Hacker News Reader

"For the purposes of this blog, we will narrowly define blockchains as a Byzantine-fault tolerant consensus protocol"

I don't think this is a useful definition. Blockchains are about trust and control, not Byzantine fault tolerance.

And they seem to be doing poorly on the trust element. My lack of trust in the controlling entities is why I left the space.

Bitcoin is more centralized ( via the mining cartel) than the existing banking system. The wealth gap is greater in crypto than the analog world too.

That's a great point. And it's definitely a tricky term to navigate because "blockchain" means so many different things to different people. (e.g. tokenization, governance, finance).

I'd say you identified the key aspect though, which I agree is not explicitly answered in this blog. "Who runs this" is a critical question and I think it will vary depending on the end application. I'm going to guess there will be settings where a permissioned deployment may be appropriate (think enterprise settings). There will be settings where a permissionless deployment will make more sense (think globally censorship-resistant Wikipedia). It all boils down to who wants to control it and how to convey trust. And for each of those, you probably have different access control policies too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com