[bitcoin-dev] Trivia on the history of compact fraud proofs and anti censorship.

[Gregory Maxwell <greg@xiph.org>]

It's generally not /too/ important where ideas come from, even in our
open source non-patent encumbering world the only compensation people
get for sharing a good idea is the credit they receive. Most of the
time people are still happy to see their ideas further developed, even
if credit isn't sufficiently given.

But I'm particularly disappointed when attribution gets withheld in
the furtherance of political attaks. In some cases people have adopted
public positions that e.g. Bitcoin developers don't care about
scalability and then show that, by comparison, they care by publishing
work explaining/elaborating the scaling work of Bitcoin devs, but to
maintain consistency with their claims go through an extended effort
to avoid attributing them.

In two cases so far, I've painstakingly walked through an idea with a
political opponent in the Bitcoin space in private, only to have them
turn around and present the ideas I argued into their heads as novel
inventions without a shred of credit to me or the Bitcoin development
community.

One of them was the case of Peter R and the subchains paper, which I
previously forwarded to the list the correspondence between myself and
him where I argued the concept of preconsensus as part of his disproof
of the orphaning-controls-capacity claim.

The other is on compact fraud proofs with Justus Ranvier (again, a BU
person). I promptly complained directly to Justus when I saw him doing
it. I'm now forwarding to the list for posterity, because after almost
two years and several pings, I was never even given a response.

This came up to my attention today because V. Buterin published a
paper on lite client security ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.09044.pdf )
that was apparently unaware of proposals from our community on sampled
anti-withholding[1]. ... and this paper cites Justus' writeup as both
the only example of fraud proofs previously, and evidence that
sampling coded data was not previously considered.

[1] e.g. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizards/2015-04-18.html
starting at "The improvement we have is this". Error coded
anti-withholding been discussed many times-- and I've been pretty
bummed that I've been unable to excite people much about the idea,
hopefully that will change with the eth hype machine behind it--, but
this particular citation is while not the earliest or clearest
description, perfect for this case since the context is that it's a
complaint that the same author was failing to cite our communities
past efforts on fraud proofs, and as a result they weren't aware of
the state of the art like anti-withholding.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 9:46 PM
Subject: A plea for ethical behavior
To: Justus Ranvier <justusranvier@gmail.com>


https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5evvth/fraud_proofs/

I spent _hours_ explaining how this technology would work to you on
reddit in private message, walking you through arguments on it.
Pointing out some of the details.

I also originally introduced the idea of compact fraud proofs to the
community (though the general idea was that of Bitcoin's creator,
without the compact-- just the unworkable kind) and was the first
person to enumerate the missing components for it.

Yet, the idea here is attribute solely to you, leaving me erased from history.

This isn't right.  It is especially offensive because the same parties
affiliated with BU use this plagiarism as a proof point that they are
scaling innovators while I am not, -- the height of absurdity when
they do it with ideas I invented and introduced to them.

Mike Hearn didn't have the integrity to credit Matt for the invention
of thinblocks; instead he was happy to have other people misrepresent
the history, I think you are a better person than him and hope you
will say something.

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