I made the short bibliography of the original bitcoin paper because of Merkle trees. Damn, I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.
A pure mathematician far from CS, I nevertheless wondered about digital timestamps, and convinced myself they were impossible. Then I went to a talk by Stuart Haber, supported by a paper with funny quotes starting each section. He explained the purpose of an observer to make timestamps work, but they were using a linear linked list.
As a coauthor of the original Macaulay computer algebra system, with some low-level coding chops, it was obvious to me a tree would help here. And there had just been a NYTimes story about how the nascent internet was accelerating research in CS, people would be on vacation for a week and miss entire start-to-finish events.
I stayed up to dawn writing a polite parody of their paper, introducing the use of a tree, emailed it to everyone I recalled had been at the talk, and went to sleep. That's all I ever contributed; I ended up on the joint paper even though my contribution turned out to be a "Merkle tree".
People keep inventing Merkle trees, too.
I made the short bibliography of the original bitcoin paper because of Merkle trees. Damn, I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.
A pure mathematician far from CS, I nevertheless wondered about digital timestamps, and convinced myself they were impossible. Then I went to a talk by Stuart Haber, supported by a paper with funny quotes starting each section. He explained the purpose of an observer to make timestamps work, but they were using a linear linked list.
As a coauthor of the original Macaulay computer algebra system, with some low-level coding chops, it was obvious to me a tree would help here. And there had just been a NYTimes story about how the nascent internet was accelerating research in CS, people would be on vacation for a week and miss entire start-to-finish events.
I stayed up to dawn writing a polite parody of their paper, introducing the use of a tree, emailed it to everyone I recalled had been at the talk, and went to sleep. That's all I ever contributed; I ended up on the joint paper even though my contribution turned out to be a "Merkle tree".