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by gue5t 3444 days ago
It isn't negative towards the technology. Blockchains solve one problem: distributed consensus among mutually distrustful peers. If there's any existing trust structure, then a blockchain isn't what you need.

In situations where you already have trust but want immutability and cryptographic assurances, you may want to look into Merkle DAGs or other authenticated data structures, which are not blockchains at all. https://cs.umd.edu/~mwh/papers/gpads.pdf

1 comments

Exactly. The most valuable part of the blockchain technologies for most big news announcements tend to be the Merkle DAG piece not the distributed consensus.

Frankly the distributed consensus part of blockchains has always seemed more than a tad bit wasteful of energy and computation.