12 ms·

is there a spec for block chain? i'm confused by what people mean by block chain and the only thing i can find is this loosely written white paper

icebraining 9y ago
The original Bitcoin paper is essentially a description of the blockchain.
- fruitzome 9y ago
  A blockchain is just 1 of the innovations that went into the bitcoin protocol. Finally people are seeing that a blockchain without POW or censorship resistance is bullshit. This is why bitcoin (cash) is more important than ever.
  - cglace 9y ago
    Is bitcoin really important? I think most people have no practical use for it.
    - fruitzome 9y ago
      2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them. I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin. Many other people are censored. Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation. Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)
      - dlp211 9y ago
        So these people are essentially poor and don't have access to trade and Banking, but they are going to have access to the blockchain, hardware wallets, and the various other technologies they need, and this will all happen before banks or mobile app payment systems are able to capture the market? Call me a skeptic.
        cachvico 9y ago
        Yes. The implication is that the 2B unbanked will get access to a cheap Android, and therefore ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees, before the banana state fixes their massively corrupt government.
        acdha 9y ago
        > ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?
        cachvico 9y ago
        Ethereum and Litecoin among others offer fast and cheap transactions today, and efforts are underway to solve this problem for Bitcoin (e.g. Lightning Network). There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.
        acdha 9y ago
        Fast and cheap are still not synonyms for instant and free but that’s at least possibly closer to one day being competitive with the existing mobile systems. Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.
        fruitzome 9y ago
        A lot of the world lives on less than $2 a day. You can buy a cheap refurbished Android phone for $5. And you have SMS cointext.io to transact for instance. You do not need a hardware wallet, only to memorize the 12 word seed phrase. Just look at the set of users who have phones without adequate banking. You will see this is measured in the billions of people. The best hope to lift people out of poverty is for us to transact and deal with these people.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retra 9y ago
        What are you buying from rural South Africa that's worth $2?
        fruitzome 9y ago
        It's none of your business. But there was some music I paid for online because I liked the sound. It's awesome that I'm able to support artists and creators across the globe and make a difference in someone's life (as they made a difference in mine). Transaction cost? 1 cent with Bitcoin Cash. They kept $1.99
      - KirinDave 9y ago
        Bitcoin is sooooo important that everyone has devised an alternative off-chain protocol that actually does peer-to-peer scaling and in no way actually needs bitcoin except as a reconciliation strategy. Yeah wow, we're all impressed.
        zodiac 9y ago
        What's wrong with off-chain scaling?
        KirinDave 9y ago
        Nothing, unless you have an agenda to make the blockchain relevant. I don't, so I do all my scaling off-chain.
        zodiac 9y ago
        I'm confused by this, as well as by your parent comment. Could you make your claims more directly so I can understand them?
        KirinDave 9y ago
        What's the point of having a chain at all? It's not a unqiue or prigiledged BFT solution. It has some nice but not essential properties. If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain and it's phenomenal cost at all.
        zodiac 9y ago
        > What's the point of having a chain at all? Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated. > If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems. Obviously, you need on chain consensus and guarantees so that the payoff matrix for the offchain game is setup correctly so that honest behaviour in the offchain game is a Nash equilibrium. So that when I "pay" you some money in a payment channel you really have received it in a certain sense, and offchain payments are basically as secure as on chain ones.
      - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Right, people buying something for $2 in rural Africa can afford to pay a $30 fee to make that transaction happen. They definitely don't use something like M-Pesa instead.
- untog 9y ago
  > There are many uses for blockchain outside of cryptocurrency > What is a good spec for blockchain? > Bitcoin
ropeadopepope 9y ago
Here's a decent writeup on the blockchain: https://infogalactic.com/info/Blockchain https://infogalactic.com/info/Blockchain
EthanHeilman 9y ago
There is no consensus definition of what a blockchain is. In fact the Satoshi whitepaper that introduced Bitcoin does not even use the word blockchain it talks about a hash chain of blocks a concept which predates Bitcoin by ~30 years. The real innovation of Bitcoin was to use PoW to both limit Sybil attacks and to make additions to the hash chain computationally expensive to revert. Often however when people talk about blockchains they are talking about systems which don't use PoW at all. Like end-to-end encryption or peer-to-peer networks blockchain describes a cloud of concepts and technologies. A better terminology would be DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology).
- jason_slack 9y ago
  If so many companies are doing things for the blockchain, are they storing in the same blockchain as bitcoin or are companies creating more blockchains and needing miners to help mine, etc,
  - EthanHeilman 9y ago
    We are still very much in the experimental phase of the technology and companies are taking many different approaches. Some companies are using Ethereum as their blockchain so they don't have to build and operate one. Other companies are launching blockchains by which they mean a ledger created by a set of trusted validators running a BFT algorithm (see Distributed Systems). Systems built on a trusted set of validators don't need miners as they don't use PoW.
    - jason_slack 9y ago
      That makes sense. Thanks for explaining. They really just mean a ledger. Doesn't one lose the trust if the ledger is not distributed and verified by outsiders? Using a trusted set of validators, I assume is an internal operation. They aren't asking "Joe Nobody" off the street to become a trusted validator...
      - EthanHeilman 9y ago

icebraining 9y ago

The original Bitcoin paper is essentially a description of the blockchain.

