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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

>This is very different comparing to existing technologies that usually store state in a centralized place that is owned by a single company.

That wouldn't be the case for Git though. With git every repository is authoritative. Github is merely were most people put their repos to be discovered and use it as a central source of truth (which is totally fine for what most people do)

You can also use a USB stick (did that in Uni when wifi was failing, it's quite fun)

You also don't need full decentralization as Mastodon shows. You only need enough that it becomes hard to single out a user and block only them or a group of users. In the fediverse there is basically no universally blocked instance, every instance federate with atleast some others.

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Git is somewhat similar to blockchains, but the similarity is very loose. Bitcoin has a shared state and enforces strict rules of how it can updated. For example I can't spend non-existing funds in Bitcoin. Also all state transitions are checked by all full nodes in Bitcoin.

This is different to Git that allows to perform any changes to text files without imposing any restrictions or checks on what changes can be performed. The ability to have a shared, verifiable state that can only be changed according to predefined rules, can be checked by anyone, and, theoretically, cannot be censored is the main selling point of public blockchain based systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The main question is how much of that do we really need in practice to solve actual, real-world problems.

Well, git has a lot of that too, atleast internally. Objects need to conform to git's internal format, otherwise the remote will reject it, similar to how Bitcoin only allows transactions if signed. (Git can sign too and with a hook it's enforceable)

The rest is fairly easy since you can enforce restriction with hooks that can do arbitrary edits and checks on the repository.

I imagine you can make git behave exactly like bitcoin with only a few simply hooks.

The main selling point of bitcoin is really only the "cannot be censored" part and that is a bit meh, tbh. The moment you need to use real cash to obtain it, the government can come, kick down your door and threaten you. Such things have happened in ISIS-controlled regions when people tried to buy bitcoin or otherwise get cash out of country.

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