‘Blockchain’ is meaningless • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#21

Post by nailer » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

camillomiller wrote: post #17

SeanLuke wrote: post #8

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of wh…

I mean... "crypto" !!! Can you imagine what cryptographers had to witness every day for a couple of years now, while the term was increasingly skewing towards a completely misleading meaning?

It's like if people involved in:

- ATMs

- eCommerce

- Foreign intelligence and signals

or any other similar field where crypto is essential started calling themselves 'crypto'. Yes, these field use crypto, but no, they're not crypto. Just like cryptocurrencies aren't crypto.

This is crytpo: https://cr.yp.to

This is crypto: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/.

Things that use crypto are not crypto.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#22

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #8

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of wh…

AI has had more than one winter, you know.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#23

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

Sangermaine wrote: post #12

"Blockchain" means a 394% surge in your stock price: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...

It also potentially means trouble with the SEC:

https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-u...

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#24

Post by sheepz » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #13

It's about as meaningless as the word "communism". Tough to come up with a definition for that, but I still know what it "means". I guess you just have to read a bunch of different sources to get the full picture of what a blockchain is. It's kind of hard to communicate abstract ideas, so you need a variety of sources to paint the picture in your head.

I think communism is pretty well defined, in its ultimate form its the abolition of private property. This is in strict opposition to capitalism.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#25

Post by nailer » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

wintom wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#26

Post by ChristianGeek » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #2

Well, not meaningless ... it can mean whatever you want, and it will not be strictly wrong.

I think “generic” or “generalized” are better fits.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#27

Post by onion-soup » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

Blockchain is meaningless because I bought at 18k and sold at 6k and now I can't buy Mochiatoo and type these fancy medium articles on my MacBook

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#28

Post by kgwgk » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #8

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of wh…

Your comment sounds as if you thought that AI researchers had invented the term “agent”.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#29

Post by ouid » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #8

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of wh…

AI even has this problem among it's researchers. What the fuck is a neural network?

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#30

Post by Ajedi32 » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

git has been using a blockchain for the last 12 years, since long before Bitcoin:

Each commit includes the hash of its parent commit. These commits form a chain. Changing the contents of any past commit would break the chain. Each user of the repository keeps a copy of the blockchain on their PC, and they can fetch new "blocks" from any other peer with `git fetch` or `git pull`. The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository.