The real story here is how Adi Shamir can get caught up in such horrible published research, not once - but twice now[0]. They keep referring to blockchain.info as the blockchain, and have again scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.
You really have to question just how much the authors understand what they are writing about when they don't even understand the blockchain. This research isn't even worthy of a blog post, let alone being published as an academic paper by a noted cryptographer.
> They keep referring to blockchain.info as the blockchain, and have again scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.
I'm not sure THIS is really the issue worth debating. Their first paper states:
"On May 13th 2012 we downloaded the full public record of this system in one of its two major forms (1), which consisted of about 180,000 HTML files."
"(1) We believe (but did not verify) that these two forms contain exactly the same information, and even if there are tiny differences they are likely to have only a negligible effect on our statistical results."
That, to me, is acknowledgement that they knowingly chose to scrape the website instead of parsing the 'real' blockchain. If I'm guessing, I'd say they did it this way because they had someone with the skills to do the scraping available to them (when all you've got is a hammer...).
> even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.
Yes, 'just' a representation of the blockchain. Good enough for all their intents and purposes...
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_deb...
The real story here is how Adi Shamir can get caught up in such horrible published research, not once - but twice now[0]. They keep referring to blockchain.info as the blockchain, and have again scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.
You really have to question just how much the authors understand what they are writing about when they don't even understand the blockchain. This research isn't even worthy of a blog post, let alone being published as an academic paper by a noted cryptographer.
[0] https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921