> however bitcoin blockchain is a data structure AND a network. And the innovative part is that it manages to stay decentralized (unlike github) while keeping a single canonical ledger. This has nothing to do with postmodernist societal theory, it's a fact.

But it's not true. Neither the blockchain nor the POW hashes assert consensus. What asserts consensus is technically fear of losing money and the desire to make more money. PoW blockchains only work so long as a majority of computing power in the system is not hostile.

Let me reiterate: THE BLOCKCHAIN DOES NOT ASSERT DISTRIBUTED CONSENSUS AND THE POW HASH JUST DEFINES WHO CAN "PLAY" THE MINER GAME AS A SMALLER SUBSET OF INVESTED PEOPLE.

That is fact. This is why distributed system engineers are very eye-rolley about the ide seea that the blockchain has a Byzantine problem solution. It really doesn't, it just bribes them. As long as those bribes work for a majority of the generals, the system moves one step forward.

This is fundamentally different from other algorithms in the space, and does fundamentally different things.

> git is NOT a "block" chain. There's a clear reason why blockchain had to use the "block" structure to group transactions together instead of chaining them individually.

Squashed commits exist, dude. And quite often Bitcoin's chain has short lived forks. Heck, it's even got a long-lived fork.

The folks with merge rights are your miners in this system. You could also make an analgoue to POS chain systems where the stake is not a majority share of currency but some sort of community mandate or grant.

What's funny to me: cryptocurrency is moving away from Bitcoin's model and towards the POS world rapidly. What's more, people are redefining "stake" in exotic and exciting ways besides Victorian-era money worship models.

> Thinking git is a blockchain is as ridiculous as saying anything that uses this type of linked list structure is a blockchain.

A blockchain is just a Merkle Tree. The "genius" you're so lovingly referring to with Bitcoin is the game theoretic part of Bitcoin. The technical parts are ancient.

It's worth noting that there are lots of attacks that would count as Byzantine faults that neither POW nor POS shared consensus models can handle.

> I recommend you actually reading the white paper, running a node, and looking into the code. I bet you will realize what you've been skeptical about is nothing more than what the ignorant media have been hyping up, but not the actual technology.

I've written them. They're the kind of thing I write over a few glasses of whiskey when the family is away. It was boring. They're not hard unless you're writing them in some crazy makework language like C or Go.

The most exciting parts of cryptocurrency are how we start redefining shared value in a way that offers some of the adaptive benefits of capitalist markets while still offering societally confirmed limits.

The thing that really strikes me about your (and so many other people's) misunderstanding of cryptocurrency is that you have conflated the notion of machine consensus with human consensus. At the speed of the current Bitcoin network, machine consensus is an old and solved problem. A boring problem. What the Bitcoin paper is about is a system that builds human consensus. That's a trickier problem.