The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by zadler on Tuesday August 28, 2018 @11:22PM (#17865292)

The “block” in blockchain is due to it being a byzantine fault tolerant replicated state machine. If it were centralised there would be no need for a block. That may be the main distinguishing characteristic. Git is another example of an application running on a hash chain, but it doesn’t have blocks because it doesn’t require a slow / costly consensus process.

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by bigiain on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @01:54AM (#17865992)

Feels a bit like that's a post-facto argument to me.

It sounds like the Surity thing had "blocks" consisting of a week's worth of documents which got chained together and had their hash published irrevocably every week.

Without the subsequent invention and popularity of the specific implementation of the bitcoin blockchain - I don't think the slow/costly consensus "feature" could be considered a requirement to distinguish between "hash chains" and "block chains" like that.

(But I'm regularly on the losing side of nomenclature arguments - I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non-autonomous quadcopters "drones"...)

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by jobigoud on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @03:14AM (#17866323)

> I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non-autonomous quadcopters "drones"

Apparently we should call them quadpters because it's based on helicopter for which the ethymology is not heli + copter, but helico + pter, like in helicoidal and pterodactyl.

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by taejo on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @03:47AM (#17866466)

Or tetrapter, to stick with Greek roots (though I'm personally fine with heteroradicalism!)

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by bigiain on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @09:33PM (#17873510)

From now on, I'm shall call them "spinning dinosaurs"!

"Hey mister! Is that your drone?" "No kid, it's not a drone, it's a spinning dinosaur..."

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by bittcto on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @08:27AM (#17867675)

The entire point of Bitcoin is the distributed trustless consensus mechanism. Read the Nakamoto white paper, it’s all about double spending.

A chain of hashed data dates back to Merkle himself, that’s what a Merkle tree is.

The entire point of bitcoin is distributed independent truth and that’s the entire point of a Blockchain.

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by maxerickson on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @06:40AM (#17867178)

The bitcoin whitepaper used the word "block" in the sense of "some data under a given hash".

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It didn't use the word block in the sense of "to stop people from forging history".

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by bittcto on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @08:28AM (#17867677)

The entire point of Bitcoin is the distributed trustless consensus mechanism. Read the Nakamoto white paper, it’s all about double spending.

A chain of hashed data dates back to Merkle himself, that’s what a Merkle tree is.

The entire point of bitcoin is distributed independent truth and that’s the entire point of a Blockchain.

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Re:The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New ... by maxerickson on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @08:32AM (#17867699)

Your copy pasta is somewhat less effective when I linked the whitepaper to make my point.

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