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If the author is reading this, the most interesting thing about your article is that it creeps towards the recognition of something important (i.e. that data or

If the author is reading this, the most interesting thing about your article is that it creeps towards the recognition of something important (i.e. that data ordering and data permanence are quite different things) before it balks at the implications and adds unnecessary properties to its definition of a blockchain. This makes the piece come across ideological. As a case in point, you write that the public aspect of a blockchain is what ensures its permanence but that is not at all the case. The public aspect is what guarantees open access. Open access in turn guarantee decentralization under conditions where decentralization is economically feasible. The only thing that guarantees permanence is the economic incentive structure that pays participants to store and distribute data. We don't have a good taxonomy for discussing these ideas yet, but most people working on scale are beyond this. Ethereum is experimenting with rent. Bitcoin variants exist which have adjusted their genesis block manually. Some layer-two networks are designed be transient, while Saito uses a transient blockchain to put bandwidth-intensive applications directly the first layer. The direction of development in the space is tilting very clearly towards utility networks and disposable data-structures. The disagreement is over at what layer this needs to take place, and how to preserve things like open access while paying for things like bandwidth and storage.

berkes 8y ago
Thanks for your summary. Indeed it is very hard to explain these ideas, because so many terms are still vague, missing or explained in often contraditing ways. I think, indeed, that with "permanence" i've made the mistake to pull that together with "immutability". My first draft had them as different points, but I found that this made the explanation too complex. So I decided to go only for "immutability" and to move the "permanence" under there. In your definition of permanence (the correct one, BTW) this is not the same. Permanence needs economic incentives. As we can see with IPFS (and it not -yet- being permanent in practice). Immutability, however, needs (i) cryptography and (ii) conflict resolution and (iii) permanence. Which implies "being public". As I tried to explain. Or did I misunderstand your comment, and do you mean immutability as well as permanence?
- trevelyan 8y ago
  I really just wanted to comment because almost no-one gets what you wrote about the importance of data-ordering. So the piece started strong, but then felt like it started tripping over itself. On the permanence/immutability issue, I guess my opinion is that permanence is distinct from immutability and that while all blockchains require immutability, they can exist with varying degrees of data persistence. I tend to think bitcoin would be perfectly safe running on a 100 year chain with periodic hardforks to upgrade the genesis hash, for instance, and that it would be a bit strange to suggest that this wouldn't count as a blockchain, even if the trade-offs would make the network lose some properties of "digital gold". At a minimum, arguing otherwise would seem to imply that UBTC isn't a blockchain, which is obviously wrong.

berkes 8y ago

Thanks for your summary. Indeed it is very hard to explain these ideas, because so many terms are still vague, missing or explained in often contraditing ways. I think, indeed, that with "permanence" i've made the mistake to pull that together with "immutability". My first draft had them as different points, but I found that this made the explanation too complex. So I decided to go only for "immutability" and to move the "permanence" under there. In your definition of permanence (the correct one, BTW) this is not the same. Permanence needs economic incentives. As we can see with IPFS (and it not -yet- being permanent in practice). Immutability, however, needs (i) cryptography and (ii) conflict resolution and (iii) permanence. Which implies "being public". As I tried to explain. Or did I misunderstand your comment, and do you mean immutability as well as permanence?

trevelyan 8y ago
I really just wanted to comment because almost no-one gets what you wrote about the importance of data-ordering. So the piece started strong, but then felt like it started tripping over itself. On the permanence/immutability issue, I guess my opinion is that permanence is distinct from immutability and that while all blockchains require immutability, they can exist with varying degrees of data persistence. I tend to think bitcoin would be perfectly safe running on a 100 year chain with periodic hardforks to upgrade the genesis hash, for instance, and that it would be a bit strange to suggest that this wouldn't count as a blockchain, even if the trade-offs would make the network lose some properties of "digital gold". At a minimum, arguing otherwise would seem to imply that UBTC isn't a blockchain, which is obviously wrong.