The following shows the various services provided by blockchains and what those services are used for:
- Consensus: This is the first, and most important, feature of blockchains and the thing that's probably genuinely new in terms of scale and scope. It allows us to create a world where parties to a shared fact know that the fact they see is the same as the fact that other stakeholders see. Sure, consensus systems and replicated state machines have existed for years, but consensus systems at internet-scale, between untrusting actors, that work in the face of powerful adversaries? That's a step forward! In Bitcoin, the shared facts are things such as: Where are all the Bitcoin (output) that have not ...
