> The rest of your post is pretty offensive but I'm willing to look past it if you want to actually talk about your blockchain ideology with civility.
I don't usually go out of my way to tell people they are uninformed, but you're spreading very uninformed opinions around. You can't reasonably expect to spread your uninformed opinion around and not have people tell you you're uninformed. If you take offense to that, well, maybe you should limit yourself to sharing opinions about things you understand. I'm not saying this to offend or hurt you, I'm saying it because it's a fact you should be aware of.
I don't think you're dumb; you seem like a smart guy. You're just ignorant on a specific topic--and that's okay too--ignorance is fixable. But you should fix it before you start spraying your opinions on the topic around.
> I honestly think the disconnect here is you're thinking in terms of bits and atoms and I'm thinking from the user's perspective. If we're going to build something useful with the blockchain, we have to think from the user's perspective.
No, the cryptography (which has little to do with bits and nothing to do with atoms) affects users. You can't simply argue that you understand Bitcoin well enough because the social aspects of Bitcoin are the important part. Both the social aspects AND the cryptography aspects are vital to understanding--if you don't understand the cryptography you don't understand Bitcoin. Period. This is especially true when you make claims that are directly about the cryptography (such as that a block chain is not immutable) which show that you clearly don't understand it.
> It doesn't matter if it's 2 separate "block chains"
Since that is literally what a fork is, if it "doesn't matter" then why are we even talking about a fork?
> they're both attempts at finding consensus on 1 ledger
No, they're both (immutable) data structures which hold a ledger. "Attempts at finding consensus" aren't really represented by a data structure.
> What if the developers were compromised and the fork was made so that someone could execute a large double-spend?
You could start to build a plausible case for this by looking at the respective blockchains--which is, incidentally, an effect of them being immutable. But I thought this "doesn't matter".
But that's unlikely, because the fork was relevant for < 2 hours. The attacker would have had to spend their coin and the seller would have to release control of the asset they were spending the coin for, in that time.
And if a large double spend were executed, there's a good chance we'd know about it because the seller who received their coins on the 0.8 blockchain would probably be pretty angry about it.
If you don’t understand that the process of reconciling 2 chains of blocks is for the sake of consensus on 1 ledger, maybe you just don’t understand distributed systems ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because if you did, you would understand that when your values (in this case, transactions) get modified unexpectedly even if they’ve been consistent for an arbitrarily long time, you cannot claim that your database is immutable. The fact that the individual attempts at consensus are immutable is irrelevant because the user only cares about the resulting ledger, which as I have proven to you over and over again is mutable.
I see what you did though, you defined “blockchain” as just an individual chain, not as the encompassing consensus-finding system... which to me is not a useful definition because it leads to misunderstandings like yours (ie. “the database is immutable”). Picture this:
Exchange: “Why did the Bitcoin I received vanish? I thought Bitcoin was immutable??!!!”
You: “Oh lol you’re terribly misinformed, it’s the data structures that are immutable, silly, not the actual database. Obviously the database consensus can fail and that can make you lose money, unless it’s controlled by trustworthy and honest people of course... who made you believe otherwise?”
Immutability refers to data, not interpretation of data. It has a specific meaning in computer science. It does not mean "social value", or "economic utility", or anything like that. It refers to the actual values of the bits. And in that sense, Bitcoin is unequivocally immutable. If you want to define some other term to refer to mutability of interpretation - go ahead. Just don't call it mutability.
I don't usually go out of my way to tell people they are uninformed, but you're spreading very uninformed opinions around. You can't reasonably expect to spread your uninformed opinion around and not have people tell you you're uninformed. If you take offense to that, well, maybe you should limit yourself to sharing opinions about things you understand. I'm not saying this to offend or hurt you, I'm saying it because it's a fact you should be aware of.
I don't think you're dumb; you seem like a smart guy. You're just ignorant on a specific topic--and that's okay too--ignorance is fixable. But you should fix it before you start spraying your opinions on the topic around.
> I honestly think the disconnect here is you're thinking in terms of bits and atoms and I'm thinking from the user's perspective. If we're going to build something useful with the blockchain, we have to think from the user's perspective.
No, the cryptography (which has little to do with bits and nothing to do with atoms) affects users. You can't simply argue that you understand Bitcoin well enough because the social aspects of Bitcoin are the important part. Both the social aspects AND the cryptography aspects are vital to understanding--if you don't understand the cryptography you don't understand Bitcoin. Period. This is especially true when you make claims that are directly about the cryptography (such as that a block chain is not immutable) which show that you clearly don't understand it.
> It doesn't matter if it's 2 separate "block chains"
Since that is literally what a fork is, if it "doesn't matter" then why are we even talking about a fork?
> they're both attempts at finding consensus on 1 ledger
No, they're both (immutable) data structures which hold a ledger. "Attempts at finding consensus" aren't really represented by a data structure.
> What if the developers were compromised and the fork was made so that someone could execute a large double-spend?
You could start to build a plausible case for this by looking at the respective blockchains--which is, incidentally, an effect of them being immutable. But I thought this "doesn't matter".
But that's unlikely, because the fork was relevant for < 2 hours. The attacker would have had to spend their coin and the seller would have to release control of the asset they were spending the coin for, in that time.
And if a large double spend were executed, there's a good chance we'd know about it because the seller who received their coins on the 0.8 blockchain would probably be pretty angry about it.