In his 1934 book entited Logik der Forschung, Karl Popper argued for falsifiability over verifiability.
Verifying the claim "All swans are white" would require assessment of all swans, which is not possible, the single observation of a black swan is sufficient to falsify it. Citation — Falsifiability
The Watts-Strogatz model of the small-world network have a large clustering coefficient and paths from node a to b that are on average short.
This means the typical number of steps between two randomly chosen nodes grows proportionally to the logarithm of the number of nodes in the network. The simplicity of this approach makes it a nice starting point for decentralized search.
"It is possible to prove that in the model of a d-dimensional lattice with uniformly random shortcuts, no decentralized algorithm can find short paths [...]. Exploring further, though, we find that a subtle variant of the Watts-Strogatz network will in fact support efficient search: Rather than adding the long-range shortcuts uniformly at random, we add links between nodes of this network with a probability that decays like the dth power of their distance (in d dimensions)." Jon Kleinberg — The Small-World Phenomenon and Decentralized Search
It has no moving parts. It's just a list of items. And each item has some properties. The defining characteristics though, are that each item has 1. a property that acts like a finger print, and 2. a property that points to the item that came before it. A secure hash function creates the finger print using the item's properties as input. A correct and complete blockchain can be implemented in fewer than 50 lines of code.
A blockchain is most likely the least interesting part of any system that is built with one. Networking, consensus and replication, for example, are discrete and non-trivial problem domains that can form a foundation for maing a blockchain useful.
The most remarkable feature of most frameworks is their ability to manage mediocre developers.
Constraints provide meaning.
Some papers on logical and vector clocks.
Interactive logical timestamps.