9 ms·

Blockchain 101: The Simplest Guide You Will Ever Read

52 points by Anon84 5y ago

Imnimo 5y ago
Why is it that these garbage Bitcoin blogposts that read like they were written by GPT and contain no insightful information shoot right up to the front page? Is Velotio expecting that someone reading this would come away with a positive impression of their company?
greggeter 5y ago
I guarantee this is not the simplest guide...
jackling 5y ago
Tbh, the simplest guide is likely the original Bitcoin paper. Pretty easy read and goes into the exact details of what the Blockchain and BTC is.
trutannus 5y ago
I see a lot of these "idiots guides to blockchain" full of diagrams, analogies, and explanations. I think it really just speaks to the environment around the technology itself. Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology, but the market for it is based on making it sound like some panacea for every problem. Obfuscating the technology, and convincing the reader that "this is really complicated, but I can dumb it down for you" is a sure fire way to get them to trust you as "the expert" when you try to pitch them on some distributed ledger. The fact that all these articles come out of consulting firms (this one too) just drives that point home even further. The goal isn't to show you what blockchain is. The goal is to convince you the writer knows a lot about this complex, spooky but oh so lucrative technology. And that the writer can help you use it for $50,000 USD base consulting fee, extra for non-standard features. It's worth it, trust me. You can put Powered by Blockchain on your website!
- liuliu 5y ago
  And it is not easy really! But none of these fancy "Simplest Guide" seems care about the details. I finally started to spend some time to learn how Ethereum actually works (not conceptually or principally) last weekend. While I can compile the Sol file and "deploy" the contract. I don't even know at this point what JSON-RPC call looks like if I want to invoke the contract on the testnet, nor I figured out how to transfer money between addresses with only JSON-RPC call, not coding up a new contract.
- yumraj 5y ago
  Exactly, at its core blockchain is very simple. What I would really like to see is a paper/article/study where Blockchain based solution is demonstrably superior, or ideally the only solution, when compared to traditional, AKA non-blockchain based, solution. I have yet to see one of those.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    > I have yet to see one of those That's because a lot of the supposed benefits are ideological, as opposed to technological. You end up having to sacrifice a superior technological solution for one which better aligns with some specific ideological goal (eg: decentralization, non-state money, censorship-resilience). Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time.
    - coralreef 5y ago
      > Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time. What's that mean? If efficacy trumps ideology, then why do cryptos exist?
      - trutannus 5y ago
        Just because something exists does not negate the existence of the tradeoff. For example, not a single nation dropped their paper fiat money for cryptocurrencies as their primary exchange medium. That's because the advantage is ideological. Cryptocurrencies are superior to fiat money only if you accept the ideological basis for them. The advantage of fiat money now massively outweighs the advantages offered by crypto by orders of magnitude. For now, having actual cash in my hand trumps having tokens in a wallet in at least 99% of cases. You can't buy airline tickets with bitcoins, but with USD, or EUR, or any other fiat, you can. Even if you could buy one or two, with fiat you can buy any.
        sjtindell 5y ago
        Ethereum is a totally open source, globally decentralized compute infrastructure that executes programs. To say that it gets its value purely from ideology doesn't seem right at all. That is a tangible, valuable development in computer science that is being leveraged more and more.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology The merkle tree part is fairly simple, agreed. The decentralized consensus part is anything but.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    The algorithm behind it is complex, but for any technical administrator or technical developer, they will never come in contact with it. Based on that, for 99% of people who are not developing blockchains from scratch, but using something like Hyperledger Burrow or another existing blockchain, it's not a visible complexity. One that can be summed up as "there's an algorithm under-the-hood which will ensure consensus, see the documentation appendix 1 to find out more".
