Blockchain is a neutral database. People in the cryptocurrency world tend to emphasize its distributed nature over neutrality. In computer science, distribution is merely a technical means to enhance or measure the robustness and resilience of a system or network. The number of nodes has little effect in terms of security; edges among nodes are what’s important.
Neutrality means that there is no conflict of interest among users. Let’s say there is an industry problem that competing companies mutually face. For example, intermediating payments among banks. To solve this problem, the industry needs a neutral player that can act as a middle-man by accepting data from these competing entities.
If Goldman Sachs wants to expand their business by becoming the middle-man, Bank of America won’t be using the service because they don’t want their competitor to become a platform which they rely upon. Instead, what the industry needs is another party, such as clearinghouses, that are free from the conflict of interest among banks.
Intermediaries exist to mitigate complexity in business interests. What intermediaries essentially do is to maintain a database for competing entities. We live in a world full of middle-man businesses. Payments between people are intermediated by banks. Payments between banks are intermediated by clearinghouses and central banks.
What Bitcoin introduced was a neutral database that anyone can use and trust without conflicts of interest among all individuals and companies. We have seen something similar 30 years ago. That is TCP/IP. TCP/IP is a neutral data transmitting protocol that anyone from anywhere can use to connect.
The lack of neutrality is the reason why permissioned or private blockchains do not work in reality. Permissioned-blockchain means that the entry to the network requires permission from someone; either counterparts or tech provider. There is no neutrality in both entry and usage of the blockchain network. What we need is a stable protocol like TCP/IP where individuals and corporates are free to join at will and interact without permission.
Think of how Bitcoin solved the triple-entry accounting problem. Triple-entry accounting was a theoretical accounting idea that allows two parties to maintain an unalterable record by keeping a 3rd ledger in a receipt form. It was a novel idea, designed to remove the reconciliation process.
However, triple-entry did not become reality because there was no way to maintain the 3rd ledger neutrally. It was a question of where and who maintains the ledger. If a 3rd party maintains the ledger, it instantly becomes intermediary keeping a double-entry ledger on behalf of you and the counterpart. Bitcoin solved this problem by distributing the 3rd ledger across the network and making it neutral and open for anyone to write on.
Now, consider this. If Bitcoin is a database, you need to be able to write and read data. Otherwise, it’s not a database. If you can only record small size numbers, it should be called a neutral ledger. As Satoshi labeled on the whitepaper, Bitcoin is a timestamp server. Satoshi envisioned Bitcoin as a world computer, not just a ledger. The clue can be found in one of Satoshi’s original OP_CODES called OP_DATAPUSH4, which allows users to insert 4.29GB data into a single transaction.
Satoshi’s OP_DATAPUSH4 directly contradicts what post-Satoshi people thought Bitcoin to be. BTC people believe that Bitcoin should only process 1MB per block for the sake of censorship-resistance and value storage. BCH people believe that Bitcoin should scale to bigger blocks but only small size numbers should be recorded in a transaction.
Wherever you draw the line, BTC and BCH both set a theoretical limit to how Bitcoin should be used; digital gold or P2P cash, and the arbitrary limit is in reality set by a group of developers. The basis of their (BTC and BCH devs) technical decisions is in the belief that Satoshi, the inventor of Bitcoin, was wrong. The entire multi-cryptocurrency mess is based on the idea that Satoshi was wrong and that we could do better.
Regardless of how you think of Satoshi Nakamoto, BSV is providing an opportunity to continue Satoshi’s vision. The vision is to remove power from the economic protocol, which in return gives the capability to build anything you want without interruptions or arbitrary changes.
