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Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? (theguardian.com)

Posted by timothy on from the using-every-part-of-the-algorithm dept.

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.)

2 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No, C and C++ are the most important. by Wycliffe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.

    It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.

    C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility. You cannot compare C/C++ to Perl, Python, PHP, or even to Java. Yes, C++ is harder to use than higher level languages but that's kindof the point of the higher level languages. The point of C++ is to be an intermediate language that straddles both worlds. There are really no other languages that can switch between machine code, assembly, and high level concepts with the ease and flexibility of C++. That's the reason C++ has the staying power it does.

  2. Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore by caseih · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Doesn't look like the mods understood what the article was talking about anymore than you did! This isn't about bitcoins. It's about the technology for doing a trustrworthy and tamper-proof ledger of transactions between parties that need not have any trust for each other. The article contains at least one good use for the blockchain: land deeds.