>, because the concept of a block chain has been described a long time before
Citing historical usage and original meanings is not relevant as to why people use synecdoche.
The point is that in today's discourse, the term "blockchain" has already expanded beyond the original literal technically constrained meaning of "chain of hashes". Even if _you_ want to keep the original meaning of "blockchain", you still have to recognize when _others_ are using synecdoche.
To interpret those articles correctly, you have to mentally substitute "blockchain" with "distributed ledger". If you substitute with "chain of hashes", the articles make no sense.
Synecdoche throws original historical usage out the window.
>, but for people who are new to the topic, that would not have been very helpful in understanding the concept of a block chain.
There are many web articles that create a "toy" blockchain by showing _hashes_. The problem is that the abundance of such articles actually hides the real ingenuity of the Satoshi/bitcoin.
Again, the hard part is combining multiple technologies in clever ways that can synchronize the psychology of anonymous people -- aka "decentralized trust". The hashing is the least interesting component of all that. However, since the "hashes" are the most "accessible" part of it (especially to programmers), that's what everybody ends up writing about! This has the unintended side effect if hiding the more groundbreaking ideas (the psychology) of distributed ledgers.
The psychology aspect is a part that's the most impressive. You have incentives -- everybody likes money -- and proof-of-work -- consensus that solves the byzantine generals problem. But if you combine them all to produce a new trustless kind of money then this innovation itself serves like a socially scaleless memetic payload.
It's like what Nick Szabo talks about in his social scalability article. That the design of Bitcoin offers high social scalability, allowing anyone to participate in the system across cultures, languages, customs, and laws. It kind of ties everything together under a single model.
I also agree with you about the "Synecdoche" thing, too. It seems like we're arguing about the same thing. As you say, you can interpret "blockchain" as the chain of blocks that is outputted from the consensus system or as the whole system itself. But I guess in the context of this article it was confusing whether this poster was having a genuine misunderstanding or was just talking about a part of the system.
Citing historical usage and original meanings is not relevant as to why people use synecdoche.
The point is that in today's discourse, the term "blockchain" has already expanded beyond the original literal technically constrained meaning of "chain of hashes". Even if _you_ want to keep the original meaning of "blockchain", you still have to recognize when _others_ are using synecdoche.
Examples in media:
+ https://www.google.com/search?q=bloomberg+blockchain
+ https://www.google.com/search?q=wsj+blockchain
+ https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain...
To interpret those articles correctly, you have to mentally substitute "blockchain" with "distributed ledger". If you substitute with "chain of hashes", the articles make no sense.
Synecdoche throws original historical usage out the window.
>, but for people who are new to the topic, that would not have been very helpful in understanding the concept of a block chain.
There are many web articles that create a "toy" blockchain by showing _hashes_. The problem is that the abundance of such articles actually hides the real ingenuity of the Satoshi/bitcoin.
Again, the hard part is combining multiple technologies in clever ways that can synchronize the psychology of anonymous people -- aka "decentralized trust". The hashing is the least interesting component of all that. However, since the "hashes" are the most "accessible" part of it (especially to programmers), that's what everybody ends up writing about! This has the unintended side effect if hiding the more groundbreaking ideas (the psychology) of distributed ledgers.