• simplymath@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    Right, but isn’t the “main chain” of Ethereum based on a similar principle wherein it’s the main chain because it’s the one the devs use?

    What about BTC vs BTC lightning.

    I’m genuinely failing to see a distinction here, and, again, the wiki article says that blockchains are special cases of Merkle trees.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      Right, but isn’t the “main chain” of Ethereum based on a similar principle wherein it’s the main chain because it’s the one the devs use?

      No clue, I don’t keep an eye on that, I’m partially aware that there are several similar forks (and eth classic was a result of scammy shenanigans) but, afaict, none try to pretend they’re the “real” ethereum.

      I’m genuinely failing to see a distinction here

      A distinction between trust and trustless? Because my initial point was that git isn’t trustless, because it works just like any other online system that requires a login, where a central server/database checks if the user sending inputs was properly identified by some mean (password, cryptographic key, something else). Implementing a Merkle or any other hash tree doesn’t make something trustless

      • simplymath@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        does git require authentication with a central server? I know that’s common practice and true of github, but my recollection was that it was meant to fix the problem of distributed kernel development via an email listserv in the early 2000s. This stack exchange post discusses how it’s not really centralized

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          7 days ago

          Not being centralized has nothing to do with being trustless. The fediverse is also decentralized, yet you, me and everyone else has to log in to a specific server. If I try to login via lemmy.world, it’ll fail. I have to login via programming.dev. Does that make lemmy and the fediverse trustless? No.

          Even the top answer on that SO question explains that the use case of hash trees for git is different from that of blockchain