[darkmighty]

Indeed I'm not a fan of "blockchain" as a buzzword at all (especially now that people are trying to apply it to things that shouldn't be distributed); but clearly there are many things that do benefit from distribution.

Things that come to mind are Namecoin, I2P, IPFS, and other tech on the pipeline that can bring the internet closer to it's original ideal of distributivity, each person responsible for their content, etc.

Those are also free software ideals: while great strides have been made in open sourcing user-side software, (mainstream android, Linux on servers, etc), the internet just hides a massive closed system: before you could at least inspect how things work through reverse engineering, but querying web servers is literally a black box model. The problem that not everyone wants to run their own server or even deal with renting out can largely vanish from certain applications. We've started with the easiest ones, which were file sharing (reputation-free), then Bitcoin, with more basic web tasks incoming.

It's important to keep in mind most of those are fit for low-efficiency. Unless we have a breakthrough with Fully Homomorphic encryption, the bulk of computing itself will be centralized (or you will have to accept a mix of high cost or unreliability).

[diggan]

I agree with most things in your comment, I'm just curious what things you see that "shouldn't be distributed"?

[alistproducer2]

I would say anything that can be done by a centralized entity that doesn't benefit from adding censorship resistance. The main reason blockchains need complicated and, in many cases, wasteful consensus algos is because they were first designed to promote open membership to the network. This meant that you had to design a system that allowed strange machines to work together while no entity trusting any other to not cheat it. Open membership means that the ledger can not be effectively censored, and by extension, neither could one's wealth. Outside of that use case (censorship resistance), very few things benefit from transitioning from central authority to blockchains.

I didn't cover the case of smart contracts, but it's essentially the same thing.

[diggan]

> I would say anything that can be done by a centralized entity that doesn't benefit from adding censorship resistance

Ok, and what concrete, real examples does not benefit from that?

[darkmighty]

You have some private data. You want to compute a hard function of this data, and your computer isn't powerful enough.

For example, this could be a rendering problem: you provide the models, a distributed system computes it (for a cost). This system cannot be private, efficient and reliable. It can be private and reliable, but hugely inefficient, or efficient but non-private and non-reliable. With a non-distributed system (i.e. Google compute, Amazon cloud, etc) you get pretty much all 3 of them, with a slight caveat that privacy is guaranteed circumstantially/legally instead of mathematically. But it's extremely safe to assume you'll be fine.

You want to run and real time multi-user application.

For example, and MMORPG. This one is a fun challenge for sure, but it's a complete nightmare to develop, and again needs sacrifices. In this case you probably can't achieve speed, security, and large number of players simultaneously. Every decision (like "what did this monster drop?") needs to be done through some large scale consensus to guarantee security, which kills latency completely. If you're extremely lax with security and consistency, then you can probably make it work, but accepting users might cheat, possibly game-breakingly. Or you could achieve it all with a handful of players, and reasonable efficiency[1], but your scope will inevitably be limited. I believe Ubisoft's ForHonor[2] uses P2P gameplay, but I'm not sure how safe their system is. Also I'm sure stats and most persistent data is stored centrally.

[1] See Mental poker:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

[2] Some reddit discussion from quick googling:

https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/5u8jlh/why_forhon...

Note that the players largely loathe this system.