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How Blockchains mirror Nature

10 points| raulk | 8 years ago |blog.consensusx.com | reply

9 comments

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[+] josst|8 years ago|reply
NASA would define life as "A self-sustaining series of chemical reactions capable of extracting energy from its environment and capable of Darwinian evolution.

Self-sustaining?

Nope.

Chemical reactions?

Definitely not.

Capable of extracting energy from its environment?

Unless you count people plugging in GPUs as the Blockchain's doing, no.

Darwinian evolution?

Hell no.

Overall conclusion: No.

[+] raulk|8 years ago|reply
It looks like HN doesn't like metaphors :) Since it's flagged, I will repost with a different title.
[+] jasode|8 years ago|reply
Some replies are responding to the title as if the author literally meant "living organisms".

Instead, I think it's clear that the author is speaking of an interesting metaphor.

It's similar to how we might talk about all the various Javscript libraries and framework flavor-of-the-month as a sort of "Darwinism" and "natural selection". E.g. it's a marketplace of coding ideas and the ones with staying power demonstrate "survival of the fittest".

Or to write about all the worldwide computers executing high frequency trades on the stock exchanges as an emergent "super-organism".

[+] lvoudour|8 years ago|reply
He describes phenomena that apply to every market ever (not to mention simple control loops). How are blockchains any different?