pull down to refresh
So: parallel hardware, yes. Parallel truth, no. That's why a permanent split is the worst case — it wrecks the thing all the other redundancy exists to defend.
The Bitcoin blockchain is not anyone's ledger of truth, yet. I've had various ideas over time, including even consulting once for a project that wanted to upload the Pentateuch [first five books of the old testament, aka "Torah"] to the blockchain... however if you look at actual usage today, the "truth" in the blockchain is an economical ledger, which is important within its domain, lots of private data, which is best considered a backup rather than shared truth, and mostly lots of "art", which is an interesting use of the datastructure, although not the same kind of "truth".
I do look forwards to a future where Bitcoin is much more widely used for timestamping of all kinds of publications, and has a much more fundamental role in helping humanity agree upon shared truths, although I believe it is decades away, and requires a greater social/political trust in a system that will have matured significantly by then.
Fair point on what's actually on the chain today. But look at your own list — it helps my argument.
If the chain splits, the art and the data survive. Both chains keep the full history up to the split, so none of it gets erased. The thing that actually breaks is the money. Your coins now exist on two chains that disagree with each other. A payment you make on one chain can get copied onto the other. And every exchange has to pick which chain to call "Bitcoin." So I don't need Bitcoin to be some grand ledger of truth — I just need it to be money, which is the one use you agree is real today. And money is exactly what a split destroys.
Funny you mention timestamping, because I'm building that right now — Bitcoin timestamping in legal case software, so I can prove a case file existed on a certain date without trusting anyone's server. That's actually the use a split damages least — the proof would survive on both chains. But even there it costs you: in court I'd have to argue about which of the two "Bitcoins" counts before anyone even looks at the proof. So that's the full picture: the money breaks outright, and the data survives but gets harder to use. Nothing on your list comes out of a split better off.
Bitcoin timestamping in legal case software, so I can prove a case file existed on a certain date without trusting anyone's server. That's actually the use a split damages least
there still is reduced strength, because timestamping draws its power from the cost of rewriting history; and after a fork, the divided hashpower produces weaker separate histories, and any given attacker with some amount of equipment is thus correspondingly more powerful in an attempt to rewrite either individual chain.
I hope you're building on top of OpenTimestamps?
You're right — that's a second cost on top of the courtroom one. A timestamp is only as strong as the mining work stacked on top of it, and a split cuts that in half for each side.
One wrinkle: it hits old and new proofs differently. A stamp made before the split lives in the history both chains share, so erasing it means rewriting both. It's the stamps made after the split that land on a weakened chain. And that's not theory — Ethereum Classic ended up the minority chain after its split, and in 2020 it got 51%-attacked three times in one month. One attack rewrote about 7,000 blocks, roughly a day of history.
And yes — OpenTimestamps. Official library, public calendars, no coins or keys on my side. No point reinventing that. What I'm actually building is the court-facing layer: a proof only helps if a judge and opposing counsel can follow what it proves.
The capacitor analogy's worth testing — but it breaks on what you're putting in parallel.
Parallel hardware — capacitors, nodes, software implementations — is redundancy, and yeah, Bitcoin wants more of it. But the ledger isn't hardware. Its whole value is that there's only one of it. Every node keeping its own copy of the same history is the good kind of parallel. A chain split is the opposite: not many copies of one ledger, but two ledgers that disagree about what happened. That's not a backup, it's a divorce — coins stop being interchangeable, a payment on one chain can be replayed on the other, the users and the money split in two, and you lose the one thing all that redundancy was protecting: everyone agreeing on a single history.
So: parallel hardware, yes. Parallel truth, no. That's why a permanent split is the worst case — it wrecks the thing all the other redundancy exists to defend.