yupper32 5y ago
It seems like there are always massive difficulties with coming up with use cases for blockchain that central authorities/legal frameworks don't already solve perfectly fine or better. > "What if one wins the bet saying 10000$ and at the time of payment, he doesn't respond." Why not contact the next bidder, or redo the auction? > "online games like tic-tac-toe, where both players will deposit `X` amount in the smart contract" > No one controls your game > There is no way one can cheat > No frauds, the winner always gets a reward. Are these actually issues in real life? Online gambling has been a successful business for decades.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Essentially, the application of the blockchain is preventing centralized authorities from doing thing you don't like or circumvent centralized authorities effort to stop your activities (centralized authorities can't reduce the value of bitcoins by printing and, currently, centralized can't stop criminal transactions using bitcoins - but stay tuned). Centralized authorities have plenty of problems. The Fed supported financial markets over the last twenty years using "quantitative easing", printing money, and that money has tended to go to the wealthiest sector. But bitcoin tends to help not "the little guy" but a sufficiently powerful medium-sized-guy who aims to be even more unfettered than large financial capital is now.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    I actually meant central authority in the software sense, not in the government sense. I'm talking about blockchain as a technology, not necessarily bitcoin. Though of course bitcoin is a pretty successful implementation of blockchain. It's not like bitcoin can't be regulated by governments.
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      Sorry, didn't realize your usage. That said, I think there's a relationship between the "blockchain as application" question and the "bitcoin as economic/political system" question. Without the cryptographic and consensus parts, blockchain is just a ledger and obviously could be more easily. The only advantage that a ledger coming from a blockchain has over a conventional ledger is that you know the blockchain was (probably) obtained with this ongoing voting/consensus protocol and the main impact is you know the result is correct and wasn't imposed by some central authority.
pezzana 5y ago
> Note: Ethereum smart contract is the code that is deployed over Ethereum blockchain. It is written as a transaction on the block so no one can alter the logic. This is also known as Code is Law. By bringing up Ethereum smart contracts and not Bitcoin smart contracts, the article implies that Bitcoin does not support smart contracts. But it has done so since its launch in 2009. The term "smart contract" was coined by Nick Szabo. From Wikipedia: > Smart contracts were first proposed in the early 1990s by Nick Szabo, who coined the term, using it to refer to "a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract Bitcoin implements smart contracts in part through "Script," the custom Forth-like language: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script No doubt for marketing purposes, the myth that "Bitcoin doesn't do smart contracts" continues to be propagated. Reading the two Wikipedia articles clearly demonstrates the fallacy of this idea.
- adfgaertyqer 5y ago
  How did we let people get away with the term "smart contract" in the first place? They are automated, but they sure as Hell aren't smart compared to an ordinary contract. They are simplistic, limited, and fragile.
plondon514 5y ago
The lesson that really made me finally understand how blockchains work was Anders Brownworth's "Blockchain Demo"[1]. He builds up a blockchain through interactive steps starting from a hash function, to mining, to coinbase transactions. Highly recommend. [1] https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/ https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/
axby 5y ago
I really liked this video by 3Blue1Brown explaining how blockchain works: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 Things that I didn't realize until I watched the video: * "Mining" bitcoin means processing transactions for other people. Miners do time consuming operations to process transactions. I had never heard of 3Blue1Brown before someone showed me that video, but he has a bunch of other good math videos. I liked the one about pi showing up in weird places.
- axby 5y ago
  Specifically, he doesn't have any incentive to hype up Bitcoin to get you to buy it, at least as far as I know.

