<story><title>‘Blockchain’ is meaningless</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091766/blockchain-bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-meaning</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SeanLuke</author><text>Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI&amp;#x27;s long nightmare.&lt;p&gt;AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms.  Consider &amp;quot;Agent&amp;quot;, which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn&amp;#x27;t stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a &amp;quot;database agent&amp;quot; or a &amp;quot;compiler agent&amp;quot; or whatnot, equating &amp;quot;agent&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;program&amp;quot;.  Indeed there&amp;#x27;s an entire non-AI &lt;i&gt;field&lt;/i&gt; called &amp;quot;Agent Based Modeling&amp;quot; -- of which I am a participant -- which completely misunderstands the term.  So AI gave up and switched to &amp;quot;Intelligent Agent&amp;quot;, which was unfortunately an even &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; buzzword-compliant word.  Now we started seeing &amp;quot;intelligent graphics agent&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;intelligent login page agent&amp;quot;.  Finally in the late &amp;#x27;90s AI moved to &amp;quot;Autonomous Agent&amp;quot;, a word straight from the Department of Redundancy Department.  But it worked!  Nobody outside of AI seems to use it: my theory is that most people don&amp;#x27;t really know exactly what autonomous means.</text></comment>
<story><title>‘Blockchain’ is meaningless</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091766/blockchain-bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-meaning</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Ajedi32</author><text>git has been using a blockchain for the last 12 years, since long before Bitcoin:&lt;p&gt;Each commit includes the hash of its parent commit. These commits form a chain. Changing the contents of any past commit would break the chain. Each user of the repository keeps a copy of the blockchain on their PC, and they can fetch new &amp;quot;blocks&amp;quot; from any other peer with `git fetch` or `git pull`. The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository.</text></comment>