<story><title>I Am Not Satoshi</title><url>http://blog.dustintrammell.com/2013/11/26/i-am-not-satoshi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vbuterin</author><text>This is not even the first paper by Dorit Ron and Shamir on Bitcoin; they did an analysis of the transaction graph earlier: &lt;a href=&quot;http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf‎&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;584.pdf‎&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And that one too was quite poorly done; from the text, it actually seemed like they thought that &amp;quot;the blockchain&amp;quot; is a file stored on blockchain.info. Disappointing from the inventor of Shamir&amp;#x27;s Secret Sharing and differential cryptanalysis.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oakwhiz</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  We acquired the complete state of the Bitcoin transaction system [...]
  This required downloading 180,001 separate but linked HTML files [...]
  following the links backwards to the zeroth block [...]
  Each file was parsed in order to extract all the multisender&amp;#x2F;multireceiver transactions in it, and then the collection of transactions was encoded as a standard database on our local machine.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This is definitely a very strange way of retrieving the blockchain for research purposes. Couldn&amp;#x27;t they have simply issued RPC calls to the regular bitcoind client after downloading the blockchain via the built-in peer-to-peer mechanism?</text></comment>
<story><title>I Am Not Satoshi</title><url>http://blog.dustintrammell.com/2013/11/26/i-am-not-satoshi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vbuterin</author><text>This is not even the first paper by Dorit Ron and Shamir on Bitcoin; they did an analysis of the transaction graph earlier: &lt;a href=&quot;http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf‎&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;584.pdf‎&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And that one too was quite poorly done; from the text, it actually seemed like they thought that &amp;quot;the blockchain&amp;quot; is a file stored on blockchain.info. Disappointing from the inventor of Shamir&amp;#x27;s Secret Sharing and differential cryptanalysis.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwh</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;it actually seemed like they thought that &amp;quot;the blockchain&amp;quot; is a file stored on blockchain.info&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;People seem to confuse that a lot. It&amp;#x27;s a badly named service at the best of times. I wonder how many legal requests the site will get from people believing they run Bitcoin.</text></comment>