11 ms·

‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

104 points by wglb 9y ago

_pmf_ 9y ago
Well, not meaningless ... it can mean whatever you want, and it will not be strictly wrong.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  I think that is the point in the article; it is used in many different ways so simply saying you're using the blockchain doesn't have much meaning and yet people look at it as a sign of a forward facing company.
- ChristianGeek 9y ago
  I think “generic” or “generalized” are better fits.
empath75 9y ago
It's interesting that an article that provides at least 6 different meanings for it says that it's meaningless.
- rs86 9y ago
  Journalists suck
nixpulvis 9y ago
I think we all agree it's some for of "secure" ledger. Otherwise yea, it's not a super well defined term. Regardless it's obviously over hyped and buzzed. Git for example could be called a blockchain if you really wanted to.
wintom 9y ago
It’s not meaningless. Saying Blockchain is meaningless is like saying the web is meaningless or the internet is meaningless. Just because you either don’t understand it or you feel it’s too broad does not make it meaningless. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party. It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.
- nailer 9y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted. That seems a reasonable definition of blockchain, in much the same way one could give a reasonable definition of an array as a sequence of items. The article's premise that 'The term blockchain is misused and frequently misunderstood' (which is true) means 'Blockchain is meaningless' doesn't hold water and this is very typical for a Vox technology article.
  - jgh 9y ago
    I think gp's definition is still too broad. Consensus is not an inherent property of blockchains, for example. You can make blockchains without any consensus at all, or with some central authority prescribing reality. A blockchain is simply a kind of data structure, like a linked list or a hash map or an array.
    - nailer 9y ago
      I'd agree with that (though not to point of voting gp down): the aims and benefits of blockchains should be seperate from their definition.
    - seanalltogether 9y ago
      Exactly. Is "blockchain" just the data structure, or is it the data structure + the protocol for communication + the software to validate it? Another example might be bit torrent. I personally wouldn't classify bit torrent as just the data structure. I would say its the data structure, the protocol and the end clients. However if someone used these technologies to create a different format and a different protocol, I wouldn't think of it as bit torrent.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    It's meaningless because it's become just another buzzword.
- zone411 9y ago
  The issue is that you now have ICOs (including by public companies) that use the term "blockchain" just for the hype, even though the supposed "blockchains" they use don't fulfill your conditions.
jacinabox 9y ago
With all due respect, that's crap. Blockchain means exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto defined it to mean in his seminal paper.
- organsnyder 9y ago
  "Means exactly"... to whom?
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Coinbeards!
- thisisit 9y ago
  AFAIK, there is no definition of the word blockchain in the paper. The word came later. Happy to be corrected on this confusion.
SeanLuke 9y ago
Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of which I am a participant -- which completely misunderstands the term. So AI gave up and switched to "Intelligent Agent", which was unfortunately an even more buzzword-compliant word. Now we started seeing "intelligent graphics agent" or "intelligent login page agent". Finally in the late '90s AI moved to "Autonomous Agent", a word straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. But it worked! Nobody outside of AI seems to use it: my theory is that most people don't really know exactly what autonomous means.
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  And just as AI is being overused to solve problems, so too is the "blockchain", inevitably making users lives worse in the long run.
  - kbwt 9y ago
    > AI is being overused double-checks URL bar to make sure he is still on HN Downvote me all you want but I think the tech sector is currently suffering a veritable Machine Learning craze.
    - madenine 9y ago
      Give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that last bit was sarcasm?
- camillomiller 9y ago
  I mean... "crypto" !!! Can you imagine what cryptographers had to witness every day for a couple of years now, while the term was increasingly skewing towards a completely misleading meaning?
IncRnd 9y ago
The world "blockchain" is not really meaningless. Originally, a blockchain was a cryptographically chained chain of blocks in a proof of work system. It is still used that way, but it is also repurposed by other marketing schemes of many cryptocurrencies.
Sangermaine 9y ago
