How bitcoin & blockchain differ and why it really matterssteemCreated with Sketch.

in #bitcoin7 years ago

Bitcoin (cryptocurrency, more generally) = blockchain + game theory + BFT

  • blockchain — immutable ledger
  • game theory — cryptoeconomics; economic incentives for trustless multiagent systems (including decentralized governance)
  • BFT — byzantine fault tolerance; theory, defining P2P communications again, in trustless multiagent systems

On top of that cryptocurrencies (and blockchain) may get additional value with:

  • zero-knowledge: a cryptographic ability to prove something (like a transaction) without disclosing the information about its components;
  • smart contracts: automatically-executed decentralized business logic;
  • decentralized P2P storage & communications (IPFS, IPDB, Swarm, Whisper etc);

But even these three get their value only in public, decentralized blockchains, i.e. cryptocurrencies. Why are permissioned or private blockchains inferior comparing to public ones (cryptocurrencies)? Because in controlled (centralized or quasi-centralized environments) there is much weaker BFT & economical incentivization, i.e. some centralized party must be trusted. Thus, while permissioned/private blockchains still have their important applications (like in an enterprise environment), they are in no way a better generic alternative to public crypto.

P.S. This is the brief answer to a question why such decentralized project like Pandora Boxchain requiring high censorship resistance can't be implemented in an enterprise or permissioned environment and needs its own cryptoeconomy/cryptocurrency.

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