For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
I have wet dreams about a new text based mesh internet powered by the gemini protocol. Imagine, if you will, instead of paying monthly to your ISP/cell service provider to acess the internet, that instead you bought an ‘internet box’ once. Where each router/gateway acts both as a self-hosting site for the user, and transmits this site text data to other local routers through LoRaWAN. There are many technical challenges to this kind of networks, one being “how do I check that all other routers have an up-to-date version of any one site?” and blockchain technology seems to fit nicely for that particular issue.
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven’t really been built yet.
So, if I get it, it’s like torrent, except instead of you manually verifying the hash code, each computer your file passes pay automatically checks and says “yup, the file I received and transmitted is the file I was supposed to receive and transmit” ?
pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.
I see, but if I’m not mistaken, git is anterior to the blockchain. What I’m asking here is what new things the blockchain brings to the table, that preexisting protocols like Git or P2P couldn’t do. Or is the blockchain just another application of the same principles (the Merkle chain, as a previous commenter was saying)? If so, what sets it appart ?
