> 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.

What exactly is 'not true'? Go back and re-read the sentence you said 'that's not true' to. i was talking about the distinction between a data structure and a network. if you think THAT's not true, then explain why blockchain is not a data structure and a network simultaneously, instead of your irrelevant rant about how Bitcoin is not perfect, because I never said bitcoin was perfect either.

> 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.

You can reiterate as much as you want, and no one is stopping you from believing in your definition of blockchain, but remember that you're just rambling on and on about a topic I never was discussing about.

> Squashed commits exist, dude

Do you really think just because you CAN achieve something in a piece of technology, that makes it same as another piece of technology that is specifically designed to work in that manner? By that standard, iPad, iPhone, laptop, smart watch, they're all same thing. They're made up of Cpu and memory and fundamentally same tech if you open them up.

> 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.

The game-theoretic part is what people are most excited about, and the only proven way so far to make this type of model work is through this specific data structure AND a network called blockchain. PoS, PoW, doesn't matter, the only proven network is Bitcoin so far. There are other newer approaches like 'tangle' from iota, but you'll probably say that's just nothing more than a graph database haha.

To you blockchain may just be that data structure but to me and many other people, it is also the entire network. my only argument was that people can't agree because people have different views on the terminology.

if you want to talk about whether bitcoin's model scales or not, go to twitter, take sides, and find your friends and fight there, there are plenty of trolls there who will be happy to play with you.

> 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

no you haven't. just listen to yourself, you sound like a guy just out of coding bootcamp who says 'i can easily build a facebook over a weekend'. Anyone can theorize about a concept and anyone can even write a 'facebook' over a weekend. But that's a child's play, what matters is whether you actually create something in the real world that works on a scale. if you just read just another medium blog post about 'how i built a blockchain in 200 lines of code' and did the same thing and think "there! i've built a blockchain, that was nothing!", then i really can't help you there buddy.

> 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

All i talked about in this thread is that blockchain is a network AND a data structure. Some people like you think it's just the pure data structure part, some people think it's both. no one is right or wrong about that because there's no fixed definition that says which is which, unlike the internet where they have specific terms like 'tcp', 'ip', 'the internet', etc. You can discuss whether that argument is correct or not, but that's not what you've been doing. you're just ranting about Bitcoin itself and i don't really care about that.

Man this must be what talking to a wall must feel like.