"Blockchain" means a 394% surge in your stock price: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in-a-name-u-k-stock-surges-394-on-blockchain-rebrand https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Wow. Get a helmet folks. If you have any experience in this industry, you’ve seen this before and know how it ends...
- rtkwe 9y ago
  It also potentially means trouble with the SEC: https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-using-blockchain-name/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-u...
jbob2000 9y ago
It's about as meaningless as the word "communism". Tough to come up with a definition for that, but I still know what it "means". I guess you just have to read a bunch of different sources to get the full picture of what a blockchain is. It's kind of hard to communicate abstract ideas, so you need a variety of sources to paint the picture in your head.
- sheepz 9y ago
  I think communism is pretty well defined, in its ultimate form its the abolition of private property. This is in strict opposition to capitalism.
sheepz 9y ago
The blockchain hype is crazy. My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation. Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized etc.
- cal5k 9y ago
  Most of the people who spout such nonsense have no idea what they're talking about.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming related media.
  - betawaffle 9y ago
    Why can't we get hype for my friend Sparse Merkle Trees!
    - vinniejames 9y ago
      I'm hyped! When is the ICO?!
      - nkristoffersen 9y ago
        I almost spit out my coffee.
  - tomtheelder 9y ago
    When people use the term blockchain they don't just mean a chain of state changes, they mean one that is backed by the sort of decentralized consensus model you described. The nomenclature isn't ideal, but the convenience of having one word to describe a somewhat complex topic wins out. I mean even the Wikipedia article on blockchain treats it this way [1], mentioning the consensus model in the initial blurb, and asserting that Satoshi invented the blockchain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
cornholio 9y ago
"Blockchain" has come to designate a very well defined concept: any technical and financial construction designed for speculative investment in unregulated securities out of reach of traditional authorities, usually having a very shady, deflationary or ponzi-like economic structure and strong money laundry potential. There is nothing fundamentally novel in distributed databases or their application in finance, we knew how to build "blockchains" since the 70`s. Satoshi's proof of work chains were the first anonymous implementation and that's what started the "crypto revolution".
- Theodores 9y ago
  I am of the same conclusion, however, the dreaded blockchain has those that are true believers. They will cite the Estonia example and they will cite Wikileaks and how that show was able to be kept on the road thanks to Bitcoin payments that were provided when Visa and their ilk in 'fiat land' decided to take their payment methods away. They will cite a land registry in some poor African country and tell you how good it is that their evil government cannot take the 'peasants' land away. If that is not enough to suppress your questioning of blockchain they will also roll out the commerce examples, e.g. the Walmart supply chain or whatever it is. You will be told about some of these '541t coins' (as you call them) in venerated ways, as if the goals of their founders put the efforts of everyone from Mother Theresa to Elon Musk in the shade as far as noble ambition for humanity is concerned. It is like they are trying to fool ninety percent of you for ninety percent of the time. Maybe you work in some computing discipline that is tediously dull compared to the parsnip science that is blockchain. Perhaps you are a small cog in supply chain management or maybe you are at the cutting edge of some new 3D printing technology that is revolutionising something important, e.g. dentistry. Up until now you have felt that you may have been pleasing your clients and delivering value not just to your company but to the wider world. You think deeply about any conceivable way that blockchain technology could revolutionise things for you. Or maybe do what you are doing already but better because of the magic blockchain. Even though you know your sector inside and out and your industry pretty well, your mind draws a blank. This is despite your code being used in many different parts of business applications. Your only conclusion is that there is no use whatsoever for blockchain in what you do. The blockchain bore who has not spent 'a career' doing some useful industry thing will be able to declare that you are just not getting it. Clearly your mind is just too limited, you are old in the head and unable to grasp what blockchain is about, how it works and how it is going to change everything. If you can't even see one use with all that stuff you know and work with then clearly you have not understood what blockchain is all about. By now you have also had time to think about the examples of blockchain use presented by the blockchain bore. With Wikileaks it was all a scam, it conveniently kicked off the Arab Spring, confirmed a few things we knew already, led to the Assange sideshow but lead to little change. Plus how much does it really cost to host a few web pages? £200000 a year in hosting fees? What fools they were to sell their bitcoinz! So what remains? As you say, gambling on unregulated securities. Paying for illegal things online is the second use for the dreaded blockchain.
