‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

I am of the same conclusion, however, the dreaded blockchain has those that are true believers. They will cite the Estonia example and they will cite Wikileaks and how that show was able to be kept on the road thanks to Bitcoin payments that were provided when Visa and their ilk in 'fiat land' decided to take their payment methods away. They will cite a land registry in some poor African country and tell you how good it is that their evil government cannot take the 'peasants' land away.

If that is not enough to suppress your questioning of blockchain they will also roll out the commerce examples, e.g. the Walmart supply chain or whatever it is.

You will be told about some of these '541t coins' (as you call them) in venerated ways, as if the goals of their founders put the efforts of everyone from Mother Theresa to Elon Musk in the shade as far as noble ambition for humanity is concerned.

It is like they are trying to fool ninety percent of you for ninety percent of the time.

Maybe you work in some computing discipline that is tediously dull compared to the parsnip science that is blockchain. Perhaps you are a small cog in supply chain management or maybe you are at the cutting edge of some new 3D printing technology that is revolutionising something important, e.g. dentistry. Up until now you have felt that you may have been pleasing your clients and delivering value not just to your company but to the wider world. You think deeply about any conceivable way that blockchain technology could revolutionise things for you. Or maybe do what you are doing already but better because of the magic blockchain.

Even though you know your sector inside and out and your industry pretty well, your mind draws a blank. This is despite your code being used in many different parts of business applications. Your only conclusion is that there is no use whatsoever for blockchain in what you do.

The blockchain bore who has not spent 'a career' doing some useful industry thing will be able to declare that you are just not getting it. Clearly your mind is just too limited, you are old in the head and unable to grasp what blockchain is about, how it works and how it is going to change everything. If you can't even see one use with all that stuff you know and work with then clearly you have not understood what blockchain is all about.

By now you have also had time to think about the examples of blockchain use presented by the blockchain bore. With Wikileaks it was all a scam, it conveniently kicked off the Arab Spring, confirmed a few things we knew already, led to the Assange sideshow but lead to little change.

Plus how much does it really cost to host a few web pages? £200000 a year in hosting fees? What fools they were to sell their bitcoinz!

So what remains?

As you say, gambling on unregulated securities. Paying for illegal things online is the second use for the dreaded blockchain.

I'm stating crypto is cryptography. There's not multiple cryptographies as far as I'm aware so 'crypto are' doesn't make sense.

And yes, words change over time, but in that case I can just refer to (all) cryptocurrency as 'Bitcoin' since that's the common definition. In fact it's far more popular to refer to cryptocurrency as Bitcoin than it is to call that 'crypto'. Short version: this one isn't settled yet.

How did nuclear, patriot and rubber change?

> The term has become so widespread that it’s quickly losing meaning.

I mean, that's how language works, right? Words mean things at certain points of time and then over time those things sometimes change and new words appear to better distinguish between the new things. Or words get contextualized within a specific industry and take on different meanings depending on your perspective.

Such an evolution does not mean a word is "meaningless" it just indicates you'll have to provide more context in order to communicate your idea, which, again, is how language works.

> 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.

Since git commits can easily be signed (and IMO should be most of the time), when I explain this I usually try to describe the consensus algorithm as being based on a set of known valid signers which I think further helps bridge the gap for people that understand "proof of authority" chains.

https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority...

When people use the term blockchain they don't just mean a chain of state changes, they mean one that is backed by the sort of decentralized consensus model you described. The nomenclature isn't ideal, but the convenience of having one word to describe a somewhat complex topic wins out.

I mean even the Wikipedia article on blockchain treats it this way [1], mentioning the consensus model in the initial blurb, and asserting that Satoshi invented the blockchain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain