[leumas]

I do agree that most have been trying to solve the wrong problems with blockchains, but to write off the technology in it's entirety seems rather ridiculous...

Is immutability not a powerful programming concept? Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised?

[PeterisP]

This doesn't need cryptocurrencies, a centralized public ledger applying hashes/signatures with something like a Merkle tree can do the same while avoiding the necessity to constantly burn proof-of-work proportional to how valuable your data integrity is.

[nickpsecurity]

What you're describing are immutable, crypto-protected logs. They go way back before blockchains without blockchains problems. One was a big business:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-t...

I mentioned some random examples below showing that people stayed exploring and pushing the useful concepts again without all the bad stuff:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837

[spookthesunset]

> Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised?

Use Git. It doesn't even require a small nation's worth of electricity to operate and it probably even has a substantially higher transaction throughput!