AndrewDucker 9y ago
In general, if the transactions are gathered together in blocks, and it is blocks that are secured on the chain using cryptography, and it is designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records, the system qualifies as a blockchain That works for me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tylersmith 9y ago
  "designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records" is really the only thing important here as far as most people are concerned. The part about chaining blocks of data together is an implementation detail that may or may not last long term.
onion-soup 9y ago
Blockchain is meaningless because I bought at 18k and sold at 6k and now I can't buy Mochiatoo and type these fancy medium articles on my MacBook
Ajedi32 9y ago
git has been using a blockchain for the last 12 years, since long before Bitcoin: Each commit includes the hash of its parent commit. These commits form a chain. Changing the contents of any past commit would break the chain. Each user of the repository keeps a copy of the blockchain on their PC, and they can fetch new "blocks" from any other peer with `git fetch` or `git pull`. The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository.
- lev99 9y ago
  >long before Bitcoin To be fair, bitcoin is only about 37 months younger than git. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
  - ashelmire 9y ago
    Other version control systems existed decades before git with similar principles (like CVS).
    - astrodust 9y ago
      CVS and its precursor RCS are in no way like git other than that they're version control systems.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  > The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository. Since git commits can easily be signed (and IMO should be most of the time), when I explain this I usually try to describe the consensus algorithm as being based on a set of known valid signers which I think further helps bridge the gap for people that understand "proof of authority" chains. https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority-Chains https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority...
- tomtheelder 9y ago
CodexArcanum 9y ago
"Blockchain" is a data structure, a pretty well defined one. The buzzword is basically a synonym for "distributed (, decentralized?) system." Buzzwords arr usually annoying and misused. Object-Oriented Programming as practiced isn't really what was intended by the term. Memes with cat pictures are only vaguely a subset of Dawkins' memes. "The Cloud," ugh, let's not even.
brwsr 9y ago
Well, at least less meaningless than the widely used word "Economy" representing our financial system of waste, where consumers have to keep buying stuff to keep the system intact.
granaldo 9y ago
The killer app of blockchain is people trading coins in and out speculating on altcoins https://www.coingecko.com/en https://www.coingecko.com/en
philipodonnell 9y ago
> The term has become so widespread that it’s quickly losing meaning. I mean, that's how language works, right? Words mean things at certain points of time and then over time those things sometimes change and new words appear to better distinguish between the new things. Or words get contextualized within a specific industry and take on different meanings depending on your perspective. Such an evolution does not mean a word is "meaningless" it just indicates you'll have to provide more context in order to communicate your idea, which, again, is how language works.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
arisAlexis 9y ago
Anyone remember newsweek title "Internet? bah" around 1995?
- flukus 9y ago
  The internet is a communication platform that allows to send messages and share files from millions/billions of machines in a global network. A simple definition that explains it's capabilities, something blockchain lacks.
  - arisAlexis 9y ago
    a blockchain is an immutable ledger that keeps transactions transparent and untampered. can be used for all money transactions and also for asset ownership and log transparency by governents. It is very simple.
xg15 9y ago
While the general gist is true, so far you could separate the buzzword uses from the non-buzzword uses pretty well by checking whether or not they use an article before the word "blockchain". Though this bit then kind of worries me: > Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream discourse, but they’ve also been joined by a concept that is widely circulated, but poorly understood: “the blockchain” or just “blockchain.” I fear they are learning...
- bertil 9y ago
  I honestly can’t tell from context whether the article is a sign of understanding. To be blunt, I’m not sure I can tell for people who talk about “(the) (I/i)nternet” either, and I met some of those who invented it.

