How to think about Blockchains
ELI5: The best organizing idea for thinking about Blockchains and Cryptos
I want you to do yourself a quick favor and forget everything you know about Blockchains and Cryptographic Currencies.
Forget how some aspire to be money, and others don’t. Forget how some chains focus on smart contracts while others try to create a long term store of value. Forget the priority and the debates around being decentralized. Forget the question of the speed of transactions on this chain, or the fees on that chain, or the quickness to reach finality.
Forget that Bitcoin solved the ‘Byzantine Generals Problem’ and that Ethereum was the first Turing complete blockchain.
Forget the noise, forget the bubbles, forget Bitcoin, forget Ethereum, and forget all your feelings about all of it.
Now… I’m going to tell you how to think about Blockchains, and why they are important.
Ready?
Blockchains are the most durable record keeping systems that humanity has ever produced, and that durability helps make them the most immutable record keeping systems that humanity has ever produced.
That’s it. That’s why Blockchains are important and that is how to think about them.
For those not in the crypto world, ‘immutability’ is the term describing the difficulty (bordering on the impossibility) of trying to change an entry in a Blockchain once it’s been entered into a Blockchain.
You can now start remembering the other things you know about Blockchains so long as you now associate those things to the durability and immutability of Blockchains.
Immutability is the core idea of crypto
To dive a bit deeper: Durability is the one metric that all Blockchains can be measured against and by extension to each other. And it is the one thing that Blockchains do better than existing databases or networks.
Durability yields immutability, and everything else that Blockchains are known for, from decentralization, to the individual tokens non-fungibility, to the cryptography that the tokens are named for -all of it- either create the circumstances that produce immutability, or flow from the feature of immutability.
Decentralized networks help to achieve immutability. Rewarding miners with tokens helps achieve immutability. The fact that many crypto projects are both open source in development, transparent in network activity, permissionless in access all help drive immutability. The idea that Blockchains are trustworthy derives from their immutability.
Savvy crypto buffs might quibble that durability is not exactly immutability, and that Recoverability, Decentralization, and a few other ideas help to produce the durability, which then helps produce record keeping immutability, but largely the idea of durability can be covered by the idea the entries and data in a blockchain are (or can be) immutable.
Immutability is the organizing principle of all of it.
Congratulations, you now can think more clearly about Blockchains and their place in the world than most people.
Until next time.
-Jack