Cookie Jars and the $T Problem
With blockchain, everyone gets a cookie
Before we get into things, let me tell a little story.
The sky is beautiful, seagulls are flying as you and some friends sit on a beach. Everyone is looking at each other and small box sitting on the ground, the tension is thick.
Suddenly, someone snatches at the box and violence erupts. One of your friends brings out a airhorn and attempts to use the power of loud noise to drive everyone away. Instead all it brings is this dude:
He hops down to the beach and his presence wills everyone into silence.
After everyone has calmed down, he looks to the box and peers inside to find a couple of cookies. After some (largely useless) explaining, he figures out that everyone was accusing someone else of stealing cookies. Using his infinite wisdom he devises a simple plan:
- If you want to take a cookie, solve a riddle + make sure >1/2 of the house is there to witness
He then flies away, as everyone stares in awe at his magnificence.
The moral of the story: stop stealing cookies/don’t dismiss people wearing glasses.
But the problem is that solves nothing.
- Did no one consider that somehow we have to gather over half of any population to watch someone take out a single cookie?
- Or who makes up the riddles? How are they kept unbiased?
- How do we verify the people verifying other people?
This problem isn’t about cookies; it’s about the trillions of dollars that are spent each day
Hold up, wtf is blockchain? Do I need boltcutters? Is this illegal? Do I need a lawyer? Is turtle soup ethical to eat?
To answer all those interesting questions:
Blockchain is the equivalent of one of those scenes from a crime movie. Yarn. Literally, everything is interconnected. Mysterious stains.
Everything is interconnected, but instead of some borderline-coffee-addicted-middle-aged detective trying to figure out who did it. There a scrawny 20 something bragging about it to the world, while making millions.
aka this guy
Yeah, but that doesn’t explain it >:(
OK, the concept is that blockchain acts just like a public ledger — but with three main parts:
- The Block — think of this like a piece of paper — anything could be on it and it has the potential to store valuable info
- A nonce — this is like an ID for the sender of a block — the idea is to give you of the relevance of whether a block is good or not (if you receive multiple blocks with the same nonce, you need to discard some of them)
- Data — this is just whatever’s written on the paper/block — moving on
- Hash — this is the info about the data itself — think of this like the type of handwriting you use on each piece of paper — similar but always unique
Without going much deeper you might already be able to guess some of the benefits:
- 🕵🏽♂️ Open Source Tracking — anything that anybody does is recorded and validated by the entire community.
- 🔒Secure — all validating info is public, anything that needs to be kept private is kept private
- 🌌Decentralized — there is no single governing source, the entire notebook is maintained by the community for the community
Now imagine the implications of something like this.
- What happens when the risk of fraud is almost nonexistent?
- What happens when everyone’s transactions are publicly available?
- What happens when attackers don’t have any leverage?
If people stopped paying attention to the surface level of blockchain (instead of just the NFTs), they would see the entrance to an entirely other world.
While you’ve probably heard of the seemingly outrageous world of NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and get-rich-quick schemes, there’s sooo much more to it than that.
Wait crypto?
Did I stutter?
Cryptocurrencies are just monetized blockchains (but with equal footing).
Using blockchain = going to the grocery store:
- The grocery store is the blockchain — it hosts all the fruits and veggies (cryptocurrencies like ETH and BTC), and provides all the underlying support for these fruits to be available
- All the different items are types of crypto — each different group of foods are different protocols (think CAD vs USD) that all use the same tech
So, should I care?
Duh.
