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by asynchrony 2757 days ago
Putting lies into a blockchain doesn't make them true. Lettuce can still kill you in a post-blockchain society.
1 comments

No, but it isn’t about lying as a matter of business, that would easily be detected and caught in most cases, and a large amount of work to continually lie effectively. If you have employees and machines writing lots of data it’s infeasible to tamper with it in real-time.

The tampering comes after the fact when a legal issue arises. The immutable nature of the ledger makes it an improvement over the past by preventing later tampering.

So why not use a central database and allow all stakeholders to replicate and keep their own logs of edits. It would be far more efficient. It would lack a certain buzzword though.
A blockchain is a database optimized for that use case. Your desire to avoid the word blockchain is because you don’t like the connotations.
A blockchain isn't optimal for anything. If it was there should be some evidence of it improving something in the real world, no? Something other than a cult of buzzwords and speculation.
What was probably the original blockchain was created for bitcoin and is good for that. Though the paper didn't coin the word blockchain, it described it "As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it."

Then after bitcoin had gone up the marketing guys saw visions of billions in free money and started saying blockchain, blockchain!

It is optimal for situations where you don’t want to trust a central institution. An asset worth $70bil from zero in a decade (Bitcoin) should be considered a successful experiment even if it disappeared tomorrow. Pure computer science, math, and game theory created it, and it’s quite impressive.
I’m not sure that the creation of an asset bubble is a good metric for success. How do you feel about pets.com and tulips?