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Correct. The specific innovation brought to us by blockchains is "objective truth" over subjective truth. We've had journaled, auditable, shared, and logged dat
by brighton36 11y ago
Correct. The specific innovation brought to us by blockchains is "objective truth" over subjective truth. We've had journaled, auditable, shared, and logged databases for years. Even PGP signed SMTP was a sufficient mechanism for transmitting shared data. The innovation of Blockchains are their proof of work mechanism by which truth is objectively determinable.
Oh - and of the thousands of blockchains out there, only one is worth a damn. The others are barely burning more than $10k per day in anchoring their objective truth.
- pjc50 11y agoIt is absolutely not an objective truth! It's an expensive consensus. The mental image of 'burning' increasing amounts of wealth for a financial instrument of dubious value gets more strange the more you think about it, like a funeral pyre or a hugely destructive potlatch.
- brighton36 11y agoIt's certainly an objective truth - it's attested to by the energy spent in producing it. Attesting to alternate truth is often possible (we have orphan blocks all the time) but - the older the truth, the more objective it is. The intrinsic value of bitcoin is censorship resistant storage. The speculative value of bitcoin is somewhere above 0. If you don't need censorship resistance - don't use it. But if you think no-one needs censorship resistance, then you are empirically wrong, as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of transactions per day in Bitcoin. As for burning increasing amounts of wealth - well, the network is pretty well calibrated. It's not a chain reaction that will take over the world, it'll scale to precisely the size that the market demands.