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Comment by sunsu | Hacker News Reader

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sunsu·

"Slow Database"-Flavored WASI

Any time you see the word "blockchain" replace it with "Slow Database" in your head and see if it still makes sense.

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I checked the shipping status of an Alibaba purchase today after I received the Fedex notification yesterday.

The message on the Alibaba site said:

"Attention: Tracking information is supported by the Alibaba Global Trade Blockchain. It may be delayed for 1-2 days."

My brain was making combinations like Slow braised Wasabi flavored etc.

Indeed, I felt like I was reading an article about how to abuse stored procedures in order to push all of the computation to the database, even the inefficient parts. [0]

[0] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Stored__0x26__0x23_220_...

Any time you do a generalization, you are wrong.

Infinite recursion.

The Blockchain is the slowest and at the same time most energy hungry Datastore mankind has ever build. And in the case of bitcoin it's not fit for the job it was developed for.

It was designed to help create a timestamp for blocks of transactions. It's doing that just fine for Bitcoin.

There's no way for the blockchain to validate time stamping due to fluctuation in hash power and the nature of an adversarial network with untrusted data.

What's been happening is blocktimes wildly fluctuate, anywhere from 20 seconds - 90 minutes + even though the software attempts to calibrate for 10 minutes.

He just means things are unequivoqually ordered in time, so each block is a time stamp. Not necessarily running at constant frequency as our other time keeping tools.

This is a cheap throwaway joke that has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the article. It would have been possible to make this joke by only reading the title.

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