[md_]

Thanks for sharing the examples!

The obvious criticism is indeed that these use cases could be addressed—if not with Postgres—with Merkle trees, no? Like (at a quick glance) MediLedger wants auditability similar to (say) Cert Transparency, and is using a “permissioned” blockchain to do that. How that differs from a centralized or partially centralized model like CT isn’t obvious to me.

Perhaps more importantly, though, none of these examples seem like they demonstrate the supposed appeal of “Web3.0”: permissioned blockchains, by definition, do not have truly distributed ownership; the entire bullshit premise of Web3.0 from people like (ironically) a16z is that you get to own “digital assets.” Yet permissioned, partially centralized blockchains—-irrespective of whether Postgres would be a better solution!—-exhibit none of those characteristics, right?

If all the hype around “Web3.0” is just a way of saying “supply chain tracking will be done, at greater cost and complexity, in a distributed manner”, that doesn’t strike me as deserving of all the hype. What broad cultural or economic impacts will it have?