[manholio]

> Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.

Trouble is, the "decentralized ledger" can only reliably timestamp if there is a financial incentive that motivates peers to burn hashes, stake and vouch for blocks etc. Without that financial incentive the whole blockchain breaks down to something inferior to even the PKI distributed systems described by Lamport in the 70s and 80s.

That's the major fallacy of "blockchains" as a technology, they are always a disguise for token speculation, they require native minted tokens of speculative value to operate.

[kuramitropolis]

>they require native minted tokens of speculative value to operate.

Well, so does the rest of industry and civilization (fiat money). What's the distinction there?

[manholio]

The distinction is between something that costs money and competes in the maketplace based on that, versus something so insanely expensive the only way it can compete is to pretend it prints actual money and speculate on their future value.

If Bitcoin didn't have bitcoins, nobody in their right mind would pay to an electricity bill the size of Argentina just to keep it running as a distributed timestamping ledger. There is no imaginable practical application that would justify that resource waste.