broad directive, the researchers are free to choose their agenda, and that no input was received from the Citi Foundation regarding the choice of topic, let alone the conclusions of the research.

Through most of the meeting I answered general questions about Bitcoin; we also spent some time brainstorming ideas for improving the paper. I will soon put up for discussion here some of the issues that were raised.

cool!

[Binford 6100]

awesome!

bitcoin -> Bitcoin - cause initial difficulty when comparing versions, sea of red : )

p #2
added that statistics is based on one of two main sources of block information but that they are sure that they are the same and with no impact on stats (footnote)

p #4
altered system description, deleted mentions of drugs, Silk road and investigations.
instead more detailed description how payments can be combined from multiple chunks

p #5
chapter 3 new 5 lines at the end, more details how they evaluated entities' btc ballances.
changed Owner to Entity

p #7
in the middle  „One can also argue...“ added thought about 'lost' coins in experiments by early adopters (look for 1,657,480 bitcoins) ... taking this into account they think 73% btc is associated with addresses that only accept bitcoins and never sent any. 70% out of those 73% are addresses not changed in last 3 months before the cut-off date of the research.

p #8
it tabs 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 added number of addresses and a title Number of owners changed to num of entities.

p #12
para Long Chains: changed description why some small txs are chained the way they are and also they drop MtGox note

p #13
Acknowledgments added last sentence:
Finally, we would like to thank all the members of the Bitcoin community, and in particular Meni Rosenfeld and Stefan Richter, who sent us excellent comments, criticisms and suggestions. We revised the original version of the paper in order to respond to their input.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

@Binford 6100 - can you post the actual before and after texts?

bitcoin -> Bitcoin - cause initial difficulty when comparing versions, sea of red : )

If you haven't already, you should pre-process by unifying the capitalization in both versions.

[Binford 6100]

@Meni I had it 'outsourced' this time after I failed few weeks ago. This is a summary I translated into English from the report I received. I did not specify that it should be in English nor that I want to have it formatted in any special way. You're interested in what, seeing paragraphs next to each other from v1.0 and 1.1 so you can see the changes for yourself? Now that I know what changed this could be easy.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

@Meni I had it 'outsourced' this time after I failed few weeks ago. This is a summary I translated into English from the report I received. I did not specify that it should be in English nor that I want to have it formatted in any special way. You're interested in what, seeing paragraphs next to each other from v1.0 and 1.1 so you can see the changes for yourself? Now that I know what changed this could be easy.

Yes, skipping large blocks of text that remained the same. Something like molecular's diff. PS myself I know what changed, but other people may be interested in clearly seeing the improvements.

[Binford 6100]

@Meni even with pre-processed texts there are problems, like layout issues. p.ex. when the same text shifts by one word so every line looks different. adding new line breaks to list of tolerated exceptions would do the trick but not with my tool.
etc.

[molecular]

@Meni even with pre-processed texts there are problems, like layout issues. p.ex. when the same text shifts by one word so every line looks different. adding new line breaks to list of tolerated exceptions would do the trick but not with my tool.
etc.

back when I tried I found some online service like this: http://www.fileformat.info/convert/doc/pdf2txt.htm to pre-process that helped with the linebreaks but had some other problems I don't remember. Might be worth a try.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

@Meni even with pre-processed texts there are problems, like layout issues. p.ex. when the same text shifts by one word so every line looks different. adding new line breaks to list of tolerated exceptions would do the trick but not with my tool.
etc.

I imagine that new paragraphs would have two line breaks. So what about replacing double line breaks with a temporary character, removing all line breaks, and replacing the temporary character with a line break? Then every paragraph would be in a single line.

Would it help to obtain the original TeX?

[molecular]

@Meni even with pre-processed texts there are problems, like layout issues. p.ex. when the same text shifts by one word so every line looks different. adding new line breaks to list of tolerated exceptions would do the trick but not with my tool.
etc.

I imagine that new paragraphs would have two line breaks. So what about replacing double line breaks with a temporary character, removing all line breaks, and replacing the temporary character with a line break? Then every paragraph would be in a single line.

Would it help to obtain the original TeX?

As I said earlier, having access to the original tex or whatever the sources are would certainly make things easier.