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Comment by mishurov | Hacker News Reader

It's actually a nifty idea, could be implemented as something like blockchain in terms of distribution and syncing diffs among peers.

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Hey, maybe work geolocated "check-ins" into it, and a gig model where you can pay someone to do your merges!

I'm sure you can figure out some way to work deep learning into it. How are you ever going to disrupt anything with a buzzword density below five nines?

> distribution and syncing diffs among peers

That's the stated purpose of git. Git syncs diffs, distributedly. The whole point of the article was that we have technology that works and is very well supported, so we should use and improve those rather than reinvent them for the sake of a new technology.

Git and BlockChain are both based on the Merkle tree data structure. So you could pretty easily prototype a text-based diff/merge-able schema with a single file via git, and then implement the protocol as a smart contract when you figure out the semantics. Multi-file might map to a KeyValue store such as what's implemented with IBM HLF/Composer. I guess something like the protobuf schema evolution rules would be good inspiration as well.

No criticism intended but how is git based on a merkle tree? Commits reference each others hash to build a DAG, but in a merkle tree, if I understand correctly, the non-leaf nodes are actually only having the purpose of simplifying a hash check of the underlying leaf nodes, a tradeoff between processing (checking all the hashes) and storage space (storing the non-leaf nodes additionally to the actual data). Just learned about a few days ago though, might be incorrect.

The funny thing is that a huge part of the world hasn't realized yet that a blockchain is in fact a p2p network with the addition of increased trust in the form of proof-of-work. If you could define work on a bug, providing a changeset, reviewing a changeset, running tests on a changeset as proof-of-work, you could actually define a development system based on a blockchain.

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