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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, decentraliz
by 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 agoWhy can't we get hype for my friend Sparse Merkle Trees!
- vinniejames 9y agoI'm hyped! When is the ICO?!
- nkristoffersen 9y agoI almost spit out my coffee.
- tomtheelder 9y agoWhen 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
- tylersmith 9y ago"Distributed ledger" [1] is a far better term for here IMO. If there's quibbling about "distributed" or "decentralized" then just change those terms as appropriate for the system under discussion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger