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Comment by ribosometronome | Hacker News Reader

ARPANET refers to a specific network that was decommissioned in 1990. And for 13 years of it's 21 years in existence, it was using NCP rather than TCP/IP.

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I worked at BBN Technologies in the early 2000's. I was always amazed at how a company that essentially co-founded the internet and had the second domain name ever registered[1] could basically go out of business.

You just made me think that Bitcoin could definitely be the ARPANET of blockchains and Core devs could be BBN. Don't get me wrong, I worked with some extremely smart people, but in the end, Raytheon bought the whole company.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...

The difference of course, is that bitcoin isn't a company. And the arpanet turned into the internet. But companies come and go. By your analogy, raytheon owns the internet.

You're right, Bitcoin is not a company, it's a technology. This is the analogy I'd make.

Then (Internet) / Now (Cryptocurrencies)

  NCP[1] == Blockchain based decentralized consensus
  ARPANET == Bitcoin
  BBN Technologies == Blockstream
  TCP/IP == We are figuring this out right now
  Internet == We are figuring this out right now

The ARPANET turned into the Internet in the fact that parts of it were used to build TCP/IP and the modern Internet. Just like concepts from Bitcoin will eventually be used to build whatever decentralized byzantine fault tolerant mechanism we end up with in ten years. I don't think Bitcoin is the Internet, Bitcoin is the ARPANET. Also, I wouldn't say Raytheon owns the Internet. Today the Internet is owned and controlled by many different parties all built on the TCP/IP stack. Countries like China own their own internet.

In my mind, all of this work to find different decentralized consensus algorithms is work to build transport layer (OSI Model[2]). Bitcoin is an early application, but thousands of applications are now popping up, competing, and building healthier communities.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

And the bitcoin node software i use today is version 0.15.1, not 0.8.0. The segwit block structure is different to the original implementation. One turned into the other. Nothing is stopping you running a 0.8.0 node of course. But the newer implementation has more functionality.

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