Wonderful. While academically it seems the intended focus was security analysis, it is comprehensive enough to be used as a reference general introduction to Bitcoin, to those willing to take the time to study it seriously.

A few nitpicks:

1. "Bitcoin" and "satoshi", as units of currency, should only be capitalized if at the beginning of a sentence. "Dollar" isn't capitalized either. Bitcoin as the name of a project, a protocol, a software, an ecosystem and a community is of course capitalized. Also, I'd avoid using "bitcoins" in reference to the system - e.g., instead of "(b)Bitcoins offer much lower cost of transferring money" I'd say "Bitcoin offers".

2. You use http://pastehtml.com/view/awb1vg03r.html as a reference for currently used mining pool reward systems, but it's badly out of date, and even for its time it was vague at best - SMPPS pools are listed as PPS, different varieties of score-based methods are lumped together in a single category, etc.

in the very first paragraph i find something i would've stated differently:

"It relies on cryptographic algorithms in order to prevent abuse of the system."

shouldn't it say "...cryptographic and hashing algorithms..."?

i'm not an academic in this particular area so correct me if i'm wrong.

my turn to nitpick.  he used a small "c".

hmmm, this is confusing.

"Hash functions" can also be defined as a broad category with "cryptographic hashing functions" as a subset.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function

if you use "Cryptography" as you defined it, i would think you'd capitalize it even in the middle of a sentence.

even more confusing is that in my discussions with theymos, as well as has been commented here on this forum by several prominent members, it's been said that Bitcoin does not rely on "encryption" per se.  i always understood this to mean that the SHA-256 hashing algorithm effectively makes miners "guess" at the target solution which reduces the process down to mathematical probabilities vs. certain miners having insider information, ie, a "cryptographic key solution".

this is what makes Bitcoin "fair" to the masses that care to mine, like me, and would be analogous to the lotteries run by States.  even the little guys line up around the block to buy their tickets despite knowing that larger players can buy up huge numbers of tickets for the ultimate prize.  at least they have an equal chance on a ticket by ticket basis.

cryptography isn't capitalized, trust me, my masters degree was in cryptography

How did this thread turn into a language discussion?

Section 5.3 Finney Attack

I think you described a regular double spend attack, where is Finney attack involves pre-mined block, and it is not detectable.

Cryptography is mathematics.

Even if "cryptography" is assumed to mean "encryption", the public should be well aware of the important role of encryption in online commerce and banking.

I shall be reading this

Where is the accompanying CD?

Yeah, now that I reflect on it for a long while I believed that Finney attack is a double-spend attack, and that there are just two variations of it, which made things a bit confusing.


Well, it's not an article aimed at general public, but rather people that know a bit about computer science, or want to know more and are ready to look into some things they have doubts with.

This kinda reminds me of this article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/19/scientists-are-from-mars-the-public-is-from-earth/



The accompanying CD is in my school's archive, and with three other printed copies of the thesis. As I said in the original post, I'll upload its contents eventually (it's mainly a lot of code in Google Go, a bit messy).