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> 3. I think if you study Bitcoin, you realize that the currency is an application of the protocol. Bitcoin is actually a chain of digital signatures. Each “bit
by kaoD 13y ago
> 3. I think if you study Bitcoin, you realize that the currency is an application of the protocol. Bitcoin is actually a chain of digital signatures. Each “bitcoin” is just a ledger of all transactions of that “coin.” In other words, applications that have nothing to do with currency or payments (e.g., like Bitmessage) can exist.
I disagree.
Despite the name resemblance, Bitmessage is not really comparable with Bitcoin. I think about Bitmessage more like Freenet for messages. It's just a p2p temporary distributed datastore.
In fact BM has no blockchain and there's no concept of mining (which would not make economic sense since you wouldn't get rewarded for it). Relaying messages to get yours relayed is much cheaper, and messages get deleted after 2 days, so there's no huge blockchain to maintain.
The real Bitcoin breakthrough was the blockchain and POW as an agreement protocol, and I don't think that's applicable outside of currencies because mining is very costly and the entire security relies on it.
- jbackus 13y agoActually there is a proof of work concept. You have to compute a partial hash collision that is proportional to the size of the message you want to send. The reason Bitcoin clients hold the full blockchain is to acheive distribution and so that wallet balances can be computed by walking over the entire chain and summing. Bitmessage only needs the distributed aspect so its partial streams are good enough and less expensive for a user to get started.
- kaoD 13y agoI'm aware of BM's POW but it's in no way related to Bitcoin's use of it. Bitmessage's POW is not a way to reach consensus about a chain of events. POW as a means to limit email spam messages was already proposed with Hashcash in 1997. BM just added a P2P distributed message database to provide decentralization. The POW was no breakthrough from Bitcoin either: IMO Bitcoin's core concept (and the real genius) is the distributed agreement protocol, which is nowhere found in Bitmessage. That's what I meant with "POW as an agreement protocol", not just "POW", and why I think Bitmessage does not really benefit from Bitcoin's protocol.