I agree. When Shamir wrote the first Bitcoin paper over a year ago, we in the Bitcoin community eagerly awaited the paper, looking forward to the revelation of some obscure new security flaw, or other issue.
Imagine our surprise when we realized that not only did the paper not reveal anything new (Satoshi mined many of the early coins -- Eureka!), but that in order to do their analysis, they scraped the entire blockchain explorer web site to access Bitcoin's transaction history, and then commented on how difficult it was to access that history.
So little was their research and understanding of how Bitcoin works, that they misunderstood its most fundamental property: the shared public ledger that sits on the desktop of anyone running the reference Bitcoin client.
Unfortunately, it looks like they're after publicity, and not new knowledge. A big disappointment.
>When Shamir wrote the first Bitcoin paper over a year ago
You mean 'when Ron and Shamir wrote their first Bitcoin paper'? as there were several prior papers about Bitcoin; including one myself and a co-author wrote on a similar topic in 2011.
We obtained our data directly from the blockchain, using a modified version of Gavin Andresen's bitcointools which we put on github (although its now out of date).
Imagine our surprise when we realized that not only did the paper not reveal anything new (Satoshi mined many of the early coins -- Eureka!), but that in order to do their analysis, they scraped the entire blockchain explorer web site to access Bitcoin's transaction history, and then commented on how difficult it was to access that history.
So little was their research and understanding of how Bitcoin works, that they misunderstood its most fundamental property: the shared public ledger that sits on the desktop of anyone running the reference Bitcoin client.
Unfortunately, it looks like they're after publicity, and not new knowledge. A big disappointment.