DLTs and Blockchain are not the same.
I have been putting off writing another article but as the acronym DLT spreads and Bitcoin is feeling bullish I thought it time to elaborate.
Jackie Chan is not dead... yet. And if you have any doubt, any remaining niggling suspicions all you have to do is look at the picture above. Now let's put our "deep fake" suspicions to one side and take it as moot that the Chan is in fact holding this newspaper, we would all agree he is very much alive... but why? I mean if he was pointing at the McDonald’s Big Mac he just bought seconds ago nobody would be convinced that that photo constitutes a "proof of life". The reason we accept a newspaper as proof of life is that it's hard to fake distributed ledger technology (DLT) entries.
This observation has not escaped governments, enterprise or individuals who often post notices of death, weddings, tenders, sequestration, estate notices and others as a way to get information timestamped in a reliable and cost effective fashion.
The number of in print newspapers held by individuals is the security guarantee of the information contained within its pages. Isn't this then a blockchain?
Newspapers it would seem should be the very definition of distributed ledger technologies, a good analogy for what a blockchain is. If blockchains are just DLTs why can't we dispense with BTC and just have the Wall Street Journal publish a list of transactions for the latest and greatest WSJ token, send out its typical 750k odd copies daily and we have a simple effective token? or asked another way, are blockchains effective because their ledgers are distributed or is there more to a blockchain?
We need to go back and read the Satoshi White paper again. There he states the simple and elegant "longest chain rule" which is fuelled by a consumable resource burn (proof of work) so that we can determine with ever increasing accuracy over time that no matter which ledger we read, we can convince ourselves which versions of a blockchain ledger is false and which version is true.
A blockchain is chiefly unique from a DLT in that it records a measurable quantity (the proof of work behind the longest chain) that you can verify for yourself that allows you to have confidence in the information presented irrespective of the reputation of the author, ledger, community or any other person involved in the network.
The distribution of the ledger in blockchain is kind of irrelevant. The proof of work behind the longest chain is everything. Proof of stake coins are not blockchains. The do not burn resource and chain it to preserve independence of the ledger. Conversely on average I only need to sample 6 randomly selected ledgers on the BTC main net to convince myself some payment has been successful, I don't need there to be millions of ledgers, what I need is millions of miners. Those two things are not the same.
I always try to keep my articles short and as such I have attempted to illustrate the difference between DLTs and Blockchains through an intuitive thought experiment. Of course the formal differentiation is deeper but would require a lot more rambling. If you would like to have more clarification on this crucial topic please don't hesitate to message me or comment on this article and we'll take it from there.
Until then let's stop discussing DLTs and let's start discussing the longest chain rule (LCR) technologies!