I strongly believe that we need a lot simpler explanations to bring more people on board. Last month, I was in Turkey and explaining Bitcoin to my 60-year-old dad. He got the concept within minutes. His first question was about double-spending, and then he failed to grasp the mining concept and PoW. I think this happened because he lacks some abstraction ability.
Explaining Blockchains to Developers
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#12This article fails to mention one very fundamental property that makes blockchains interesting (and is the motivation for their design): The prevention of double-spend.
Thats hardly its main motivation, banks have been preventing double spend for a long time now. The motivation behind the blockchain is to have a distributed ledger thats not controlled by a single party and thus cannot be taken down or controlled by governments.
The problem is that it's very good at that but nothing else, so if you're doing something legal or supported by the banking structure of your country, the blockchain is by far a worse solution in every way.
The best blockchain got so far was Bitcoin and such as a horse betting platform, basically another stock to bet on and thus its recent popularity. Aside from that Its hard to see a continued use, maybe as conservative governments keep increasing protectionism and divisiveness we'll get more use out of it.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#13I strongly believe that we need a lot simpler explanations to bring more people on board. Last month, I was in Turkey and explaining Bitcoin to my 60-year-old dad. He got the concept within minutes. His first question was about double-spending, and then he failed to grasp the mining concept and PoW. I think this happened because he lacks some abstraction ability.
Alternatively, your 60 year old dad may have developed enough common sense in his years to sense the blockchain is largely an over hyped snake oil.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#14OK, now explain it to non developers who think "it's the future of currency".
Simple - it may be called a "currency" but really it acts more like a stock.
- There are limited ways to convert the bitcoin to USD, much like there are limited ways (brokers) to move money in/out of stocks.
- The exchange/price compared to USD fluctuates wildly. It is not stable like USD - it is more like a volatile stock. BTC was worth $18k on Dec 1 2020 and has gone as high as $63k since then and is now around $32k USD per 1 BTC.
In my opinion, the major limitations to it becoming a stable, usable currency is the volatility and ease of use. You can have all the anonymity and hack proof tech you want but until its easy to use and stable, it won't be adopted widely. Any effort to make it easy to use will likely make it lose the anonymity part. For example if I can now pay at any POS terminal using an app on a phone, there goes anonymity.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#15> If 51% agree on the legitimacy of the block, consensus is reached
I think this isn't entirely right, because he's talking about 51% of miners. The ones that actually incorporate the blocks to the blockchain and validate if the transactions are valid are the nodes (I might be wrong but that's my understanding). In fact this article fails to mention nodes at all, and nodes (for example people running the Bitcoin Core client at their computer) are what make the whole thing decentralized.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#16I strongly believe that we need a lot simpler explanations to bring more people on board. Last month, I was in Turkey and explaining Bitcoin to my 60-year-old dad. He got the concept within minutes. His first question was about double-spending, and then he failed to grasp the mining concept and PoW. I think this happened because he lacks some abstraction ability.
We first need to know why we should bring more people on board.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#17I strongly believe that we need a lot simpler explanations to bring more people on board. Last month, I was in Turkey and explaining Bitcoin to my 60-year-old dad. He got the concept within minutes. His first question was about double-spending, and then he failed to grasp the mining concept and PoW. I think this happened because he lacks some abstraction ability.
Alternatively, your 60 year old dad may have developed enough common sense in his years to sense the blockchain is largely an over hyped snake oil.
I don't think it is overhyped. We are still in the early days of blockchain, and I can easily say that it offers a cheaper & more inclusive financial system than the traditional one.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#18I find this one offers a better explanation for developers and non developers: http://tinybank.dev/
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#19This article fails to mention one very fundamental property that makes blockchains interesting (and is the motivation for their design): The prevention of double-spend.
Yes, and developers should be able to read the original white paper, where the double-spend problem is discussed. I don't think separate "blockchain for developers" articles are needed.
Re: Explaining Blockchains to Developers
#20I strongly believe that we need a lot simpler explanations to bring more people on board. Last month, I was in Turkey and explaining Bitcoin to my 60-year-old dad. He got the concept within minutes. His first question was about double-spending, and then he failed to grasp the mining concept and PoW. I think this happened because he lacks some abstraction ability.
We first need to know why we should bring more people on board.
It looks like inclusive systems are the new black.