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?
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?