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RE: Week 2: Thinking more about blockchain technology

in #blockchain6 years ago

the chain is the ledger, the block is the page on the ledger, and the transaction is the line on the page. So, there are individual transactions in the block, and the entire block is the currency, like bitcoin.

The bolded text is a great analogy, it just falls apart a bit at the end where the "currency" is conflated with the "entire block".

Let's leave aside the currency debate for a moment, e.g. is it a commodity, digital asset, currency, token? etc. I'll call them tokens for the moment.

The emission of tokens is governed by rules written in code on the blockchain, so for instance in Bitcoin, miners earn "block rewards" in BTC for successfully mining a block, but the "entire block" isn't the currency. By entire block I presume you mean something like a block that has been included in the blockchain and has enough confirmations from the network to be considered valid. A confirmed block, or a block that is considered 'valid', or 'final', is indeed a new page in the ledger. The tokens which are emitted to reward this block production exist as an entry or entries on the ledger as well.

So, person X gets Z reward for producing block Y. In Bitcoin the block reward is either mined by an individual, very rare, or it is mined by the collective efforts of a mining pool, usual. When a block reward is mined by a pool, the rewards are distributed to those proportional to how much they helped to mine the block / win the lottery.

On Steem, we have dispensed with the mining / lottery method, as it is too inefficient to scale to 100k+ transactions per second, and instead the blockchain is maintained by witnesses, who earn some portion of the total STEEM emitted for their efforts to maintain the network, and content creators share the rest of the block rewards.

So, while both BTC and STEEM pay block rewards to those who maintain the blockchain, and the first ledger entry of these block rewards are recorded in the relevant block, the block is not the rewards. The tokens are 'moveable' simply by updating the ledger, but the block remains, unalterable, non-moving, forever.

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