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> anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off

Exactly - when you have the might and connectivity of Facebook, and everything you could want to do with a blockchain you could do much more easily with a centralized SaaS-based currency like steam credits or MMO gold, why would you strap yourself to a difficult to administer and control public blockchain architecture?

Blockchain is a thing that makes sense when you have no central authority for tracking state. There’s zero overlap between that and Facebook.

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I agree with the comment on zero overlap currently. However, I look at it more like google and android. Perhaps fb feels that it is better to have some voice in the crypto/blockchain ecosystem than none.

Shouldn't it be 'A blockchain' or 'blockchains' since we're speaking about one of many things?

Or has the name become like software, code and water?

It depends on what use of the word blockchain we are discussing. Blockchain is the name of an algorithm (or more accurately a class of algorithms) in addition to being the name of instances of using that class of algorithm. See for example the word “average.”

The use of the word "Blockchain" without the article is useful in identifying those who understand decentralized ledgers and those who are following the crowd. Essentially it's the buzzword version of the real deal, which is kind of nice as it lets you concentrate on reading the writings of people who have some idea what they're talking about.

Your comment is super interesting to me. I’ve historically been in the camp of “what’s important is the concept” (aka blockchain) rather than the instancing (aka a blockchain), but taste testing your comment with my roughly coincident comment on parallels with a word like “average” or “sum,” I see how if talking with someone I knew to be a mathematician or physicist I’d be very comfortable hearing them drop the article but with someone who didn’t seem to grok any real math if they dropped the article I’d likely conclude they had no idea what they were actually talking about. I think you’ve convinced me that going that tiny bit of extra distance and including the article before the word is in fact a potentially valuable in-group signaling mechanism for communicating that you are in fact a person who commonly talks with others knowledgeable about blockchains (genuine question: did I do the signalling right in your reading there by using a plural in that sentence? I’m realizing I’ve so favored dropping the article and treating blockchain as a collective noun that I’ve not trained my ear correctly on this and need to start trying to do so).

You got it "right" in terms of what my snobbery likes! ;) Obviously the style of writin is not actually a direct proxy for skill and understanding, but I do believe it relates to experience. Dropping the article is so new that I think most people who've spent the better part of the last decade working on cryptocurrencies would have to make a conscious effort to adopt that style of writing.

Could you, by the way, provide an example of how, in maths, you'd use e.g. "average" without an article in a sentence? I'm having difficulty coming up with an equivalence to this issue, but then I'm no mathematician at all.

Edit: also, sorry about the snub. I got confused and thought we were talking about how the article used the word. I wouldn't have been quite so abrasive if I'd realized I was also commenting on you, personally. I do tend towards snarkiness but usually try to avoid making it personal.

The simplest usage of average without an article would be “let’s average FB’s data” (where average is a used as a verb). That’s completely acceptable to say in normal usage but maps to “let’s blockchain FB’s data” which you’d presumably hate. We could also say “I used an average”/“I used a blockchain” (average being a gerund/noun form of a verb as in “I went for a run”) or we could say “I computed the average”/“I forked the blockchain” (akin to “on my run”, where we are referring to a specific instance or result of the verb to average or to run).

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