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by hobofan 3169 days ago
Blockchains allow for a distributed, mutable permissioned system that are required(?) for features like "Who is allowed to push to this named repository?".

You can also leave stuff like that out, but then you will end up with a system where everyone can only push to their own forks leaving us with a very splintered distributed system. To compensate we would need a much better system for distributed content discovery than anything I've seen so far.

1 comments

You don't need a Blockchain for that. You just store the public keys of the allowed users on the repository itself.

Giving readable names to repositories is a possible use case, although I'd just use DNS.

Yeah, I guess you are right, a blockchain is probably not an absolute requirement for that. I think though, that decentralized maintenance of open source project would be a logical next step, and a blockchain-based system could certainly be useful there. This could help prevent a lot of stale/abandoned projects from dying where the only maintainers of a project leave it to rot and there is no one left to review PRs coming from the community.
How would the blockchain help there?