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Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? (theguardian.com)
mspohr writes: This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally). A linked article in The Economist expands the thought and discusses changes to the blockchain to improve performance, reduce overhead and accommodate different uses.
(See also this related poll.)
I don't use Bitcoin, but from what little I've read from previous stories here or elsewhere is that the scaling issue at current is due to conflicts within the community and not an inherent problem with the blockchain concept. Someone who was in favor of increasing the size even used a similar example that it would need to be larger in order to handle all of the transactions for a major credit card company.
The great thing about the blockchain concept is that it is distributed. There is no central server you can compromise. As long as a given percentage of the miners aren't hostile, everything is fine. The idea is great, but in practice its dead. A majority of the bitcoin hashing power is provided by very few people. They of course have a high interest in bitcoin still being trusted, otherwise the bitcoin price crashes and goes close to 0$, and all their expensive rigs are worthless. But its not at all a system anymore where the "small guys" control everything.
Bitcoin has been designed so that if you own the private keys for a wallet, nobody can steal your bitcoins. This is even provided if the blockchain gets compromised or controlled 99% by entities hostile to you. Your bitcoins remain yours. But the moment you use some website which knows the private key for the wallet, you fully trust them. And if the website gets hacked, they can of course get stolen. So its not a problem of bitcoin itself.
You're right, except for the bits where you are wrong:
So to boil it down,
Cryptography doesn't boil down. You learn to understand it in full or you end up with a broken view of how you think it doesn't work.
there is a parent server
No there's not, the blockchain is distributed amongst all users, that's how you verify someone who sends you something owns it in the first place
that is tracking all uses and exchanges of the bit of pertinent data.
Yes
And that can never ever get compromised.
Unless the people who verify the data cryptographically can control more than 51% of the efforts to verify it.
Because nobody has ever lost bitcoins?
Correct, you can't lose bitcoins. Think of it as money that is only ever tied to your wallet. Everyone in the world knows the exact concept of that wallet. You can lose the wallet, someone can even pick it up and spend the contents, but you can never just magically lose money out of it. It has to go somewhere, and the blockchain tracks its movement.
Sorry about the sarcasm.
Don't be sorry, simply learn about the technology and then you won't have a need for it.