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Comment by scyclow | Hacker News Reader

The critical innovation of blockchain is that it takes your digital signatures and orders them in a way that's byzantine fault tolerant.

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if you are trying to be persuasive you should know that what you said is complete gibberish to tech saavy people who are not already bought in to whatever you are talking about.

I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet or trying to persuade anyone either. BFT is overkill for most use cases, but sometimes it's useful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

The commenter above was certainly familiar with BFT. It wasn't the term as such that was gibberish.

But rather, the implication you were attempting to make that this is a "critical innovation" that provides value.

What's gibberish about the implication? That's all a blockchain is. It takes cryptographic signatures (or more specifically, transactions that are cryptographically signed), and puts them in order.

As pointed out, the cryptography existed well before blockchain. My only point was that the fancy decentralized way it orders the transactions is the real innovation.

(edit: grammer)

It's gibberish because you don't justify why this innovation provides value.

Instead you just slather more fancy technical lingo on top.

It provides value to people who want to compute things on a public network that no single party controls. We can argue about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for people to value until the cows come home, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation.

But point taken. I'll avoid using fancy technical lingo like "BFT" or "cryptographic" on hacker news any more.

Yeah, this "cryptographic" stuff is just way over our heads.

The blockchain and even the EVM are not distributed systems. They merely run the same (mostly pointless) computation, on every single node participating in the system.

To me, distributed systems means parallel computation. The blockchain by definition, cannot be parallelized (except when someone manages to pull off such a large theft that the developers are forced to fork the blockchain).

They are decentralized systems, which achieve their decentralization by being as inefficient as possible. Sure, it's a bit clever, but it's also incredibly stupid.

This shit is so pervasive. Honestly seems more like they're trying to get up-votes from fellow crypto enthusiasts than trying to convince anyone; except perhaps themselves.

I don't really care about upvotes, I just think that it's an important point to understand the technology. I'm not saying anything positive or negative about it. I'm just that blockchains are about more than logging cryptographic signatures -- they're also about ordering those cryptographic signatures.

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