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A comment on Rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with techno-utopian ideologies. Parent comment

Re:Rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with tec... by Retric on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @10:45AM (#17074278)
People used DB logs with hashes for verification at least as far back as the 70's. Blockchain on it's own is just a slightly different form of the same thing.

So, while Blockchain has nothing directly to do with being distributed, that's just a useful feature but requires proof of work of some kind, or someone can quickly manufacture several blocks.

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Re:Rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with tec... by marknadal on Tuesday May 15, 2018 @12:50PM (#17075353)
Right, the only "new" thing is using PoW as an /economic incentive/ because PoW was previously used for plenty of things during the cipherpunk movement as well.

Fair point about it being distributed

The Proof of Work solves a separate problem, that of Double-Spending. The Proof of Work here isn't arbitrarily to slow the system itself down, just to slow non-canonical histories.

But that itself is not the "blockchain" (thus the "how do you define it?" question, I'm curious to hear your take), I'm just playing devil's advocate: A lot of people who weren't around in the 70s are now calling verified logs a "blockchain", now it is a stupid buzzword, but at what point do we consolidate the word for an idea, versus argue there are semantic differences?

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