Quote from: scintill on December 06, 2013, 09:04:59 AM

Quote from: seanneko on December 06, 2013, 08:33:00 AM

This is why I hate academia. It's based on rubbish like how many references your paper gets, or how big your vocabulary is. Not so much the actual idea you're writing about. Sometimes I read an entire page which could be summarised in one sentence without losing any content at all.

Source: I work with academics/researchers and see this every single day.

IMO (having last read it a few months ago) the paper is not that great of an academic paper. I felt it left quite a few ideas undeveloped and glossed-over. We know Satoshi had answers to the things he left unfinished in the paper based on his source code, and the community has filled in gaps over the years, but the paper, while briefly introducing some revolutionary ideas, is fairly basic.

Even from a computer science perspective, it is not a rigorous specification of the protocol, tx construction, script language, etc. The source code has served that purpose.

I get the impression he wrote the paper to give people something to chew on, while writing the code which he considered more interesting or important ("I'm better with code than with words"). If you were "there", feel free to correct any of this.

From his early email messages he clearly says somewhere, that he wasn't sure whether or not he could fix all the problems code wise. When finished working out all the major problems in the code, he wrote the white paper convinced it was possible. So in my opinion, his original code is what was most revolutionary.