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by joeblau·8y ago·view on hn ↗
Let's say the OP is correct. It doesn't matter — Whomever is using the word is using it how they want to and the recipient will understand the correct and incorrect meaning. If I was the CTO at a bank and I told the OP we were building a private blockchain for asset management, he would know what I mean. Now since the op is technical, he would probably ask more questions to figure out that what I really want is an openly audit-able immutable database, but his intellect would allow him to drill down further.

This fallacy the same thing that happened for the word "Disrupt"/"Disruption"/"Disruptive Technology". Even Clay Christensen, the creator of the phrase, says most people misuse the phrase "disruption" when compared to his explanation in the Innovators Dilemma[1]. There are Tons[2] of[3] people[3] complaining that the term is misused. In the end, if you casually tell someone you've got an idea for a Taco Food truck that's going to disrupt the food truck industry, people will know what you mean.

The definition of this word "blockchain" is being misused so much that it is changing faster real eduction can help. I think posts like this are great if you're technical, but as I said above — It doesn't matter what the fallacy is.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...

[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/the-truth-about-disruption...

[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/vukivujasinovic/2017/03/02/its-...

[4] - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption...

1 comments
If it's private, it isn't auditable. You can keep a journal of all transactions, and when you decide that history needs to be changed, you make the change in your journal and roll it forward from there. If the auditors have half a clue, you can't do this for events that happened before the most recent previous audit, but if they have a whole clue, they won't accept the current state of your system as anything more accurate than your attestation.

The counterargument to "words mean what people agree they mean" is that "to computers, instructions mean what they have already been defined to mean". If you change Python's meanings, you need to tell everybody that you're using Python 3.5-Joe, not Python 3.5.

>If it's private, it isn't auditable

Clearly true, but in this field "private" is really being used to denote "not a Public Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum".

It doesn't mean "actually private". It means "we built our own rather than pay to use Ethereum".

No, because that would be another public blockchain.

Private really means what you think it is "a blockchain that only a small selected group can access". A lot of "Private blockchains" are just Ethereum-nodes running behind a firewall and with a secret genesis-block.

It does not, however, mean that it cannot be peer-reviewed. Allthough that still leaves the problem of not knowing if what you've reviewed is what is running.