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greglook / blocks

Clojure content-addressable data storage.
The Unlicense
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is this a blockchain library? #12

Closed zcaudate closed 8 years ago

zcaudate commented 8 years ago

This is going to sound pretty ignorant... I've been googling 'blockchain' technology for about half a day and I still don't know what it means. Does this library have anything to do with it?

greglook commented 8 years ago

Not exactly - this could be used as one of the layers supporting a blockchain, but doesn't directly implement such a system directly. At the most abstract level, a blockchain is like a linked list where the nodes in the list are content-addressed blocks, and the pointers between the nodes are hashes of previous blocks in the chain. This library implements the immutable content-addressed block part, but doesn't provide a formalized structure for constructing the chain of blocks.

You might want to look at clj-merkledag, which builds on this library to provide data structure serialization. I'm not actively developing it right now, but it works and I have some future plans for it.

zcaudate commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the explanation =) I’m now googling ‘what is a merkle tree'

zcaudate commented 8 years ago

also, I’m curious what mvxcvi means

greglook commented 8 years ago

also, I’m curious what mvxcvi means

It's a legacy from when I used to name my computing devices after powers of two, expressed as roman numerals. MVXCVI (implied bar over the first V) is MV (4000) + XC (90) + V (5) + i (1) = 4096 = 2^12. I liked the succinctness and it's a fairly unique string, so I started using it as a publishing namespace.

zcaudate commented 8 years ago

very cool. so there's been 12 devices so far?

On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 8:53 AM, Greg Look notifications@github.com wrote:

also, I’m curious what mvxcvi means

It's a legacy from when I used to name my computing devices after powers of two, expressed as roman numerals. MVXCVI (implied bar over the first V) is MV (4000) + XC (90) + V (5) + i (1) = 4096 = 2^12. I liked the succinctness and it's a fairly unique string, so I started using it as a publishing namespace.

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