[buckie]

Maybe, our system gets 8k-12k transactions per second with full replication + crypto up to a few thousand consensus nodes (slows down around 4k nodes). That type of performance opens up a lot of potential applications.

As for "a horseless carriage with a horse" perhaps, we'll see. These systems do give you something that you can't get otherwise which is a distributed DB that you can share with competitors without worrying about them stealing from you/breaking it. Blockchain is to overloaded right now, but it's the name that has stuck likely because "a Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Consensus database" (BFTCDB) is just too impenetrable. If one of these BFTCDB take off, if may not actually be a blockchain (though I suspect it will be because cryptographic data structures are just too useful for them) but I bet it will be called one.

But that the end of the day, that's what a permissioned blockchain is -- a DB you can share, which is a seriously new capability.