52 points by Anon84 5y ago

Why is it that these garbage Bitcoin blogposts that read like they were written by GPT and contain no insightful information shoot right up to the front page? Is Velotio expecting that someone reading this would come away with a positive impression of their company?

greggeter 5y ago

I guarantee this is not the simplest guide...

jackling 5y ago

Tbh, the simplest guide is likely the original Bitcoin paper. Pretty easy read and goes into the exact details of what the Blockchain and BTC is.

trutannus 5y ago

I see a lot of these "idiots guides to blockchain" full of diagrams, analogies, and explanations. I think it really just speaks to the environment around the technology itself. Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology, but the market for it is based on making it sound like some panacea for every problem. Obfuscating the technology, and convincing the reader that "this is really complicated, but I can dumb it down for you" is a sure fire way to get them to trust you as "the expert" when you try to pitch them on some distributed ledger. The fact that all these articles come out of consulting firms (this one too) just drives that point home even further. The goal isn't to show you what blockchain is. The goal is to convince you the writer knows a lot about this complex, spooky but oh so lucrative technology. And that the writer can help you use it for $50,000 USD base consulting fee, extra for non-standard features. It's worth it, trust me. You can put Powered by Blockchain on your website!

liuliu 5y ago
And it is not easy really! But none of these fancy "Simplest Guide" seems care about the details. I finally started to spend some time to learn how Ethereum actually works (not conceptually or principally) last weekend. While I can compile the Sol file and "deploy" the contract. I don't even know at this point what JSON-RPC call looks like if I want to invoke the contract on the testnet, nor I figured out how to transfer money between addresses with only JSON-RPC call, not coding up a new contract.
yumraj 5y ago
Exactly, at its core blockchain is very simple. What I would really like to see is a paper/article/study where Blockchain based solution is demonstrably superior, or ideally the only solution, when compared to traditional, AKA non-blockchain based, solution. I have yet to see one of those.
- trutannus 5y ago
  > I have yet to see one of those That's because a lot of the supposed benefits are ideological, as opposed to technological. You end up having to sacrifice a superior technological solution for one which better aligns with some specific ideological goal (eg: decentralization, non-state money, censorship-resilience). Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time.
  - coralreef 5y ago
    > Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time. What's that mean? If efficacy trumps ideology, then why do cryptos exist?
    - trutannus 5y ago
      Just because something exists does not negate the existence of the tradeoff. For example, not a single nation dropped their paper fiat money for cryptocurrencies as their primary exchange medium. That's because the advantage is ideological. Cryptocurrencies are superior to fiat money only if you accept the ideological basis for them. The advantage of fiat money now massively outweighs the advantages offered by crypto by orders of magnitude. For now, having actual cash in my hand trumps having tokens in a wallet in at least 99% of cases. You can't buy airline tickets with bitcoins, but with USD, or EUR, or any other fiat, you can. Even if you could buy one or two, with fiat you can buy any.
      - sjtindell 5y ago
        Ethereum is a totally open source, globally decentralized compute infrastructure that executes programs. To say that it gets its value purely from ideology doesn't seem right at all. That is a tangible, valuable development in computer science that is being leveraged more and more.
ur-whale 5y ago
> Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology The merkle tree part is fairly simple, agreed. The decentralized consensus part is anything but.
- trutannus 5y ago
  The algorithm behind it is complex, but for any technical administrator or technical developer, they will never come in contact with it. Based on that, for 99% of people who are not developing blockchains from scratch, but using something like Hyperledger Burrow or another existing blockchain, it's not a visible complexity. One that can be summed up as "there's an algorithm under-the-hood which will ensure consensus, see the documentation appendix 1 to find out more".

yupper32 5y ago

It seems like there are always massive difficulties with coming up with use cases for blockchain that central authorities/legal frameworks don't already solve perfectly fine or better. > "What if one wins the bet saying 10000$ and at the time of payment, he doesn't respond." Why not contact the next bidder, or redo the auction? > "online games like tic-tac-toe, where both players will deposit `X` amount in the smart contract" > No one controls your game > There is no way one can cheat > No frauds, the winner always gets a reward. Are these actually issues in real life? Online gambling has been a successful business for decades.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Essentially, the application of the blockchain is preventing centralized authorities from doing thing you don't like or circumvent centralized authorities effort to stop your activities (centralized authorities can't reduce the value of bitcoins by printing and, currently, centralized can't stop criminal transactions using bitcoins - but stay tuned). Centralized authorities have plenty of problems. The Fed supported financial markets over the last twenty years using "quantitative easing", printing money, and that money has tended to go to the wealthiest sector. But bitcoin tends to help not "the little guy" but a sufficiently powerful medium-sized-guy who aims to be even more unfettered than large financial capital is now.
- yupper32 5y ago
  I actually meant central authority in the software sense, not in the government sense. I'm talking about blockchain as a technology, not necessarily bitcoin. Though of course bitcoin is a pretty successful implementation of blockchain. It's not like bitcoin can't be regulated by governments.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Sorry, didn't realize your usage. That said, I think there's a relationship between the "blockchain as application" question and the "bitcoin as economic/political system" question. Without the cryptographic and consensus parts, blockchain is just a ledger and obviously could be more easily. The only advantage that a ledger coming from a blockchain has over a conventional ledger is that you know the blockchain was (probably) obtained with this ongoing voting/consensus protocol and the main impact is you know the result is correct and wasn't imposed by some central authority.

pezzana 5y ago

> Note: Ethereum smart contract is the code that is deployed over Ethereum blockchain. It is written as a transaction on the block so no one can alter the logic. This is also known as Code is Law. By bringing up Ethereum smart contracts and not Bitcoin smart contracts, the article implies that Bitcoin does not support smart contracts. But it has done so since its launch in 2009. The term "smart contract" was coined by Nick Szabo. From Wikipedia: > Smart contracts were first proposed in the early 1990s by Nick Szabo, who coined the term, using it to refer to "a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract Bitcoin implements smart contracts in part through "Script," the custom Forth-like language: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script No doubt for marketing purposes, the myth that "Bitcoin doesn't do smart contracts" continues to be propagated. Reading the two Wikipedia articles clearly demonstrates the fallacy of this idea.

adfgaertyqer 5y ago
How did we let people get away with the term "smart contract" in the first place? They are automated, but they sure as Hell aren't smart compared to an ordinary contract. They are simplistic, limited, and fragile.

plondon514 5y ago

The lesson that really made me finally understand how blockchains work was Anders Brownworth's "Blockchain Demo"[1]. He builds up a blockchain through interactive steps starting from a hash function, to mining, to coinbase transactions. Highly recommend. [1] https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/ https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/

axby 5y ago

I really liked this video by 3Blue1Brown explaining how blockchain works: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 Things that I didn't realize until I watched the video: * "Mining" bitcoin means processing transactions for other people. Miners do time consuming operations to process transactions. I had never heard of 3Blue1Brown before someone showed me that video, but he has a bunch of other good math videos. I liked the one about pi showing up in weird places.

axby 5y ago
Specifically, he doesn't have any incentive to hype up Bitcoin to get you to buy it, at least as far as I know.