Quote from: farmer_boy on December 04, 2010, 12:37:49 AM

I agree with the factual errors that some pointed out, btw. E.g. the suggestion that any well-respected cryptographer (i.e. one that has published articles in the past two years in well-known journals) has looked at Bitcoin seriously is a complete lie.

As for the scientific progress concerned, Bitcoin is still at the experimentation phase, I'd say. I don't really see why the main author doesn't submit a journal article somewhere, as writing such an article is pretty easy, if you know what you are talking about. Figuring out what to write usually takes a lot of time, but writing down your research should be easy.

In terms of well-respected cryptographers involved with the "technology" of Bitcoins, there certainly is quite a bit of research that is happening with the SHA-256 algorithm including trying to find out weaknesses and hopefully make up a better algorithm that would accomplish the same job if not do a better job. The NSA is active in that investigation including some candidate algorithms that are being examined that might work better than this algorithm for cryptographic hashing.

As for really examining the Bitcoins algorithm itself, that hasn't really been heavily reviewed but that is something happening right now mainly within the community. That is certainly something Bruce got square on in terms of talking about the "open source software" as many eyes do make bugs quite shallow. There have been some significant updates which have fixed some problems in the past, and I expect to see some in the future because of community involvement to point out weaknesses in the network design. Legitimate weaknesses will be addressed if they are raised..