Bitcoin: There’s a blockchain for that!
Invented by Satoshi Nakamoto—the mysterious, possibly pseudonymous inventor who whipped up Bitcoin and then vanished—it’s a solution to an old game-theory chestnut called the Byzantine Generals’ Problem. Say you’ve got a bunch of officers planning an attack, communicating by messenger, and one or more might be traitors; how do the loyal leaders eliminate sabotage and make sure they’re all on the same, correct page?
.. To make sense of all this, you have to distinguish carefully between Bitcoin and the blockchain (an effort that, I fear, will prove as futile as trying to differentiate between the Internet and the Web). You can — as has been widely suggested — think of Bitcoin as a single application, the blockchain as the whole platform. Bitcoin is a browser, or email; the blockchain is the underlying protocol, like HTTP or TCP/IP.
.. “There is a tendency in computer-land to seek technical solutions to political problems,” Ceglowski says. “In my opinion, the focus on the blockchain (and related ideas) falls into that misguided category. The idea that we should look to algorithms and technology to reclaim our freedoms is fundamentally undemocratic. It presupposes a technical elite who would ‘fix the Internet’ for everyone else. While I can see how this appeals to romantic ideas of hacking the system, I see it as a dangerous trend at worst, and a distraction at best.