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>There are many companies that are building distributed ledger with centralized authority. The fundamental innovation of the bitcoin protocol is how it made th

>There are many companies that are building distributed ledger with centralized authority. The fundamental innovation of the bitcoin protocol is how it made the blockchain, a traditionally centralized data structure invented in the early 1990s, a distributed append-only database using PoW consensus. It's incredibly inefficient, its unimaginable inefficiency is there to buy trust in a trustless peer-to-peer network. You're basically forcing every writer to cut down a pound of their own computational flesh to write to the database. How can this be necessary or useful in a trusted setting? why can you not rely on trust or traditional register-and-authenticate to write to the database? You're either using PoW consensus or you're not. If you're, you're not a central authority (unless the blockchain is somehow not an authoritative state and you're simply using it as a fancy bulletin board), if you're not, then whatever you're doing is different from what everbody else have been calling 'blockchain' since 13 years and you're just inviting confusion by calling it that.

ryani 4y ago
I think there's a difference between "blockchain + PoW" and "blockchain". Blockchain taken literally is just verification of history via hashing. It's a form of provenance that is hard to fake. Even if you are a central authority as to what transactions are being made, you can't rewrite history beyond any point that you've made publicly visible, without losing the trust of people who rely on you as a central authority, as to do so you would need to break the hashing algorithm.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
But I'm still rejecting the premise. There's TONS of small startups and large companies that are building blockchain for verification purposes and centralized or known limited authorities. Many of them are showing pragmatic promise in supply chain verification etc. Certainly they're calling it blockchain. What they're not calling it is Crypto currency. Are we saying they're synonymous and there's no other use case? I'm an outsider laughing at the whole Blockchain brouhaha, have zero horse in any race. I'm just amused endlessly how any given individual strongly believes their perspective is the only valid one and all others are simply "wrong", and heretics to the one true religion I mean bitcoin I mean blockchain I mean Crypto currency (Note how people are switching which one we are talking about in the thread. Due to various assumptions of equivalence ). Everything in this thread has firmed up my perspective.
- Banana699 4y ago
  >Are we saying they're synonymous and there's no other use case? No, we're saying that modern usage of "blockchain", dating back 13 years, is specifically about distributed trustless append-only ledgers, which is only useful for distributed authoritative state. Crypto currencies just happen to be a really good application for distributed authoritative state. You can do trusty applications with trustless ledgers, but that would be pointless and needlessly wasteful. You can do a centralized 1990s blockchain, but calling it 'blockchain', though technically true, just smells of marketing hype. >amused endlessly how any given individual strongly believes their perspective is the only valid one and all others are simply "wrong", and heretics to the one true religion Snark. >Note how people are switching which one we are talking about in the thread. Due to various assumptions of equivalence People on HN probably don't need to be reminded by the entry level 101 stuff about the difference between bitcoin and the blockchain, so your point is just trivial hair splitting. Bitcoin is a special case of crypto currencies, which is enabled by PoW driven blockchains, which without PoW are just boring old data structures. People switch between them because they are a natural fit that exist for and because of each other, and anyone of them alone either don't make any sense or make little sense. >Everything in this thread has firmed up my perspective. I don't see why you're so proud that you have learned nothing, but anything that makes you happy I guess.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Fair enough to the last point; but I did enter this thread open to be proven wrong, and then keep seeing sentences in the form of "which is only useful for distributed authoritative state", which is specifically my point. I have made reference several times to successful businesses, from startup to multinational, which are implementing blockchain without distributed authoritative state. Rather than specific discussion on validity of those use cases, all I am repeatedly seeing is casual dismissal without discussion. It is that repeated response that firms up my perspective. I also do not believe blockchain, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency are actually synonyms and easily interchangeable, in knowledgeable or not knowledgeable audiences. I do think they're deemed interchangeable for some subset of people, per my initial point, who believe them to be trivially synonymous; and who cannot themselves be educated or be opened minded enough or escape internal context to see how anybody else can possibly have a different perspective. Here, too, we have failed to reach each other, and I suppose to neither of our surprise either.

ryani 4y ago

I think there's a difference between "blockchain + PoW" and "blockchain". Blockchain taken literally is just verification of history via hashing. It's a form of provenance that is hard to fake. Even if you are a central authority as to what transactions are being made, you can't rewrite history beyond any point that you've made publicly visible, without losing the trust of people who rely on you as a central authority, as to do so you would need to break the hashing algorithm.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

But I'm still rejecting the premise. There's TONS of small startups and large companies that are building blockchain for verification purposes and centralized or known limited authorities. Many of them are showing pragmatic promise in supply chain verification etc. Certainly they're calling it blockchain. What they're not calling it is Crypto currency. Are we saying they're synonymous and there's no other use case? I'm an outsider laughing at the whole Blockchain brouhaha, have zero horse in any race. I'm just amused endlessly how any given individual strongly believes their perspective is the only valid one and all others are simply "wrong", and heretics to the one true religion I mean bitcoin I mean blockchain I mean Crypto currency (Note how people are switching which one we are talking about in the thread. Due to various assumptions of equivalence ). Everything in this thread has firmed up my perspective.

Banana699 4y ago
>Are we saying they're synonymous and there's no other use case? No, we're saying that modern usage of "blockchain", dating back 13 years, is specifically about distributed trustless append-only ledgers, which is only useful for distributed authoritative state. Crypto currencies just happen to be a really good application for distributed authoritative state. You can do trusty applications with trustless ledgers, but that would be pointless and needlessly wasteful. You can do a centralized 1990s blockchain, but calling it 'blockchain', though technically true, just smells of marketing hype. >amused endlessly how any given individual strongly believes their perspective is the only valid one and all others are simply "wrong", and heretics to the one true religion Snark. >Note how people are switching which one we are talking about in the thread. Due to various assumptions of equivalence People on HN probably don't need to be reminded by the entry level 101 stuff about the difference between bitcoin and the blockchain, so your point is just trivial hair splitting. Bitcoin is a special case of crypto currencies, which is enabled by PoW driven blockchains, which without PoW are just boring old data structures. People switch between them because they are a natural fit that exist for and because of each other, and anyone of them alone either don't make any sense or make little sense. >Everything in this thread has firmed up my perspective. I don't see why you're so proud that you have learned nothing, but anything that makes you happy I guess.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Fair enough to the last point; but I did enter this thread open to be proven wrong, and then keep seeing sentences in the form of "which is only useful for distributed authoritative state", which is specifically my point. I have made reference several times to successful businesses, from startup to multinational, which are implementing blockchain without distributed authoritative state. Rather than specific discussion on validity of those use cases, all I am repeatedly seeing is casual dismissal without discussion. It is that repeated response that firms up my perspective. I also do not believe blockchain, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency are actually synonyms and easily interchangeable, in knowledgeable or not knowledgeable audiences. I do think they're deemed interchangeable for some subset of people, per my initial point, who believe them to be trivially synonymous; and who cannot themselves be educated or be opened minded enough or escape internal context to see how anybody else can possibly have a different perspective. Here, too, we have failed to reach each other, and I suppose to neither of our surprise either.