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So Blockchain is a fancy word for something like a Git repository?
by hannob 6y ago
So Blockchain is a fancy word for something like a Git repository?
- throwaway9980 6y agoYes. See the sibling comment about Merkle trees.
- oblio 6y ago> Blockchain is a fancy word Blockchain is a funding key word. There, fixed that for you.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWe’re now in the phase where the underlying technical term is being diluted down to meaninglessness in order to dodge around the well publicized failures of specific examples.
- jcfrei 6y agoI'm absolutely aware of the shortcomings of the currently most popular blockchain technologies. But calling specific implementations (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) a failure when people are paying thousands of dollars each block to use it is pretty bold.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoI don't think something's success or failure hinges on whether rich people like it.
- thedudeabides5 6y agoWell, except for tradable financial assets...which are by their definition beauty contests for rich people’s saving/investment dollars.
- Retric 6y agoSuccess or failure of financial asset is independent of their current price, otherwise Bernie Madoff was providing a valuable financial product in 2007. It’s individual trades that depend on the price because they have finite endpoints. However, assets are owner independent and therefore based on their long term value proposition.
- ashtonkem 6y ago> But calling specific implementations (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) a failure when people are paying thousands of dollars each block to use it is pretty bold. And people were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for plush toys with the appropriate tags preserved in plastic. Bubbles are a thing, and the crowd can be wrong. To pretend otherwise is silly. More fundamentally, the original promise of Bitcoin was that it would act like a currency. It has failed at this. You can tell because all of the advocates have shifted over from “money of the future” to “it’s a store of value”; a subtle admission that it’s not actually functioning like a currency.
- meowkit 6y agoAnd there are cryptos like Nano that fulfill this original promise. Technology evolves over time. Just because its not perfect at the first go, doesn’t mean it should go in the trash.
- ashtonkem 6y ago> Just because it’s not perfect at the first go, doesn’t mean it should go in the trash The converse is also true; just because it’s an improvement over past failures doesn’t mean that it’ll actually work. My issue with crypto has always been fundamental; I don’t think crypto fans really have a good grasp on what motivates the average person, because most crypto fans[0] are ideologues, and like many ideologues they struggle to recognize that not everyone shares their values. Decentralized and trust-less speaks to engineers, but your average person has no idea what that means and doesn’t really care either. Plus a lot of the consequences of crypto currency design are absolute anti-features from a consumer perspective; nobody wants to find out that losing their password means that they’re broke, or that they can’t reverse a fraudulent charge. Your average consumer wants those features, and is willing to give up decentralization, something they didn’t value, to get it. 0 - At least those fans of crypto that want to see it used as currency. As compared to those crypto fans that want to do whatever it takes to make the number go up.
- jakupovic 6y ago
- jcfrei 6y agoNo, I see blockchain as a social technology. The current, trusted system for tracking ownership is a state-governed system. The account balances we have, share registers of companies, residential property registries, etc. Blockchains offer an alternative system (outside of government run systems) to keep track of ownership. Now, in my opinion there's little to gain of replacing those existing systems - they are working just fine. But for a new asset class (notably digital assets) blockchains will work very well. Again, the important change is the change in social consensus. If you told someone 5 years ago that you hold a certain token on the Ethereum blockchain nobody would have cared. If you today ran a registry of tokens on your github repository nobody would care. But if you hold a token today on the Ethereum blockchain then people are willing to pay for it.
- GuB-42 6y agoThat's a question I asked myself a few times. The fundamental part of a blockchain is that each block signs the previous block, making it very difficult to rewrite history. And it is exactly what git does. We could implement a cryptocurrency on a git repository. Just commit and push 'I am X, here is the proof, send Y gitcoins to Z' whenever you want to do that. The only thing git is lacking compared to say, bitcoin, is a builtin way to select the "origin" repository. In most git-based projects, there is a global consensus on a central location. In bitcoin, it is automatically selected based on who wasted to most computing power on a pointless cryptography problem.