[walexander]

Is this actually a serious question? Do you think there is no point to PayPal, or do you think your GitHub repo is an equivalent replacement? Is forwarding an email to a bunch of people equal to twitter?

The point of cryptocurrency and smart contracts from a technology perspective is that it is distributed, decentralized/p2p, and has immutable atomic operations. There were lots of early cryptocurrencies and lots of early ledgers. World of Worldcraft gold is a a digital currency if you want to call it one.

What bitcoin solved was decentralized atomic operations (double spend). That's pretty much it. Whether or not you need that is open for debate, but points like you're making are ridiculous.

[endisneigh]

yeah, I am serious. git is already distributed and decentralized. you can also enable immutable atomic operations. it's also optionally transparent like a blockchain.

in practice what's the difference? what can you do with a blockchain that you couldn't do with a repo?

[jonreem]

Settle positions between two mutually non cooperating parties. Your github solution doesn't consider that many non cooperating parties may want to do conflicting things on chain and you need a trustless way to resolve those conflicts. First writer wins to a centralized database at github is not an acceptable settlement method for billion dollar transactions.

EDIT: A blockchain is not just about keeping a history, it's also about maintaining liveness of the chain and preventing censorship even when many non cooperating parties are involved with conflicting incentives.

[hanniabu]

The game theory, incentives, and costs are not the same

[rantwasp]

yes, decentralized. That's why you were using Github? (i'm going to completely leave out issues such timings of updates in the repo, failed nodes, etc)

the groundbreaking innovation when it comes to blockchain is distributed trust. you don't have one entity that decides what happens in case there is disagreement. Everyone, following the same rules, reach the same conclusion.

try doing that with pull requests.

[nexuist]

In practice the transactions you perform on the blockchain have value in USD whereas the transactions on your equally-technically-sophisticated git repo have no value at all. So there is no reason for the average person to choose your repo over existing blockchains.

[insert_coin]

Do you think there is no point to PayPal, or do you think your GitHub repo is an equivalent replacement? Is forwarding an email to a bunch of people equal to twitter?

Yes, and yes.

Paypal is superior to a github repo, but that doesn't mean they can't do the same job. Twitter is superior to an email chain, in most situations, but that doesn't mean it can't do the same job.

Concrete is superior to wood, that doesn't mean you cannot build houses out of wood. You could theoretically build a payments system on top of github, it might not be as efficient but it'll work.