I had someone ask if Grassland’s data is stored on “the blockchain” recently so I thought I would clear this up.
By “the blockchain” most people probably mean Ethereum’s blockchain. And in that case, no.
The only practical reason for a blockchain and/or decentralisation is if the only viable solution to your user’s problem is so controversial to the average person at the time of its release that they’d never be able to solve it if you did it in any other way.
Grassland’s data is stored on its own blockchain. Which is a data structure and protocol that I engineered myself for the specific type of problem that Grassland is designed to solve (giving machines an intuitive understanding of the real world).
This is an example of how a word and how different types of people use it gets semantically messy. Since about 2017, when almost everything was called a “blockchain”, the word has pretty much lost all meaning in popular language.
But here’s a very good article by a very smart person who describes it in layman’s terms. The main points are paragraphs three, four, five and six where he describes it has having “three essential elements”
- Distributed
- Consensus Algorithm
- Currency
So the word “blockchain” just describes how the data is structured and the protocols around it. Ethereum and Grassland both have those “three essential elements”. But Ethereum employs those three essential elements differently in order to solve a very different problem than Grassland. Which uses them in order to ensure that its censorship-resistant intelligence gathering network would be able to overcome any economic, geographic or political barrier. So that’s where things start to differ.
The following diagram shows at a very high level of abstraction how Grassland’s data is structured and the protocols around it.
But one of the things that the “blockchain”community seems to have forgotten in all the hype is something that was just common knowledge to us in the beginning, and it’s this... The only practical reason for a blockchain and/or decentralisation is if the only viable solution to your user’s problem is so controversial to the average person at the time of its release that they’d never be able to solve it if you did it in any other way.
