[trog]

> In a distributed setting where a me may wish to join the party late and receive a non-forged copy, it’s important. The crypto is there to stand in for an authority.

Yeh, but that's kinda my point: if your primary use case is not "needs to be distributed" then there's almost never a benefit, because there is always a trusted authority and the benefits of centralisation outweigh (massively, IMO) any benefit you get from a blockchain approach.

[chaboud]

100% agreed there. A central authority can just sign stuff. Merkle trees can still be very valuable for integrity and synchronization management, but burning a bunch of energy to bogo-search nonces is silly if the writer (or federated writers) can be cryptographic authorities.