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‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

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Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#101

Post by spookthesunset »

Sargos wrote: post #93
spookthesunset wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are deliberately torturing the word consensus just to make a straw man argument against crypto. It is hardly a straw man. Which Bitcoin blockchain fork is the "original" blockchain? Which one is the real Ethereum blockchain?

The one listed as "Bitcoin" and "Ethereum" on exchanges for sale. It's pretty unambiguous.

Ah, so consensus is actually just a codeword for mob rule? I'd say it is pretty ambiguous and if I thought Bitcoin Cash was the real bitcoin, I'd be pissed at the "Bitcoin" fuckers stealing the name...

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#102

Post by camillomiller »

bdamm wrote: post #92
nailer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was a branch of physics, then became a weapon, then became a US senate procedural change "going nuclear". Patriot was an anti-government rebel, then a pro-government supporter, then a missile, then an act to boost government and corporate controls within digital content, and sometimes an American football player. Rubber was a tree, then a commodity, then a condom. "A rubber".

Very bad examples. You’re just saying that a lot of common words have multiple meanings based on the context. None of those meanings is prevalent as in using crypto now for shortening cryptocurrency.

I think that “Rubber” being used to indicate a condom is just a very plain synecdoche. All the other meanings are there, still. Plus, rubber’s main meaning is still referring to the material

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#103

Post by xg15 »

While the general gist is true, so far you could separate the buzzword uses from the non-buzzword uses pretty well by checking whether or not they use an article before the word "blockchain". Though this bit then kind of worries me:

> Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream discourse, but they’ve also been joined by a concept that is widely circulated, but poorly understood: “the blockchain” or just “blockchain.”

I fear they are learning...

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#104

Post by bertil »

ouid wrote: post #29
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?

Are you referring to the distinction between the software frameworks known as an artificial neural networks and biology, specifically neuroscience?

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#105

Post by bertil »

kxyvr wrote: post #62
lev99 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks are clearly inspired by the scientific fields of Genetics and Neuroscience.

I'll disagree with this. Cybenko's approximation for a multilayer perceptron is simply a concrete expression for Kolmogorov's representation of a continuous function, which was created in order to solve Hilbert's Thirteenth problem. This has absolutely nothing to do with the brain. Yes, Cybenko uses the word "neural network", but just look at expression (1) in his paper "Approximation by Superpositions of a Sigmoidal…

As a data scientist dating a neuro-scientist, I can confirm that the two fields are quite apart in practice (except from the occasional image processing of fMRIs) — however, Cybenko’s work started in the late 70s; the inspiration for using a formalism of unit perceptrons organised in layers (as well as the convolution structure) comes from a paper on cat’s vision system published in 1962 [1]. As far as I’m aware, all key papers (Hinton, Le Cunn) cite Hubel & Wiesel as their explicit inspiration.

The current practice has moved far from neuro-science, but I don’t think it’s pedantic when discussing machine learning to talk about “artificial neural networks” and acknowledge that neuroscience is still working on understanding the structure of brains. Some people, focused on their research, didn’t have that discretion. I wouldn’t imitate them.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1359523/

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#106

Post by bertil »

tylersmith wrote: post #54
jgh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't even Satoshi who came up with the proof of work mechanism, it's from Hashcash which was invented in the 90s. What he did do though was have the good sense to connect the two concepts!

PoW is not from Hashcash and wasn't invented by Back. PoW was first formally conceptualized in 1992 in the paper "Pricing via Processing, Or, Combatting Junk Mail, Advances in Cryptology" by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor. Hashcash was proposed 5 years later, in 1997. Satoshi is the first one to come up with a way to leverage PoW into a permissionless and global consensus mechanism instead of solely being a cryptoeconom…

That is a ton of useful context (and likely a classic case of non-gender neutral attribution of scientific achievement, assuming Nakamoto’s male).

Do you have citation for that? Or even better, the patience to edit Wikipedia?

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#107

Post by bertil »

xg15 wrote: post #103

While the general gist is true, so far you could separate the buzzword uses from the non-buzzword uses pretty well by checking whether or not they use an article before the word "blockchain". Though this bit then kind of worries me: > Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream discourse, but they’ve also been joined by a concept that is widely circulated, but poorly understood: “the blo…

I honestly can’t tell from context whether the article is a sign of understanding. To be blunt, I’m not sure I can tell for people who talk about “(the) (I/i)nternet” either, and I met some of those who invented it.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#108

Post by Maybestring »

aje403 wrote: post #89
Maybestring wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>extremely-vague-homeomorphism Analogy is the concept in its full generality.

If only. Analogy is more like the bastardization of an Ideal Form

Thats a very foreign view of the concept for me. I think of analogy as a non-rigorous functor.

A mapping between concepts and relationships among concepts in one context to concepts and relationships among concepts in another context.

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