At the weekend I felt the urge to know a bit more about blockchain, so I did some googling. I wanted to get beyond the impression I got back in the summer, which was more or less that blockchain was so revolutionary, so outstandingly technically innovative, that it would enable you to connect to the internet without a computer.
I found this meaty quote:
Given that bitcoin and blockchain is at the crossroads of game theory, cryptography, data networking, and monetary theory, a proper understanding of the subject is in fact quite rare.
Pregnant with meaning, from http://www.coindesk.com/2017-will-prove-blockchain-bad-idea/
Eventually I noticed, English teacher that I am, that the author had made a typo: bitcoin AND blockchain IS. That's a plural, right? It should be are, surely?
But then I read the comments to the article and read someone dismissively calling the writer a bitcoin maximalist, to whom bitcoin and the blockchain were more or less the same thing, or at least they should be, and all the hype about altcoins and stuff was just that, hype. I had learned a little, about the human aspects of this software.
A small branch
As part of my googling around I started to see language that seemed vaguely familiar: I searched for
git as a blockchain
and this was not a wildly uninformed search, people had thought and written about just this.
And this is what I think I learnt:
Although in many ways git is similar to a blockchain, it is not a blockchain, and certainly not The Blockchain, because in git branching is a Good Thing, but in a blockchain it is a Bad Thing, if not a Very Bad Thing.
This is interesting, to me, because it is again more about the language, the control of the definition, than the software itself.
Back to the quote.
Another point was that blockchain is about monetary theory. This point needs expanding: we often hear that cryptocurrencies are challenging the control of the banks and their fiat, but what about the control of the narrative? Saying that the value of a currency is a function of its scarcity is straight from the textbooks of monetarism, isn't that so? It doesn't have to be the case.
Here's an article from Evonomics http://evonomics.com/moneysupply/ Rapid growth in money supply does not cause inflation. This is not theory-based, but evidence-based. It's an interesting site.
So that's my beginnings of trying the think about a blockchain. One question I am left with is wouldn't it be a good idea if we could do:
--> steem blame
I'm sure it would stop a lot of arguing.