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mk  ·  3485 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Julian Assange: Bitcoin and the control of history

    Can the proverbial Uncle Joe or NYT go and change commit records in Github?

No, but someone could at Github could, correct? Isn't the requisite for an immutable record the distribution of the consensus on the validity of the record?

    The plan is not only for Gitchain to run across myriad machines, but for it to store some Git metadata–user names and permissions, for example–in a cryptographically verifiable format similar to the bitcoin blockchain. This would allow software developers to prove that their code hasn’t been tampered with–just one example of how the project could be expanded in new ways.

My interpretation of the decentralized ledger, is the distribution of not only the data on the ledger, but also the distribution of the consensus mechanism required for changes of the ledger.