Holy Books and Blockchains
I’m taking a course on blockchains this semester, and I can’t stop thinking about the Bible, the Quran, and the transmission of manuscripts in the ancient world. At its core, a reliable blockchain is: Distributed: Copies of the ledger (the “text”) exist on many nodes (“communities”). Immutable / Verifiable: Once a block is added, everyone can check its authenticity; it’s tamper-evident. Consensus-driven: The network agrees on a single canonical sequence of blocks, much like reaching consensus on an authoritative text....