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I did assume that people meant a decentralized distributed ledger when saying blockchain. In that regard, git is lacking replication, consensus and validation,
by didibus 5y ago
I did assume that people meant a decentralized distributed ledger when saying blockchain. In that regard, git is lacking replication, consensus and validation, all of which are key to a decentralized distributed ledger.
Git has some of the properties you'd want, but not all, could you implement more things on top of git to create a blockchain, possibly yes, but that doesn't make git a blockchain.
I like the wikipedia qualification for this:
> Logically, a blockchain can be seen as consisting of several layers:[21]
> infrastructure (hardware) networking (node discovery, information propagation and verification)
> consensus (proof of work, proof of stake)
> data (blocks, transactions)
> application (smart contracts/dApps, if applicable)
- avianlyric 5y agoGit is a distributed version control system, by design and definition it's decentralized. Lacks replication? What do you think the git clone and fetch commands do? Validation is easily turned on, you can tell git to traverse the tree it pulls and make sure it's cryptographic integrity is upheld, that just a config flag. Consensus is that "hard" one, but even that has already been solved on community-by-community basis. For the Linux kernel the community consensus is that Linus git repo is truth, but that can easily be changed if the community wanted to. Certainly you need a few extra bits and bobs to build a proper cryptocurrency on top of git. But all the basics are there, and for many applications a git repository would be a perfect substitute for blockchain.