Rethinking Blockchain

And a case for Timechain

Hi Plebs,

Over fifteen years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled Bitcoin. At the core of this innovation was an immutable, decentralised ledger that could be appended but never modified retroactively. This represented a major conceptual and technological breakthrough, allowing for true byzantine fault tolerance across a wide network for the first time in history.

In the years since, there has been an explosion of experiments and projects adopting Nakamoto's innovations for various use cases beyond digital currency. However, one unfortunate development has been the widespread adoption of the term "blockchain" to describe these decentralised ledger technologies (DLTs), and a particularly poor nomenclature that obfuscates more than it clarifies.

The problem with blockchain
Simply put, blockchain merely refers to a data structure consisting of a linked sequence of blocks. It fails to capture the core value propositions of Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems - lack of central control, free-market incentives, and most importantly, immutability. This definitional ambiguity has allowed entrepreneurs to claim their technologies use blockchains, even when they are centrally controlled and mutable, violating key BFT principles. Oxymoronic concepts like private blockchains have emerged as a result.

Resurrecting Timechain

To resolve this terminological deficiency, this article proposes resurrecting an older term used by Satoshi themselves - "timechain." As evidenced in early communications, Satoshi referred to Bitcoin's underlying technology as a timechain before the term blockchain became prevalent. To give one example:

"Nodes collect new transactions into a block, hash them into a hash tree, and scan through nonce values to make the block's hash satisfy proof-of-work requirements. When they solve the proof-of-work, they broadcast the block to everyone and the block is added to the timechain. The first transaction in the block is a special one that creates a new coin owned by the creator of the block." — Satoshi Nakamoto

The key insight is that decentralized BFT systems are really about establishing an authoritative, immutable chronology or "chain of events in time" - capturing the history in a way that cannot be rewritten.

By referring to the core innovation as a timechain, the terminology accurately encompasses all decentralised BFT systems focused on an immutable ledger of events, while excluding technologies falsehoods masquerading as part of the revolution.

As the Bitcoin space continues evolving, revisiting our core terminology is a worthy exercise to realign industry lexicon with its founding values. Timechain represents a return to conceptual precision - a modest but crucial step towards stronger intellectual foundations as we continue rethinking our digital future.

Cheers, and onwards with Bitcoin