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> This was the missing building block that was necessary to build a decentral cryptocurrency. Indeed. But if that's not what you want then you can drop that bi
by lucozade 8y ago
> This was the missing building block that was necessary to build a decentral cryptocurrency.
Indeed. But if that's not what you want then you can drop that bit and use the rest.
If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely.
But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). What Bitcoin did was publicize the techniques and, crucially, show that the interesting bits work well.
Of course, if you choose to use a definition of blockchain that involves trustlessness then the usage I described isn't blockchain, by definition. By I tend to use Satoshi's definition, more or less, which is orthogonal to the idea of trust.
- wolfgke 8y ago> If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. > But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). My opinion on this topic rather is: everything (except how to build decentralized trust) has been known for a long time. It is also known for a very long time that these techniques work well (otherwise Satoshi Nakamoto would never have come up with the idea to make them a central piece of Bitcoin). The central reason why it wasn't implemented before rather was that the people who knew about it did not have the charisma to convince "the people with money" that they should finance an implementation. For example, already in 1989, there was an attempt to build a digital anonymous (though not decentral as far as I know) currency called DigiCash by David Chaum: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=838558773 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=83... What happened to them? This company simply went bankrupt in 1998.
- Canada 8y agoDigiCash lacked the novel, decentralized proof of work consensus introduced by Bitcoin and I also suspect the general public was much better able to participate with 2008 broadband than what we had 1998