I am a person who is said to be quite a long talker, but I don't like others to talk long and idly (^^). When people ramble on and on, I tell them to sum it up in five words. If you understand something well, you should be able to summarise it in five words.
Steve Huston's book, which I introduced the other day, is also summed up in about five words. There are only two things that matter in drawing: gesture and structure. He gives a clear definition of this. Furthermore, some definitions are based on only one word. Art = idea, Perspective = position.
I've been studying blockchain and today was the day that such a 5-word definition came down to me. Here's a zippy definition of blockchain.
Blockchain = a trusted decentralised authority and network
Before blockchain, there was a decentralised system: 1500 years ago, Yap island was already using decentralised networks to manage its huge stone assets. This system's trustworthiness is based on the fact that there is already trust in the village's closed society, not in the asset management system of Yap Island itself.
So what about the digital world? In the past, there was a mechanism called Napster for sharing music via P2P. This network is decentralised, but it was managed centrally. What about the torrent network? The mechanism for sharing digital files using this P2P is a decentralised network, and it is also a network with no one managing it. However, there is no guarantee that the digital information shared by torrents has not been tampered with. Because in the Internet society, there is no need to expose an individual's identity, and there is no motivation to keep promises in the absence of social interests.
So what makes blockchain so revolutionary is that this decentralised network of authority can be trusted. The information that goes into the blockchain can be added to, but it cannot be tampered with. Blockchain uses the game theory to motivate people to manage the data. In other words, the blockchain uses mathematical computational competition and economic theory to reach a consensus that the data has not been tampered with.
In other words, in the blockchain, we can define it like this as well
Trust = consensus
Game theory = computational competition based on a utility function
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