[wintom]

It’s not meaningless. Saying Blockchain is meaningless is like saying the web is meaningless or the internet is meaningless. Just because you either don’t understand it or you feel it’s too broad does not make it meaningless.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party. It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.

[spookthesunset]

> Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party

Except not even Blockchain guarantees consensus. If that was true we wouldn't see the hundreds of bitcoin forks. Let's not even forget Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The "consensus" for ethereum was provided largely a few whales.

Blockchain doesn't guarantee consensus at all.

> It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.

Setting aside your massive handwave of "many other things", your only concrete example is not at all unique to the blockchain. You can make any dataset public regardless of data structure used. Likewise nothing is stopping you from making a private blockchain (as stupid of an idea as that might be).

It's all just breathless hype. The blockchain is just a data structure similar to git only orders of magnitude less efficient by design. It's only good for operating things like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Outside of criminal use, Bitcoin has proven entirely useless in the real world. Ethereum used largely as a platform to build ICO scams.

The whole thing is a scam built on other scams. It's all souped up modern day penny stocks custom built to trick rubes into lining the pockets of a bunch of scammers.

[Sargos]

> Except not even Blockchain guarantees consensus. If that was true we wouldn't see the hundreds of bitcoin forks. Let's not even forget Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

You are deliberately torturing the word consensus just to make a straw man argument against crypto. The original Bitcoin block chain exists and everyone agrees where it is and how long it is. The fact that someone can create a copy and tinker with it with their own group of friends has no effect on the real chain. Anyone can fork it. That's not a technical limitation or flaw in any way even if you try to make it out to be.

Blockchains have solved the technical challenges of coming to consensus. They did not solve the political challenges of bringing Republicans and Democrats together in a consensus. Sorry about that. Maybe in the future.

[spookthesunset]

> You are deliberately torturing the word consensus just to make a straw man argument against crypto.

It is hardly a straw man. Which Bitcoin blockchain fork is the "original" blockchain? Which one is the real Ethereum blockchain?

[Sargos]

The one listed as "Bitcoin" and "Ethereum" on exchanges for sale. It's pretty unambiguous.

[spookthesunset]

Ah, so consensus is actually just a codeword for mob rule? I'd say it is pretty ambiguous and if I thought Bitcoin Cash was the real bitcoin, I'd be pissed at the "Bitcoin" fuckers stealing the name...

[zone411]

The issue is that you now have ICOs (including by public companies) that use the term "blockchain" just for the hype, even though the supposed "blockchains" they use don't fulfill your conditions.

[nailer]

I don't know why you're being downvoted. That seems a reasonable definition of blockchain, in much the same way one could give a reasonable definition of an array as a sequence of items.

The article's premise that 'The term blockchain is misused and frequently misunderstood' (which is true) means 'Blockchain is meaningless' doesn't hold water and this is very typical for a Vox technology article.

[jgh]

I think gp's definition is still too broad. Consensus is not an inherent property of blockchains, for example. You can make blockchains without any consensus at all, or with some central authority prescribing reality. A blockchain is simply a kind of data structure, like a linked list or a hash map or an array.

[seanalltogether]

Exactly. Is "blockchain" just the data structure, or is it the data structure + the protocol for communication + the software to validate it?

Another example might be bit torrent. I personally wouldn't classify bit torrent as just the data structure. I would say its the data structure, the protocol and the end clients. However if someone used these technologies to create a different format and a different protocol, I wouldn't think of it as bit torrent.

[nailer]

I'd agree with that (though not to point of voting gp down): the aims and benefits of blockchains should be seperate from their definition.

[s73v3r_]

It's meaningless because it's become just another buzzword.