I'm so sick of these profound-sounding blog posts that take 1 million words to say precisely jack shit. Yes, the key innovation around Bitcoin was to order events. You can call this 'time' if you want. This is literally the most obvious thing you can say about the system. It's so obvious in fact that it's in the introduction section to the Bitcoin whitepaper. Here is the entire blog post written much shorter and more precisely by Satoshi:
'In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.'
Not trying to be elitist but if you find this topic new then you probably also find Bitcoin's technical workings new. Since it's now more than a decade old I don't find this a very topical inclusion for a 'news' site.
I'm voting you up, but a respectful disagreement...
I think that sometimes seeing a person meander through related concepts and take a fresh look at them can be quite valuable; likewise, non-technical language can make things accessible.
Even if there's no grand takeaway.
I know, for me, sometimes I quite like this sort of thing and sometimes I find it tiresome. But in the right mood, I find it very valuable.
Likewise, I could send this piece to someone who has no technical background at all and has not the Bitcoin whitepaper or any further analyses, and then have an interesting conversation afterwards.
After reading this article, it now seems like BTC is not equipped to to handle general relativity. If we ever become an interstellar species that seriously uses cryptocurrency, I'm not convinced that BTC will be sufficient. The only reason it works on earth is because the "ticks" of its clock are slower than the speed of light, but faster than we need transactions to be settled. If I use BTC to buy a product from a company on Mars, will ~10min be long enough? What kinds of new attacks would bent space give rise to?
These are all things I hadn't considered before reading this article, and I found them enjoyable to think about. If you didn't get anything out of it, that's fine, but don't rain on others' parade.
There's tons of conversations about this. People have been speculating about making an alternate blockchain that settles in X days, or X weeks, that way it is "inner solar system"-friendly.
To be fair to most people, they don't know what any of these terms mean: double-spending, peer-to-peer, distributed server, timestamp, computational proof.
I'm so sick off those blog posts that take 1 million words to explain monads with so many empty words. Monads are simply endofunctors coupled with coherence conditionned morphisms. Nothing newsworthy, just be a little smarter
thank you, I am sure you save a lot of time for a lot of people. There is an interesting conversation in the movie
"wall street". Bud Fox tries to make a sale pitch to Gordon
Gekko. After awhile, Gordon says: Now tell me something
I don't know.
'In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.'
Not trying to be elitist but if you find this topic new then you probably also find Bitcoin's technical workings new. Since it's now more than a decade old I don't find this a very topical inclusion for a 'news' site.