So if you know me, you know that for the past year cryptrocurrencies - beginning with ethereum - have been top of mind for me. I imagine that will be the case for many of you reading this as well. If that is the case then you have probably been asked - or told - one or both of the following question: "What is the blockchain[sic]?"
There are a ton of variations on this question, but I think it essentially sums up the mystery and skepticism sorrounding this epoch shifting technology. Below I want to leave you, dear reader, an answer to this question as well as a few responses from a couple of brilliant people that I hope you find useful the next time you start talking crypto with a noob, or a seasoned vet. Xoxo and don't get rekt. Hodl your ish bish.
What are blockchains?
Blockchains are a way to implement a distributed ledger, a record of consensus with a cryptographic audit trail which is maintained and validated by several separate nodes.
Blockchains sit ‘below’ a distributed ledger and act as a way to order and validate the transactions in the ledger. To that end, you can say that blockchains are a way to achieve the consensus necessary for a distributed ledger.
Source: “Blockchains 101” @breitwoman https://medium.com/@kathleenbreit/blockchains-101-654217effe20
copy of his book in my email inbox a few minutes after I sent 0.0162 BTC to David. T
Thoughts from thoughtful people:
Naval Ravikant: "The Four Layers of the Internet Protocol Suite are constantly communicating. The Link Layer puts packets on a wire. The Internet Layer routes them across networks. The Transport Layer persists communication across a given conversation. And the Application Layer delivers entire documents and applications.
Where’s the protocol layer for exchanging value, not just data? Where’s the distributed, anonymous, permission- less system for chatty machines to allocate their scarce resources? Where is the “virtual money” to create this “virtual economy?
Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet – almost a 5th protocol in the Internet suite."
Benedict Evans: "The question, then, is not whether something works now but whether it could work - whether you know how to change it. Saying 'it doesn't work, today' has no value, but saying 'yes, but everything didn't work once' also has no value. Rather, do you have a roadmap? Do you know what to do next?
...
First of all, it's quite common, especially in enterprise technology, for something to propose a new way to solve an existing problem. It can't be used to solve the problem in the old way, so 'it doesn't work', and proposes a new way, and so 'no-one will want that'. This is how generational shifts work - first you try to force the new tool to fit the old workflow, and then the new tool creates a new workflow. Both parts are painful and full of denial, but the new model is ultimately much better than the old.
...
One way to solve this problem is to try to separate the fundamental capability that's being proposed from the specific uses. Edison thought that sound recording would be good for sermons, not music, and it’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to tell what people will use the new thing for. But sound recording and one-to-one and one-to-many sound transmission were much more fundamental changes than the ability to listen to a sermon on demand. What mattered was seeing the value of the capability, not predicting any particular applications. The mistake to make in looking at Edison's recording technology would have been to argue about whether people wanted sermons - the mistake is to look only at the application that this technology is proposed to provide, and not the actual capability that has been created. Sermons might not work, but sound is a big deal."
