Читать книгу Introduction to Blockchain Technology - Tiana Laurence - Страница 26

Another old human concept blockchain technology utilizes is the “public witness”. This is possibly the oldest “technology” humans created. A public witness is a person that is attesting to a fact or event. Their testimony allows others to believe that something took place. A witness is spreading their personal knowledge, so more people know and believe it.

The first public witness may have occurred around an ancient campfire as a hunter retold an epic battle to their friends and family. You can see the evidence of these stories painted on the walls of caves across the world. Telling stories and sharing information is deeply human.

A public witness serves two main functions. It spreads knowledge to more than one individual and allows history to become persistent. The more people who know a story, the more persistent it becomes.

The second purpose that a public witness provides is that it allows the individual to make a choice about the information they have been given. Each individual’s social norms influence that choice, for example, do they remember the history, do they pass on the information to more people, or do they take action?

In the rest of this section, you will discover how blockchain structures mirror the public witness format. You will learn about the incentive system and the economics that drive the spread of information and the persistence of that information over time.