[kylebrown]

Distributed API's are a big part of Ethereum. I think the Merkle tree of the bitcoin blockchain (and the Patricia tree of the Ethereum blockchain) might even qualify as a semilattice.

In fact, its by the physics of information theory that a cryptographic blockchain solves the consensus problem. Specifically, information theory emerges from the laws of thermodynamics: Maxwell's demon is essentially what secures one's private keys from brute-force cracking attempts.

I'd like to see a comparison of how the blockchain solves the CAP problem, alongside CRDT's. Are they not both solutions to the same problem?

[marktangotango]

FYI information theory entropy and physics entropy really aren't the same thing:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/05/elusive-entropy/

[kylebrown]

Well that seemed excessively pedantic IMHO. It actually didn't touch much on information theory, and where it did, many of the comments disagree. I'll cite the Landauer limit[1] as what (yes, arguably) connects the entropy of information theory to the entropy of physics.[2]

Also, I only mentioned physics because the article did, quoting Lamport "Most people view concurrency as a programming problem or a language problem. I regard it as a physics problem."

Unfortunately the article didn't elaborate any more on the precise type of physics problem in question (Maybe Lamport does elsewhere), whether the physics of computational complexity or the physics of information theory, or something else. But even those two sub-fields have many connections and similarities (as does pretty much everything in physics and math. such connections are the bread-and-butter of theoreticians).

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann-Landauer_limit

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_i...

[kylebrown]

Here's an article which discusses Lamport's view: "The physics of distributed information systems"[1]. The first sentence: "This paper aims to present distributed systems as a new (interesting) area of applications of statistical physics, and to make the the case that statistical physics can be quite useful in understanding such systems."

It has several mentions of statistical physics, but (curiously) no mentions of entropy. It does however discuss the Byzantine Generals problem, which of course is the problem the bitcoin blockchain solves.

1. http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/473/1/012017/pdf/1742-65...

[kylebrown]

Okay, last one. Most concise counter-argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack#Theoretical_...

Derived from the Landauer limit.