> You could nit-pick all morning if it was strictly "true" in every which way, but this kind of selective simplification is what drives understanding. That it

> You could nit-pick all morning if it was strictly "true" in every which way, but this kind of selective simplification is what drives understanding. That it fundamentally isn't true is the basis of the 51% attack which is hardly a "nit". Overall I find this explanation too vague and abstract to be useful. A blockchain is a computer? Sure, you could perhaps squint and say that it is so in an abstract sense, but it doesn't really tell me anything about it. More concretely, you could say that it's a distributed append-only data structure where conflicts in additions are resolved using a consensus algorithm. You could then go on to explain how this data structure can be used to implement something like a public ledger or a contract protocol. I realize that the full article somewhat touches on these subjects between talk about "commitment computers" and "idea mazes". By going for a more concrete explanation, the weaknesses of the network would be evident and such simple falsehoods as the idea that a blockchain "removes the need to trust anything other than code" would not be propagated.