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Because those thousands of random people are deeply incentivized to keep the network running, while being mathematically prohibited from doing anything untoward
by Karunamon 4y ago
Because those thousands of random people are deeply incentivized to keep the network running, while being mathematically prohibited from doing anything untoward with data you send their way. The "trust" in this case is more about whether you believe the blockchain will be running and usable. The incentives and distributed nature of the system make for a very strong guarantee with more nines than any 1 provider in the world can reasonably promise or deliver.
- RC_ITR 4y agoI agree the block-chain structure and cryptography are cool, but why do 1000 people need to be deeply incentivized instead of 1?
- Karunamon 4y agoThe same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-east1 does: single points of failure suck. And this is a level of resiliency you automatically get by virtue of being on a public blockchain being used for other things.
- RC_ITR 4y ago>The same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-east1 So your argument is that the internet would be better if instead of the cloud, we had a bunch of tiny datacenters dispersed around the world? Didn't we do that for like the first 20 years of the Internet (you know, when it was a way way worse experience)? And couldn't a centralized operator do that anyway? Don't you remember how unreliable bittorrent peers were? You want to go back to that?