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Comment by sheepz | Hacker News Reader

The blockchain hype is crazy.

My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation.

Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized etc.

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Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming related media.

Why can't we get hype for my friend Sparse Merkle Trees!

I'm hyped! When is the ICO?!

I almost spit out my coffee.

When people use the term blockchain they don't just mean a chain of state changes, they mean one that is backed by the sort of decentralized consensus model you described. The nomenclature isn't ideal, but the convenience of having one word to describe a somewhat complex topic wins out.

I mean even the Wikipedia article on blockchain treats it this way [1], mentioning the consensus model in the initial blurb, and asserting that Satoshi invented the blockchain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

"Distributed ledger" [1] is a far better term for here IMO. If there's quibbling about "distributed" or "decentralized" then just change those terms as appropriate for the system under discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger

It wasn't even Satoshi who came up with the proof of work mechanism, it's from Hashcash which was invented in the 90s. What he did do though was have the good sense to connect the two concepts!

PoW is not from Hashcash and wasn't invented by Back. PoW was first formally conceptualized in 1992 in the paper "Pricing via Processing, Or, Combatting Junk Mail, Advances in Cryptology" by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor. Hashcash was proposed 5 years later, in 1997.

Satoshi is the first one to come up with a way to leverage PoW into a permissionless and global consensus mechanism instead of solely being a cryptoeconomic spam filter.

Thanks for the clarification, good to know.

That is a ton of useful context (and likely a classic case of non-gender neutral attribution of scientific achievement, assuming Nakamoto’s male).

Do you have citation for that? Or even better, the patience to edit Wikipedia?

Most of the people who spout such nonsense have no idea what they're talking about.

To me that's the key for sth to be called blockchain: it has to be decentralized. In a way that the truth is not mandated by a dictator or oligarchy, but by the own rules written in the blockchain and accepted by all.

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