[nostrademons]

> It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.

Expanding on this - one of the brilliant innovations in Bitcoin was to make the ledger fundamental and the coin an implementation artifact. The blockchain doesn't store coins - it stores a ledger of who transacted with whom, and for what amounts, and then ownership of a Bitcoin is a derived quantity from the transaction history. Ethereum just expands that ledger to let smart contracts on the blockchain define other quantities to track, as well as the rules and relationships between them.

It's completely backwards from how I would've thought to implement a cryptocurrency, which would be to start with the coin and figure out how to make its ownership distinct & incorruptible. By starting with the ledger first, you don't need to think very hard about ownership (because it's all recorded in the ledger), you just need to find a way to define a source of truth for the transaction history.

[michaelrpeskin]

Yeah. That’s a great way to describe it! It’s like a differential equation where the fundamental function is the change and you have to integrate it to find the state. Traversing the blockchain is like integration.