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Mining and proof-of-work are not advantages of Bitcoin. They're strategies to distribute costs of its feature set. (Well, plus mining is Bitcoin's key marketi

by patio11 12y ago

Mining and proof-of-work are not advantages of Bitcoin. They're strategies to distribute costs of its feature set. (Well, plus mining is Bitcoin's key marketing advantage -- it sets up incentive-compatible self-organizing distributed boiler rooms.) Being able to check that a ledger is accurate is a feature. It can be captured by a PHP app which uses MySQL transactions. This is, in fact, the most popular way to ensure ledger integrity even in the Bitcoin community (on exchanges, where transactions happen "off chain" because Bitcoin is wholly unsuitable for processing the type of transaction that mosts interests the Bitcoin community). The cost of verifying transactional integrity with MySQL transactions is, generally speaking, less than $900,000 per day, which is the present cost of verifying transactional integrity on the Bitcoin blockchain. I will respectfully decline to respond to the rest of your comment as it includes no statements which can be true or untrue about Bitcoin as a technical artifact.

kang 12y ago
That is what I have trying to explain. Mining and proof-of-work are not just strategies but necessary requirement. Blockchain is not just ledger. I'll try to explain. The banks have a ledger of all the notes in circulation maintaining a record of the number printed on the note. Now when I give you a note, and its fake, you can figure it out by checking the unique factors. But lets say that my 3D printer is advnced and printed it so accurate that it is same as a real dollar. Now the way to catch this note would be to check if the number on this note also exists on some other note. So basically proof-of-work is you checking for unique factors(not counterfeit) and then somehow check all the notes in the world that none of them have the same number(unique). Both of these are in addition to the use of mining as a way of distribution of wealth. Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm? Also, I mostly meant that you are paying too much attention to what the media is throwing at us, in the form of bitcoin and exchanges. As a thinker, forget bitcoin and its code and just think about blockchain. Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact.
- patio11 12y ago
  Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm? I find this part of the conversation to be uninteresting, primarily because it attempts to make a distinction between "Bitcoin" and "the blockchain" (despite the fact that the Bitcoin consensus blockchain as annointed by the Bitcoin Core client at this moment in time is the only one of the infinite number of possible blockchains which is cared about) but can't make a distinction between "algorithm" and "protocol". This leaves me in a position where I say "Some people call IE6 a protocol. While one could rigorously examine the entire possible space of inputs and outputs associated with IE6 and attempt to describe some set-of-rules which would resemble a protocol, this is not what we mean when we say 'protocol' and it is, importantly, not the source of the benefits which IE6 fans say when they claim that IE6 is a protocol." To which "Why don't you think IE6 is an algorithm?" is rather non-responsive. (IE6 is, vacuously, an algorithm. Whee.) Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact. I find it difficult to extract any signal about the reality which I live in from this statement. When I say "technical artifact" I usually want to imply something about the reality I live in. For example, calc.exe is a technical artifact: it actually exists, on yonder computer, and I can right now walk over to it and calculate 6+5 with a reasonable degree of confidence that this will enlighten me. I would also say the HTTP specs are a technical artifact: I, or anybody with modest technical capability, can read the specs, open up telnet, fire it at www.google.com on port 80, and then type in a predictable series of letters which results in search results presented in the middle of a lot of HTML. I do not know of any comparable fashion in which "the blockchain" actually exists as distinct from "the data structure embedded in the much-more-complicated series of operations that is Bitcoin Core."
  - moe 12y ago
    Bitcoin [...] is the only [...] blockchain which is cared about That is not correct. Bitcoin is by far the largest, but people also have non-trivial amounts in various alt-coins: http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ In terms of your Browser-analogy: Next to IE6 (Bitcoin) we also have Safari (Ripple), Firefox (Litecoin) and whole range of smaller players. They all speak dialects of the blockchain protocol.

by patio11 12y ago

kang 12y ago

That is what I have trying to explain. Mining and proof-of-work are not just strategies but necessary requirement. Blockchain is not just ledger. I'll try to explain. The banks have a ledger of all the notes in circulation maintaining a record of the number printed on the note. Now when I give you a note, and its fake, you can figure it out by checking the unique factors. But lets say that my 3D printer is advnced and printed it so accurate that it is same as a real dollar. Now the way to catch this note would be to check if the number on this note also exists on some other note. So basically proof-of-work is you checking for unique factors(not counterfeit) and then somehow check all the notes in the world that none of them have the same number(unique). Both of these are in addition to the use of mining as a way of distribution of wealth. Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm? Also, I mostly meant that you are paying too much attention to what the media is throwing at us, in the form of bitcoin and exchanges. As a thinker, forget bitcoin and its code and just think about blockchain. Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact.

patio11 12y ago
Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm? I find this part of the conversation to be uninteresting, primarily because it attempts to make a distinction between "Bitcoin" and "the blockchain" (despite the fact that the Bitcoin consensus blockchain as annointed by the Bitcoin Core client at this moment in time is the only one of the infinite number of possible blockchains which is cared about) but can't make a distinction between "algorithm" and "protocol". This leaves me in a position where I say "Some people call IE6 a protocol. While one could rigorously examine the entire possible space of inputs and outputs associated with IE6 and attempt to describe some set-of-rules which would resemble a protocol, this is not what we mean when we say 'protocol' and it is, importantly, not the source of the benefits which IE6 fans say when they claim that IE6 is a protocol." To which "Why don't you think IE6 is an algorithm?" is rather non-responsive. (IE6 is, vacuously, an algorithm. Whee.) Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact. I find it difficult to extract any signal about the reality which I live in from this statement. When I say "technical artifact" I usually want to imply something about the reality I live in. For example, calc.exe is a technical artifact: it actually exists, on yonder computer, and I can right now walk over to it and calculate 6+5 with a reasonable degree of confidence that this will enlighten me. I would also say the HTTP specs are a technical artifact: I, or anybody with modest technical capability, can read the specs, open up telnet, fire it at www.google.com on port 80, and then type in a predictable series of letters which results in search results presented in the middle of a lot of HTML. I do not know of any comparable fashion in which "the blockchain" actually exists as distinct from "the data structure embedded in the much-more-complicated series of operations that is Bitcoin Core."
- moe 12y ago
  Bitcoin [...] is the only [...] blockchain which is cared about That is not correct. Bitcoin is by far the largest, but people also have non-trivial amounts in various alt-coins: http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ In terms of your Browser-analogy: Next to IE6 (Bitcoin) we also have Safari (Ripple), Firefox (Litecoin) and whole range of smaller players. They all speak dialects of the blockchain protocol.