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by zadler 2850 days ago
The “block” in blockchain is due to it being a byzantine fault tolerant replicated state machine. If it were centralised there would be no need for a block. That may be the main distinguishing characteristic. Git is another example of an application running on a hash chain, but it doesn’t have blocks because it doesn’t require a slow / costly consensus process.
2 comments
bigiain 2850 days ago
Feels a bit like that's a post-facto argument to me.

It sounds like the Surity thing had "blocks" consisting of a week's worth of documents which got chained together and had their hash published irrevocably every week.

Without the subsequent invention and popularity of the specific implementation of the bitcoin blockchain - I don't think the slow/costly consensus "feature" could be considered a requirement to distinguish between "hash chains" and "block chains" like that.

(But I'm regularly on the losing side of nomenclature arguments - I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non-autonomous quadcopters "drones"...)

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jobigoud 2850 days ago
> I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non-autonomous quadcopters "drones"

Apparently we should call them quadpters because it's based on helicopter for which the ethymology is not heli + copter, but helico + pter, like in helicoidal and pterodactyl.

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taejo 2850 days ago
Or tetrapter, to stick with Greek roots (though I'm personally fine with heteroradicalism!)
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bigiain 2849 days ago
From now on, I'm shall call them "spinning dinosaurs"!

"Hey mister! Is that your drone?" "No kid, it's not a drone, it's a spinning dinosaur..."

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bittcto 2849 days ago
The entire point of Bitcoin is the distributed trustless consensus mechanism. Read the Nakamoto white paper, it’s all about double spending.

A chain of hashed data dates back to Merkle himself, that’s what a Merkle tree is.

The entire point of bitcoin is distributed independent truth and that’s the entire point of a Blockchain.

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maxerickson 2850 days ago
The bitcoin whitepaper used the word "block" in the sense of "some data under a given hash".

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It didn't use the word block in the sense of "to stop people from forging history".

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bittcto 2849 days ago
The entire point of Bitcoin is the distributed trustless consensus mechanism. Read the Nakamoto white paper, it’s all about double spending.

A chain of hashed data dates back to Merkle himself, that’s what a Merkle tree is.

The entire point of bitcoin is distributed independent truth and that’s the entire point of a Blockchain.

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maxerickson 2849 days ago
Your copy pasta is somewhat less effective when I linked the whitepaper to make my point.
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