[systoll]

Here’s a whitepaper on it https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi .

The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides.

It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc.

As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.