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The strength of bitcoin is the blockchain. It prevents you from going back and rewriting history--you can only append to the current block. In Git you can chan

• DSMan195276 11y ago
  I feel like that's not really a fair statement. With git, if you change the history, it effectively tosses out the old tree and creates a new one with new hashes. You're really not modifying the old history, you're saying "Get rid of the current history tree and create a new one with this change in it". You can do the same with Bitcoin, you could modify your copy of the blockchain to insert some new transaction, and then replay all the subsequent transactions that happened on the blockchain (All of these transactions get different hashes). The result for both is the same, both of them will throw errors if you attempt to pull data from a git repo or blockchain which has invalid hashes that don't match the ones you already have - This is why it's a problem if someone decides to use rebase on a public branch that people are pulling from, the hashes will change and people will get errors when they try to pull because the histories don't match.
  • fabianfabian 11y ago
    The difference is that for the git chains it is not possible for anyone to independently verify what the true chain is. You can rewrite history and it will be just as correct as the first one. PoW (Proof of Work) makes it impossible to just "replay all the subsequent transactions that happened", because your fake chain will have significantly less proof of work.
    • krakensden 11y ago
      Only if they're getting the chain for the first time. Git becomes... fairly wrothful if someone rewrites the history on a remote branch.