104 points by wglb 9y ago

_pmf_ 9y ago

Well, not meaningless ... it can mean whatever you want, and it will not be strictly wrong.

BinaryIdiot 9y ago
I think that is the point in the article; it is used in many different ways so simply saying you're using the blockchain doesn't have much meaning and yet people look at it as a sign of a forward facing company.
ChristianGeek 9y ago
I think “generic” or “generalized” are better fits.

empath75 9y ago

It's interesting that an article that provides at least 6 different meanings for it says that it's meaningless.

rs86 9y ago
Journalists suck

nixpulvis 9y ago

I think we all agree it's some for of "secure" ledger. Otherwise yea, it's not a super well defined term. Regardless it's obviously over hyped and buzzed. Git for example could be called a blockchain if you really wanted to.

wintom 9y ago

It’s not meaningless. Saying Blockchain is meaningless is like saying the web is meaningless or the internet is meaningless. Just because you either don’t understand it or you feel it’s too broad does not make it meaningless. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party. It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.

nailer 9y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted. That seems a reasonable definition of blockchain, in much the same way one could give a reasonable definition of an array as a sequence of items. The article's premise that 'The term blockchain is misused and frequently misunderstood' (which is true) means 'Blockchain is meaningless' doesn't hold water and this is very typical for a Vox technology article.
- jgh 9y ago
  I think gp's definition is still too broad. Consensus is not an inherent property of blockchains, for example. You can make blockchains without any consensus at all, or with some central authority prescribing reality. A blockchain is simply a kind of data structure, like a linked list or a hash map or an array.
  - nailer 9y ago
    I'd agree with that (though not to point of voting gp down): the aims and benefits of blockchains should be seperate from their definition.
  - seanalltogether 9y ago
    Exactly. Is "blockchain" just the data structure, or is it the data structure + the protocol for communication + the software to validate it? Another example might be bit torrent. I personally wouldn't classify bit torrent as just the data structure. I would say its the data structure, the protocol and the end clients. However if someone used these technologies to create a different format and a different protocol, I wouldn't think of it as bit torrent.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  It's meaningless because it's become just another buzzword.
zone411 9y ago
The issue is that you now have ICOs (including by public companies) that use the term "blockchain" just for the hype, even though the supposed "blockchains" they use don't fulfill your conditions.

jacinabox 9y ago

With all due respect, that's crap. Blockchain means exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto defined it to mean in his seminal paper.

organsnyder 9y ago
"Means exactly"... to whom?
- astrodust 9y ago
  Coinbeards!
thisisit 9y ago
AFAIK, there is no definition of the word blockchain in the paper. The word came later. Happy to be corrected on this confusion.

SeanLuke 9y ago

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of which I am a participant -- which completely misunderstands the term. So AI gave up and switched to "Intelligent Agent", which was unfortunately an even more buzzword-compliant word. Now we started seeing "intelligent graphics agent" or "intelligent login page agent". Finally in the late '90s AI moved to "Autonomous Agent", a word straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. But it worked! Nobody outside of AI seems to use it: my theory is that most people don't really know exactly what autonomous means.

nixpulvis 9y ago
And just as AI is being overused to solve problems, so too is the "blockchain", inevitably making users lives worse in the long run.
- kbwt 9y ago
  > AI is being overused double-checks URL bar to make sure he is still on HN Downvote me all you want but I think the tech sector is currently suffering a veritable Machine Learning craze.
  - madenine 9y ago
    Give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that last bit was sarcasm?
camillomiller 9y ago
I mean... "crypto" !!! Can you imagine what cryptographers had to witness every day for a couple of years now, while the term was increasingly skewing towards a completely misleading meaning?

IncRnd 9y ago

The world "blockchain" is not really meaningless. Originally, a blockchain was a cryptographically chained chain of blocks in a proof of work system. It is still used that way, but it is also repurposed by other marketing schemes of many cryptocurrencies.