fruitzome 9y ago
A blockchain is just 1 of the innovations that went into the bitcoin protocol. Finally people are seeing that a blockchain without POW or censorship resistance is bullshit. This is why bitcoin (cash) is more important than ever.
- cglace 9y ago
  Is bitcoin really important? I think most people have no practical use for it.
  - fruitzome 9y ago
    2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them. I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin. Many other people are censored. Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation. Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)
    - dlp211 9y ago
      So these people are essentially poor and don't have access to trade and Banking, but they are going to have access to the blockchain, hardware wallets, and the various other technologies they need, and this will all happen before banks or mobile app payment systems are able to capture the market? Call me a skeptic.
      - cachvico 9y ago
        Yes. The implication is that the 2B unbanked will get access to a cheap Android, and therefore ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees, before the banana state fixes their massively corrupt government.
        acdha 9y ago
        > ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?
        cachvico 9y ago
        Ethereum and Litecoin among others offer fast and cheap transactions today, and efforts are underway to solve this problem for Bitcoin (e.g. Lightning Network). There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.
        acdha 9y ago
        Fast and cheap are still not synonyms for instant and free but that’s at least possibly closer to one day being competitive with the existing mobile systems. Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.
      - fruitzome 9y ago
        A lot of the world lives on less than $2 a day. You can buy a cheap refurbished Android phone for $5. And you have SMS cointext.io to transact for instance. You do not need a hardware wallet, only to memorize the 12 word seed phrase. Just look at the set of users who have phones without adequate banking. You will see this is measured in the billions of people. The best hope to lift people out of poverty is for us to transact and deal with these people.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retra 9y ago
      What are you buying from rural South Africa that's worth $2?
      - fruitzome 9y ago
        It's none of your business. But there was some music I paid for online because I liked the sound. It's awesome that I'm able to support artists and creators across the globe and make a difference in someone's life (as they made a difference in mine). Transaction cost? 1 cent with Bitcoin Cash. They kept $1.99
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      Bitcoin is sooooo important that everyone has devised an alternative off-chain protocol that actually does peer-to-peer scaling and in no way actually needs bitcoin except as a reconciliation strategy. Yeah wow, we're all impressed.
      - zodiac 9y ago
        What's wrong with off-chain scaling?
        KirinDave 9y ago
        Nothing, unless you have an agenda to make the blockchain relevant. I don't, so I do all my scaling off-chain.
        zodiac 9y ago
        I'm confused by this, as well as by your parent comment. Could you make your claims more directly so I can understand them?
        KirinDave 9y ago
        What's the point of having a chain at all? It's not a unqiue or prigiledged BFT solution. It has some nice but not essential properties. If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain and it's phenomenal cost at all.
        zodiac 9y ago
        > What's the point of having a chain at all? Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated. > If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems. Obviously, you need on chain consensus and guarantees so that the payoff matrix for the offchain game is setup correctly so that honest behaviour in the offchain game is a Nash equilibrium. So that when I "pay" you some money in a payment channel you really have received it in a certain sense, and offchain payments are basically as secure as on chain ones.
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      Right, people buying something for $2 in rural Africa can afford to pay a $30 fee to make that transaction happen. They definitely don't use something like M-Pesa instead.
untog 9y ago
> There are many uses for blockchain outside of cryptocurrency > What is a good spec for blockchain? > Bitcoin

ropeadopepope 9y ago

Here's a decent writeup on the blockchain: https://infogalactic.com/info/Blockchain https://infogalactic.com/info/Blockchain

EthanHeilman 9y ago

There is no consensus definition of what a blockchain is. In fact the Satoshi whitepaper that introduced Bitcoin does not even use the word blockchain it talks about a hash chain of blocks a concept which predates Bitcoin by ~30 years. The real innovation of Bitcoin was to use PoW to both limit Sybil attacks and to make additions to the hash chain computationally expensive to revert. Often however when people talk about blockchains they are talking about systems which don't use PoW at all. Like end-to-end encryption or peer-to-peer networks blockchain describes a cloud of concepts and technologies. A better terminology would be DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology).

jason_slack 9y ago
If so many companies are doing things for the blockchain, are they storing in the same blockchain as bitcoin or are companies creating more blockchains and needing miners to help mine, etc,
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
  We are still very much in the experimental phase of the technology and companies are taking many different approaches. Some companies are using Ethereum as their blockchain so they don't have to build and operate one. Other companies are launching blockchains by which they mean a ledger created by a set of trusted validators running a BFT algorithm (see Distributed Systems). Systems built on a trusted set of validators don't need miners as they don't use PoW.
  - jason_slack 9y ago
    That makes sense. Thanks for explaining. They really just mean a ledger. Doesn't one lose the trust if the ledger is not distributed and verified by outsiders? Using a trusted set of validators, I assume is an internal operation. They aren't asking "Joe Nobody" off the street to become a trusted validator...
    - EthanHeilman 9y ago