It's not the compute, which is abitarily centralised. It's not the code. It's not the interpretation of the data. It's the consensus of which dataset is the valid one. That "consensus" is dependent on the nodes which form it being honest and not being outspent.
That's kinda insane right? Why make which version of a dataset is the right one dependent on adversarial peers with malign economic incentives?
Oh right, because you're trying to brute force your way to an alternative economic system. That's the only use case of this mixture of technological absurdities -- and it's a dumb one which will disappear on contact with regulatory oversight.
Blockchains distributed consensus model *is* based on contingent economic incentives. This isnt a "technology" is a peer-to-peer data validation network which works only insofar as it can bribe its participants.
I struggle to find examples that "require" decentralized workflows. Money seems like the most successful example, although cryptocurrecy works worse than fiat in practice for most use cases.
CA DMV records? Loyalty programs? What's wrong with a database? What's the requirement for decentralized workflows?
> I struggle to find examples that "require" decentralized workflows
Storing factoids that (1) can't be repudiated by anyone (including the initial reporter), (2) can support attestations in the future (I can prove to anyone that I bought something years ago without showing the thing or making myself known), and (3) can only be deanonymized if and when the user wants it to happen.
These all sound very cool, but they still sound like solutions in search of problems.
1 - Non-repudiation can be done with cryptographic signatures. Storing signed data doesn't require a blockchain. I think the major improvement is related to time-stamping, although there's lots of prior work there.
2 - When would someone ever need to prove this? If you can't prove the "what" or the "who", how is this useful?
3 - For Bitcoin, no, there's lots of tools to de-anonymize users. For others, I think that's true, but what's the use case beyond money laundering?
Why is that aspect desirable?
It's not the compute, which is abitarily centralised. It's not the code. It's not the interpretation of the data. It's the consensus of which dataset is the valid one. That "consensus" is dependent on the nodes which form it being honest and not being outspent.
That's kinda insane right? Why make which version of a dataset is the right one dependent on adversarial peers with malign economic incentives?
Oh right, because you're trying to brute force your way to an alternative economic system. That's the only use case of this mixture of technological absurdities -- and it's a dumb one which will disappear on contact with regulatory oversight.
Blockchains distributed consensus model *is* based on contingent economic incentives. This isnt a "technology" is a peer-to-peer data validation network which works only insofar as it can bribe its participants.