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Blockchain book said: Simply put, a blockchain is a database encompassing a physical chain of fixed-length blocks that include 1 to N transactions, where each transaction added to a new block is validated and then inserted into the block solution looking for a problem.
FTFY.
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I can't be the only person who thought Ripple, Raspberry Ripple, Raspberry PI & had a vision of the wall of RiPi's bit coin mining...
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: solution looking for a problem.
Yeah, a lot of things are that. I always go into reading about new tech with a critical eye toward it.
The foundation of it is quite interesting though because it is such a novel idea of a hash tree (merkle tree) that insures that each node is valid (and then all data must be valid). The concept is quite interesting.
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: solution looking for a problem.
I remember hearing that about iPads when they came out.
Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway. (Glenn Reynolds)
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I very much agree. While the tech itself looks promising, everybody and their grandma try to shoehorn blockchain into everything, no matter how it fits. And let's be frank, with all the issues surrounding Bitcoin, we have a better precedent on blockchain having issues than on blockchain solving them.
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Phone rings.
Voice: "Hello. This is the security call center. As a courtesy, we have been monitoring your block chains. They are in danger of becoming cross-linked."
You: Oh my! How awful! What does that mean?
Voice: You need to give us the password to your bitcoin wallet so that we can be sure some unscrupulous individual doesn't branch your links."
You: . . .
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: Voice: You need to give us the password...
Of course, there will be no passwords in the future so that is ridiculous. 
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Yes, already sat through a presentation on BC with an offer to help me set up my first BC (for a fee of course). When I saw the word "trust" I ran.
"Trust me": how 14 year old girls get pregnant. 
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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BC doesn't require trust; it is not fiat.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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While I really like the idea of blockchain I do think it's being hyped a lot.
Sure, some bigger companies are hopping on the hype train, but I don't see a lot of value for regular businesses.
It's not as secure as they make you believe.
BitCoin (and blockchain) can be hacked or tampered with or whatever it is they do.
More importantly, it's really expensive to generate those hashes (or nonces to be precise)!
The fact that mining them can make you money says enough.
It's like saying "we need ID's for our database, let's ask consumers to rent us their computers so we can get those ID's!"
Not going to happen for about 99.999999% of the businesses.
Maybe I just don't know blockchain well enough, but I know a lot of people talking about blockchain, but no one who's actually doing it.
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Sander Rossel wrote: BitCoin (and blockchain) can be hacked or tampered with or whatever it is they do.
I believe you may be misinformed. Bitcoin maybe. Not sure if something happened there. But do you know that each node in the blockchain has a SHA-256 hash of the next node, etc? Quite difficult to hack.
There is a time-based part to the value also and then the decentralized check that goes on.
So not sure if you've just heard it was less secure or something. You'd have to bring more facts to this story that it is insecure than just that it's not as secure as they say. I'm not sure either though, but if you read the part of how a blockchain is a merkle tree you would probably agree it would be quite difficult to alter the data.
But I do understand that nascent tech (and especially overhyped nascent tech like blockchain) often makes people think it is just a bunch of noise. Maybe it is, but the details behind it are very interesting.
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While it is true that hacking a SHA-256 is practically impossible, the problem with blockchain is elsewhere:
1. The HASH at any node is the combined HASH of all the nodes below it, all the way down... It makes the HASH creation a time and computation consuming when the blockchain (tree) grow...
2. The second security measure of a blockchain structure is distribution. You can not temper with the chain at one position, as the other instances will refuse to that... But that immediately rises the problem of the owner of the chain... Let take a bank - it moves to blockchain, but - obviously - all the instances will be owned by the bank, so that can give larger security against attacks from the outside, but can be hacked still from the inside... Not to mention a blockchain owned by a private company to store your data...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: You can not temper with the chain at one position, as the other instances will refuse to that
Unless you flood the network with bad actors. I guess it's fortunate we don't have massive countries like China and Russia with masses of resources and an active interest in disrupting such a thing. I mean when blockchain runs everything, even American government systems, thank God there are no Chinas or Russias.
People saying blockchain is "secure" is like people saying Apple Macs are secure. They're not, it's just that no-one has the motivation to attack them. Yet.
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: People saying blockchain is "secure" is like people saying Apple Macs are secure. They're not, it's just that no-one has the motivation to attack them. Yet.
There are a LOT of people with motivation to attack it; even verbally, arguing from ignorance. There is a financial interest in manipulating it, as well as a political interest.
It is hard to "hack" the hash; it is nigh-impossible to attack a chain of hashes on different computers, regardless of your (computing) power.
Doesn't mean that it cannot be stolen or taxed, but that was not your premise
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: It is hard to "hack" the hash; it is nigh-impossible to attack a chain of hashes on different computers, regardless of your (computing) power.
It's ironic you talk about ignorance yet clearly don't understand what I mean by using many bad actors to take over the network. I'm not talking about using computer power to hack the hashes.
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Take your argument and prove it; shouldn't be too hard to get a lot of bad actors to influence BC
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I don't have the resources, but governments do.
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No, they don't.
If they did, they would have used it by now.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: If they did, they would have used it by now.
To gain what? You think China or Russia are going to deploy a huge tech project to disrupt bitcoin? Why would they care about that?
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: To gain what? You think China or Russia are going to deploy a huge tech project to disrupt bitcoin? Why would they care about that?
No, the US. Where politicians shout it is used for tax-evasion and by criminals and terrorists
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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So you expect the US to disrupt a private enterprise like bitcoin because they say it is used for tax evasion and crime? So is the internet so why isn't the US shutting that down too? If they wanted to shut it down they'd legislate, no need to do something underhand that might harm their reputation and democracy.
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: So is the internet so why isn't the US shutting that down too?
Dunno. If someone told Trump that he can shut down something Al Gore invented, he'd probably do so
F-ES Sitecore wrote: If they wanted to shut it down they'd legislate, no need to do something underhand that might harm their reputation and democracy.
There's no need to shut it down directly; discrediting works well enough. Harming US reputation and democracy is left to the Americans themselves, doesn't look from here like you need help with that.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Dunno
The same reason they haven't shut down Bitcoin.
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