‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
theverge.com
‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#2Well, not meaningless ... it can mean whatever you want, and it will not be strictly wrong.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#3It's interesting that an article that provides at least 6 different meanings for it says that it's meaningless.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#4I think we all agree it's some for of "secure" ledger. Otherwise yea, it's not a super well defined term. Regardless it's obviously over hyped and buzzed. Git for example could be called a blockchain if you really wanted to.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#5It’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 things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#6Well, not meaningless ... it can mean whatever you want, and it will not be strictly wrong.
I think that is the point in the article; it is used in many different ways so simply saying you're using the blockchain doesn't have much meaning and yet people look at it as a sign of a forward facing company.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#7With all due respect, that's crap. Blockchain means exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto defined it to mean in his seminal paper.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#8Cryptocurrency, 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 which I am a participant -- which completely misunderstands the term. So AI gave up and switched to "Intelligent Agent", which was unfortunately an even more buzzword-compliant word. Now we started seeing "intelligent graphics agent" or "intelligent login page agent". Finally in the late '90s AI moved to "Autonomous Agent", a word straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. But it worked! Nobody outside of AI seems to use it: my theory is that most people don't really know exactly what autonomous means.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#9The world "blockchain" is not really meaningless. Originally, a blockchain was a cryptographically chained chain of blocks in a proof of work system. It is still used that way, but it is also repurposed by other marketing schemes of many cryptocurrencies.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#10With all due respect, that's crap. Blockchain means exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto defined it to mean in his seminal paper.
"Means exactly"... to whom?