
Blockchain, with Santa Claus, in shameless MS Paint - anttiviljami
https://spiceprogram.org/blockchain/
======
kang
Sorry but this comic is neither simple nor accurate.

Firstly, recording the account of sahti is the only function of the ledger,
which supposedly is a subset of a record of everyone's deeds' including the
elves. Secondly then, fee analysis has shown that blockchains are a poor store
of data and should not be used as a database since other mechanisms are far
more efficient and cheaper.

------
LordDragonfang
For anyone that's curious, the first set of runes is Futhark, and
transliterate to:

>"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death
may die"

The second and third are Enochian and transliterate to:

>"There is no sanity clause" and "Madness is the emergency exit"

respectively.

------
Udik
I guess the purpose is satirical, but it's an awfully complicated explanation.
I guess it can be understood only by people who already know how a blockchain
works.

~~~
mosselman
In another comment in this thread I mentioned my boss asking our team if
'blockhains would be a good idea to add security' in our web application
because a customer mentioned them. If I were to send this MS Pain
visualisation to my boss he'd still not understand anything about it. The
subject is quite complex and the metaphor used is far to abstract for people
who already struggle with describing the simplest requirements in a clear way.

Note that I don't pretend to know how bitcoins work 100%; I have read up on
bitcoins a while back, with this previous knowledge I still picked some things
up, but I did not grasp the complete explanation from this MS Paint cartoon.

Maybe someone could shine some light on a few things that I am left wondering
after reading this cartoon?:

[1]: What would be actually 'written on the pages' in the case of bitcoins?
The transactions? [2]: What mechanism determines what 'finding' or 'mining'
bitcoins means? At one point it says that there are rules regarding how many
'pages' there are per day. Is there a parallel for this in Bitcoins? It says
that there is randomness involved in mining. I thought you had to find certain
key pairs that were hard to calculate and that those key pairs were then used
to grant people bitcoins again. Are the reward-bitcoins simple written in a
new block? How does mining work? [3]: 'Sahti' seems to refer to money. Are we
talking bitcoins or external currencies?

~~~
m3ta
The subject could be seen as very complex but for most use-cases there is a
simple litmus test. Do you need censorship-resistant transactions or a
neutral/decentralized timestamping server? If not, then you don't need a
blockchain. That's really it.

In the case of a vendor, accepting _bitcoin_ has own security advantages, and
bitcoin comes with its own blockchain built-in. As a vendor you probably
wouldn't really need to worry about the blockchain as much as you would need
to worry about avoiding exchange rate fees.

~~~
mosselman
I will keep your answer in mind when I get asked this question again. Thank
you.

------
ianpurton
If you struggled with this explanation then I can try another a bit more IT
related.

A blockchain is...

A distributed fault tolerant public database that no one owns and everyone can
update.

Has this been done before?

Kind of, distributed database are not new. What is new is solving the problem
of multiple updates changing the same data at the same time.

So for example let's say the following happens to our distributed database.

User 1 send the following SQL to the network.

    
    
      Update customer set balance = 1000 where name = 'Customer1'
    

and User 2 at the exact same time tries

    
    
      Update customer set balance = 2000 where name = 'Customer1'
    

A blockchain database will have both statements in a block and execute them on
every node in the same order. Other distributed databases would run into race
conditions.

So when you hear the statement

 _Blockchain startup X is going to disrupt industry Y._

You can reorganize the statement into something like.

 _Startup X is going to disrupt industry Y with a new type of distributed
database._

~~~
throwanem
Your example might benefit from some revision. Simply rewriting those
statements as adjustments to the existing balance ("SET balance = balance +
1000" et al.), as would be used in reality, alleviates the race. This doesn't
really help your example show blockchain's value.

~~~
maweki
Which doesn't work once the operation is not commutative.

Serializing parallel operation is hard!

~~~
throwanem
Very true. If nothing else, perhaps it's worth choosing an example with which
a pedant like me can't quite so trivially quibble!

------
jasonlfunk
I'm curious why Santa is an "it" rather than a "he".

~~~
distances
In the comic both Santa and the elves are depicted as something non-human, are
they not? "Its eternal kin would never forget."

------
mosselman
We build a web application for companies to keep track of their CO2 Emissions
and some other key performance indicators and assessments. Yesterday our boss
called one of my colleagues and said:

"A customer of ours suggested that we use blockchains to improve the security
of our application. What do you guys think?"

It is probably the equivalent of saying you use scrum and are oh so very
agile. "We use blockchains for added security". What this would look like is
then left up to the imagination of the person confronted with this phrase.

[1]: [http://www.csoonline.com/article/3050557/security/is-the-
blo...](http://www.csoonline.com/article/3050557/security/is-the-blockchain-
good-for-security.html)

------
executesorder66
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't made in MS Paint. All the
edges of the shapes look way too anti-aliasied.

Looks more like something made with paint.NET.

(I have never used the MS paint version that comes with win10, so maybe they
improved it a lot)

------
bcherry
I'm not convinced by this format. I think the whole information would have
been easier to digest, if it was presented in a clear and concise format,
without any unnecessary detours and metaphors.

------
SquareWheel
Strangely these images become easier to see if you reduce your browser size.
Did they get their media queries backwards?

------
JackuB
I need to point out the obvious because it disappointed me after reading the
title: that was not made in MS Paint

------
paronianttila
This MS Paint stuff needs to become a thing to explain complex concepts like
this

~~~
mosselman
Isn't it already? You posted your comment on a post that links to a page that
uses 'This MS Paint stuff' to explain concepts like 'this', where the first
'This' refers to this specific incarnation of 'MS Paint stuff' and the second
'this' refers to blockchains.

This is all very meta.

~~~
edem
At least you are not an AI struggling to understand human communication.

