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https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/946886702932557824 https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/946886702932557824 https://twitter.com/hikari_no_yume/status/933

• deleted 8y ago
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• pdpi 8y ago
  Git histories absolutely are something in the blockchain family of data structures, yes, but they’re not a blockchain proper: the defining chacteristic of such data structures is that they use hashes instead of pointers as references to elements. Merkle trees and blockchains are analogous to trees and singly linked lists, respectively, while git histories are DAGs. Where things got murky was that the cryptocurrency crowd started to talk about the blockchain that backs Bitcoin in terms where the consensus layer was left implicit (our own Linux vs GNU/Linux story if you want to see it that way), then people less knowledgeable about cryptography started pouring in, they learned a bunch of new terminology, and along the way missed the nuance about the consensus layer being left implicit, so in their minds (and the world at large, eventually) blockchain means the combined data structure and consensus layer — It’s fairly obvious that git doesn’t meet the requirements for this definition of “blockchain”.
• greggyb 8y ago
  Git has a great proof-of-work and consensus mechanism in its original application. Proof-of-work is code that passes tests and consensus is "Linus said 'ok'".