Sangermaine 9y ago

"Blockchain" means a 394% surge in your stock price: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in-a-name-u-k-stock-surges-394-on-blockchain-rebrand https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...

ryandrake 9y ago
Wow. Get a helmet folks. If you have any experience in this industry, you’ve seen this before and know how it ends...
rtkwe 9y ago
It also potentially means trouble with the SEC: https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-using-blockchain-name/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-u...

jbob2000 9y ago

It's about as meaningless as the word "communism". Tough to come up with a definition for that, but I still know what it "means". I guess you just have to read a bunch of different sources to get the full picture of what a blockchain is. It's kind of hard to communicate abstract ideas, so you need a variety of sources to paint the picture in your head.

sheepz 9y ago
I think communism is pretty well defined, in its ultimate form its the abolition of private property. This is in strict opposition to capitalism.

sheepz 9y ago

The blockchain hype is crazy. My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation. Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized etc.

cal5k 9y ago
Most of the people who spout such nonsense have no idea what they're talking about.
tylersmith 9y ago
Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming related media.
- betawaffle 9y ago
  Why can't we get hype for my friend Sparse Merkle Trees!
  - vinniejames 9y ago
    I'm hyped! When is the ICO?!
    - nkristoffersen 9y ago
      I almost spit out my coffee.
- tomtheelder 9y ago
  When people use the term blockchain they don't just mean a chain of state changes, they mean one that is backed by the sort of decentralized consensus model you described. The nomenclature isn't ideal, but the convenience of having one word to describe a somewhat complex topic wins out. I mean even the Wikipedia article on blockchain treats it this way [1], mentioning the consensus model in the initial blurb, and asserting that Satoshi invented the blockchain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

cornholio 9y ago

"Blockchain" has come to designate a very well defined concept: any technical and financial construction designed for speculative investment in unregulated securities out of reach of traditional authorities, usually having a very shady, deflationary or ponzi-like economic structure and strong money laundry potential. There is nothing fundamentally novel in distributed databases or their application in finance, we knew how to build "blockchains" since the 70`s. Satoshi's proof of work chains were the first anonymous implementation and that's what started the "crypto revolution".

Theodores 9y ago
I am of the same conclusion, however, the dreaded blockchain has those that are true believers. They will cite the Estonia example and they will cite Wikileaks and how that show was able to be kept on the road thanks to Bitcoin payments that were provided when Visa and their ilk in 'fiat land' decided to take their payment methods away. They will cite a land registry in some poor African country and tell you how good it is that their evil government cannot take the 'peasants' land away. If that is not enough to suppress your questioning of blockchain they will also roll out the commerce examples, e.g. the Walmart supply chain or whatever it is. You will be told about some of these '541t coins' (as you call them) in venerated ways, as if the goals of their founders put the efforts of everyone from Mother Theresa to Elon Musk in the shade as far as noble ambition for humanity is concerned. It is like they are trying to fool ninety percent of you for ninety percent of the time. Maybe you work in some computing discipline that is tediously dull compared to the parsnip science that is blockchain. Perhaps you are a small cog in supply chain management or maybe you are at the cutting edge of some new 3D printing technology that is revolutionising something important, e.g. dentistry. Up until now you have felt that you may have been pleasing your clients and delivering value not just to your company but to the wider world. You think deeply about any conceivable way that blockchain technology could revolutionise things for you. Or maybe do what you are doing already but better because of the magic blockchain. Even though you know your sector inside and out and your industry pretty well, your mind draws a blank. This is despite your code being used in many different parts of business applications. Your only conclusion is that there is no use whatsoever for blockchain in what you do. The blockchain bore who has not spent 'a career' doing some useful industry thing will be able to declare that you are just not getting it. Clearly your mind is just too limited, you are old in the head and unable to grasp what blockchain is about, how it works and how it is going to change everything. If you can't even see one use with all that stuff you know and work with then clearly you have not understood what blockchain is all about. By now you have also had time to think about the examples of blockchain use presented by the blockchain bore. With Wikileaks it was all a scam, it conveniently kicked off the Arab Spring, confirmed a few things we knew already, led to the Assange sideshow but lead to little change. Plus how much does it really cost to host a few web pages? £200000 a year in hosting fees? What fools they were to sell their bitcoinz! So what remains? As you say, gambling on unregulated securities. Paying for illegal things online is the second use for the dreaded blockchain.

