41–50 of 108 posts
In general, if the transactions are gathered together in blocks, and it is blocks that are secured on the chain using cryptography, and it is designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records, the system qualifies as a blockchain That works for me.
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…
To be fair, bitcoin is only about 37 months younger than git.
The blockchain hype is crazy. My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation. Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized et…
Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming rela…
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I was also curious about the use of 'neural networks' in deep learning or whatever. My PhD research was working on problems in computational neuroscience. I think the use of "neural networks" is because the topology of these deep learning networks is similar to what is observed in biological brains.
Brain networks and neural networks are not similar in structure or function, other than the superficial abstraction of “nodes and connections” (graphs). They’re about as related as genetic algorithms are to actual genetics.
Unfortunately, the word choice can lead to "they've gots em a neural networks and an AI singularities and them robots coming to take over"
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I was also curious about the use of 'neural networks' in deep learning or whatever. My PhD research was working on problems in computational neuroscience. I think the use of "neural networks" is because the topology of these deep learning networks is similar to what is observed in biological brains.
Brain networks and neural networks are not similar in structure or function, other than the superficial abstraction of “nodes and connections” (graphs). They’re about as related as genetic algorithms are to actual genetics.
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.
The only thing that is going to die for now is any trace of the idea from non-technicals is that if we throw $10mm at it, it's going to come alive.
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Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming rela…
Why can't we get hype for my friend Sparse Merkle Trees!
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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.
Nuclear. Hacker. Patriot. Rubber. The audience matters. Besides, I doubt that any cryptanalyst would mind writing out cryptography any more than they'd mind writing out TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256.
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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.
I think gp's definition is still too broad. Consensus is not an inherent property of blockchains, for example. You can make blockchains without any consensus at all, or with some central authority prescribing reality. A blockchain is simply a kind of data structure, like a linked list or a hash map or an array.