The Blockchain in a Historical Perspective | Hacker News Reader

The Blockchain in a Historical Perspective

jonstokes.com

A better title would be Ledgers in historical perspective. The hypothetical he ends with (what if ledgers could be decentralised) is a classic example of blockchains looking for a problem. In recent history have there been examples of banks changing their own ledgers? As a civilisation we have already solved the problem of trust in a much more efficient way.

The Libor sandal. That was precisely banks changing their own ledgers to defraud their customers on a massive scale.

That was price fixing - nothing to do with the bank's ledger. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/libor-scandal.asp

> As a civilisation we have already solved the problem of trust in a much more efficient way.

Lol. Yeah, trust in the bankers is at a civilization high /s

In any case, block-lattice crypto is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than Mastercard et al. And it can be genuinely decentralized.

BTC and Ether were the first of their kind - but not the best, and certainly not the most efficient. Yet they get used as the bar for comparison to traditional banking and money, by people who really ought to know better.

> In recent history have there been examples of banks changing their own ledgers?

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...

That wasn't a change in the ledger - it was the misselling and fraudulent opening of accounts. And it was remediated, there was a change in the leadership and settlements to the victims. You're proving my point, as a system we do a decent job of enforcing good behaviour.

I'm sorry, aren't the balance of accounts the key component of the ledger? So wouldn't fraudulently changing account data would pretty much be the definition of altering the ledger? What kind of thing to you would constitute "changing the ledger"?

Youre joking right? Aside from the massive well know scandals, I find it extremely hard to believe you havent personally experienced sameone fudging numbers to your detriment

You may enjoy "Programmable Blockchains in Context" - the 2015 Ethereum launch post. I wrote it when I was release coordinator at the Ethereum Foundation. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-...

I think if you want to talk historical predecessors to the blockchain, the rai stones of Yap are arguably the closest example. The monetary system embodied by the stones even features proof of work (the value of the stones is derived in part from the enormous effort necessary to hew the stones and move them to their present locations; stones with an interesting history, such as people dying while moving them, are also more valuable) and a distributed ledger (Yapese oral tradition records the present owner and all past owners of the stones; when a stone changes hands, the transaction is simply added to the oral history, much like a blockchain transaction).

Yes, but why were ledgers the first examples of writing? Because it was expensive in the beginning.

As blockchain data storage rates decrease, its available applications will increase.

Blockchains are innovative because they change the pricing model for web hosting from recurring payments for things like server rental to fully upfront costs for storage and distribution of data.

Going back to ancient Sumer and looking at how ledgers got updated before the blockchain. Remember the blockchain is a shared ledger and related systems have a deep history.

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