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A comment on BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash. Parent comment

Re:BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Sta... by Frogolocalypse on Friday December 15, 2017 @07:35PM (#15936546)
The difference of course, is that bitcoin isn't a company. And the arpanet turned into the internet. But companies come and go. By your analogy, raytheon owns the internet.
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Re:BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Sta... by joeblau on Saturday December 16, 2017 @05:30AM (#15938867)
You're right, Bitcoin is not a company, it's a technology. This is the analogy I'd make.

Then (Internet) / Now (Cryptocurrencies)

  NCP[1] == Blockchain based decentralized consensus
  ARPANET == Bitcoin
  BBN Technologies == Blockstream
  TCP/IP == We are figuring this out right now
  Internet == We are figuring this out right now
The ARPANET turned into the Internet in the fact that parts of it were used to build TCP/IP and the modern Internet. Just like concepts from Bitcoin will eventually be used to build whatever decentralized byzantine fault tolerant mechanism we end up with in ten years. I don't think Bitcoin is the Internet, Bitcoin is the ARPANET. Also, I wouldn't say Raytheon owns the Internet. Today the Internet is owned and controlled by many different parties all built on the TCP/IP stack. Countries like China own their own internet.

In my mind, all of this work to find different decentralized consensus algorithms is work to build transport layer (OSI Model[2]). Bitcoin is an early application, but thousands of applications are now popping up, competing, and building healthier communities.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

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