AndrewDucker 9y ago

In general, if the transactions are gathered together in blocks, and it is blocks that are secured on the chain using cryptography, and it is designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records, the system qualifies as a blockchain That works for me.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tylersmith 9y ago
"designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records" is really the only thing important here as far as most people are concerned. The part about chaining blocks of data together is an implementation detail that may or may not last long term.

onion-soup 9y ago

Blockchain is meaningless because I bought at 18k and sold at 6k and now I can't buy Mochiatoo and type these fancy medium articles on my MacBook

Ajedi32 9y ago

git has been using a blockchain for the last 12 years, since long before Bitcoin: Each commit includes the hash of its parent commit. These commits form a chain. Changing the contents of any past commit would break the chain. Each user of the repository keeps a copy of the blockchain on their PC, and they can fetch new "blocks" from any other peer with `git fetch` or `git pull`. The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository.

lev99 9y ago
>long before Bitcoin To be fair, bitcoin is only about 37 months younger than git. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
- ashelmire 9y ago
  Other version control systems existed decades before git with similar principles (like CVS).
  - astrodust 9y ago
    CVS and its precursor RCS are in no way like git other than that they're version control systems.
tylersmith 9y ago
> The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository. Since git commits can easily be signed (and IMO should be most of the time), when I explain this I usually try to describe the consensus algorithm as being based on a set of known valid signers which I think further helps bridge the gap for people that understand "proof of authority" chains. https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority-Chains https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority...
tomtheelder 9y ago

CodexArcanum 9y ago

"Blockchain" is a data structure, a pretty well defined one. The buzzword is basically a synonym for "distributed (, decentralized?) system." Buzzwords arr usually annoying and misused. Object-Oriented Programming as practiced isn't really what was intended by the term. Memes with cat pictures are only vaguely a subset of Dawkins' memes. "The Cloud," ugh, let's not even.

brwsr 9y ago

Well, at least less meaningless than the widely used word "Economy" representing our financial system of waste, where consumers have to keep buying stuff to keep the system intact.

granaldo 9y ago

The killer app of blockchain is people trading coins in and out speculating on altcoins https://www.coingecko.com/en https://www.coingecko.com/en

philipodonnell 9y ago

> The term has become so widespread that it’s quickly losing meaning. I mean, that's how language works, right? Words mean things at certain points of time and then over time those things sometimes change and new words appear to better distinguish between the new things. Or words get contextualized within a specific industry and take on different meanings depending on your perspective. Such an evolution does not mean a word is "meaningless" it just indicates you'll have to provide more context in order to communicate your idea, which, again, is how language works.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

arisAlexis 9y ago

Anyone remember newsweek title "Internet? bah" around 1995?

flukus 9y ago
The internet is a communication platform that allows to send messages and share files from millions/billions of machines in a global network. A simple definition that explains it's capabilities, something blockchain lacks.
- arisAlexis 9y ago
  a blockchain is an immutable ledger that keeps transactions transparent and untampered. can be used for all money transactions and also for asset ownership and log transparency by governents. It is very simple.

xg15 9y ago

While the general gist is true, so far you could separate the buzzword uses from the non-buzzword uses pretty well by checking whether or not they use an article before the word "blockchain". Though this bit then kind of worries me: > Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream discourse, but they’ve also been joined by a concept that is widely circulated, but poorly understood: “the blockchain” or just “blockchain.” I fear they are learning...

bertil 9y ago
I honestly can’t tell from context whether the article is a sign of understanding. To be blunt, I’m not sure I can tell for people who talk about “(the) (I/i)nternet” either, and I met some of those who invented it.