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In my opinion, decentralization is not the point of crypto-tech. Maybe it's some minor feature, but not the selling proposition. The major feature is the formal
by dorgo 9y ago
In my opinion, decentralization is not the point of crypto-tech. Maybe it's some minor feature, but not the selling proposition. The major feature is the formalisation of the concept of consensus. Forks are a manifestation of this feature. "a 51% attack on their own blockchain" is a major feature of crypto-tech. In the last century we would call this a revolution. In this century issues like this can be resolved enterily in software. It's an opt-in economy and in some years an opt-in society.
The only reason you think the cash in your portemonai is worth something is that everybody else things the same. As soon as everybody stops believing it, the paper in your wallet can still be used to make fire. Same goes for authorities. Judges, policemen, presidents are what they are because everybody believes it. We have already an informal consensus of who is a policeman and who is not. Most of the time it resolves to whether somebody wears the uniform. Crypto tech promises to make this verifiably. No need for uniforms.
- kerkeslager 9y ago> The major feature is the formalisation of the concept of consensus. Forks are a manifestation of this feature. "a 51% attack on their own blockchain" is a major feature of crypto-tech. In the last century we would call this a revolution. In this century issues like this can be resolved enterily in software. It's an opt-in economy and in some years an opt-in society. Huh? No. Distributed consensus was formalized in 1978 by Leslie Lamport and the first version of Paxos was introduced in 1989. If you're okay with centralization, Paxos or it's successor, Raft, are much faster and more scalable algorithms than blockchain, and have a wide variety of mature implementations.