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by throwawaygh 1864 days ago
I think mumblemumble hit the nail on the head -- this isn't really distributed in the same sense as, e.g., blockchain. There is no peer-to-peer distributed ledger, no consensus mechanism, etc.

In addition to what they said, I'll also point out something else that's perhaps even more important -- you just measured "number of forks" in terms of the number of forks on github (as opposed to eg the number of people who have git cloned the repo).

1 comments

A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for decentralization. It's just how Bitcoin does it.

Also, I used github and its number of forks because it's the number I can easily work with. I have no clue how many copies of our tree are floating out there, nor is there a way of finding out.

> A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for decentralization.

You can chuck blockchain out of the conversation like that. But then we'd no longer be having a conversation about blockchain.

But we aren't. We're talking about git. We're having a digression from the main topic because git is kinda tangentially related.