Re:Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides
by pdpi on Sunday April 01, 2018 @04:14PM
(#16730200)
In the strict sense? Git histories are blockchains, so there’s definitely a use. In the loose sense? People seem to conflate “blockchain” with “decentralised concensus”. At least nakamoto consensus doesn’t work outside of currency-like applications. PoS-based systems are probably bound by the same limitations there, too.
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Re:Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides
by umanwizard on Sunday April 01, 2018 @04:16PM
(#16730209)
I have never seen someone use “blockchain” to describe a structure which can be rewritten or tampered with. Git commit dags aren’t a blockchain by anyone’s definition, as far as I’m aware.
Again — people tend to talk about Blockchain as a combination of the data structure and some sort of consensus algorithm but the term only properly refers to the data structure.
The only difference between it and a git history is that git histories are dags instead of trees — The hash-of-parent-node structure is the exact same, except commits can have multiple parents. The tamper resistance of the data structure itself comes from the hashes: it serves as both a pointer and a checksum for the previous nodes.