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Essentially, the application of the blockchain is preventing centralized authorities from doing thing you don't like or circumvent centralized authorities effor
by 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 agoI 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 agoSorry, 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.