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You're assuming that there has to be a 'leader' of some sort. A blockchain network could be you and I. It could be my neighborhood, my city, or a group of compa

You're assuming that there has to be a 'leader' of some sort. A blockchain network could be you and I. It could be my neighborhood, my city, or a group of companies that wish to participate. Any blockchain platform that can support smart contracts, of which each smart contract can have whatever 'token' of value it chooses. I can make a token and call it 'potPlantCoin'. That token can be valued at '1 potted plant' of a certain size in my neighborhood blockchain, whereas, the token is backed by a potted plant... I could then effectively have a distributed, decentralized ledger in my neighborhood that uses the value of a potted plant as the means of exchange. I don't have to worry about any other network than the small amount of processing power within the nodes in my neighborhood. Maybe that example helps you understand how the blockchain doesn't need a 'leader' or something like bitcoin that is 'so far ahead'. Bitcoin is completely irrelevant in my neighborhood. Sorry, no crystal ball here, but I do have an extremely high degree of certainty =p

CydeWeys 11y ago
None of your examples make any sense to me. It seems like it'd be a lot easier and safer to simply piggyback on the existing Bitcoin blockchain. To use your trivial example of a two person blockchain, what are you trying to do? If we trust each other already, then we don't need a blockchain, we just need signed transactions. If we don't trust each other then having our own private blockchain solves nothing, as whoever has more processing power can perform a 51% attack on the network, deny the other person's transactions, and double-spend your own. Having a blockchain makes no sense in this context. That's why you use the biggest existing blockchain, not a separate one. There's no way in hell I can cheat you if we do our transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, because I can't beat the overall hashing power of the system, but I sure as hell can beat your hashing power if we have a blockchain that's only for two people, or just for a neighborhood.
- to3m 11y ago
  For smaller-scale blockchains you would probably adopt a non-proof-of-work consensus mechanism. (This is probably what you want, anyway, when the value of the assets that back the network exceeds the value of mounting an attack! You might argue againt the wisdom of having the network secured by general mutual mistrust, but it's no worse than relying on cost.)

CydeWeys 11y ago

None of your examples make any sense to me. It seems like it'd be a lot easier and safer to simply piggyback on the existing Bitcoin blockchain. To use your trivial example of a two person blockchain, what are you trying to do? If we trust each other already, then we don't need a blockchain, we just need signed transactions. If we don't trust each other then having our own private blockchain solves nothing, as whoever has more processing power can perform a 51% attack on the network, deny the other person's transactions, and double-spend your own. Having a blockchain makes no sense in this context. That's why you use the biggest existing blockchain, not a separate one. There's no way in hell I can cheat you if we do our transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, because I can't beat the overall hashing power of the system, but I sure as hell can beat your hashing power if we have a blockchain that's only for two people, or just for a neighborhood.

to3m 11y ago
For smaller-scale blockchains you would probably adopt a non-proof-of-work consensus mechanism. (This is probably what you want, anyway, when the value of the assets that back the network exceeds the value of mounting an attack! You might argue againt the wisdom of having the network secured by general mutual mistrust, but it's no worse than relying on cost.)