[chandsie]

In the comments the author says, "Blockchain is amazing technology - but it is a solution in search of a problem." That's really the tl;dr of this article. Blockchain has a lot of potential value but arbitrarily throwing it at problems won't magically create the value (not counting investors blindly throwing money at buzzwords).

[LeoPanthera]

I have yet to come across any problems that are solved better with a blockchain than with any other traditional technology - except for the original one, a distributed electronic currency.

[tardo99]

I strongly agree with your comment. It's frustrating that people won't even attempt to address this glaring deficiency. When I ask people for examples they do the verbal equivalent of running away babbling.

[456hdsaq234g]

also decentralised clocks, which can provide decentralised timestamps, which is a kind of related concept (double spend resistance)

[a1369209993]

Also a non-redactable public record, although it's a bit hard to do that robustly; you need a transaction saying "find md5^[N]([X]) xor [md5^N(X) xor data]" to ensure you data is already securely embedded before anyone can determine that it's classified/copyrighted/otherwise-censor-bait.

[tylersmith]

It's not just related, it's the entire idea of the blockchain. It only exists to timestamp data; in the case of Bitcoin that data is a commitment to a set of transactions.