[murbard2]

There is tremendous value in distributed ledger, but also tremendous empty hype at the moment. As a rule of thumb, people who tout distributed ledger based solutions ought to ask themselves the following questions:

- Can this be replaced by a centralized database?

- If not why?

- If security / trust is a factor, what is the exact threat model?

[ThomPete]

I think at least on the first on you are asking the wrong question.

The point is not whether it can be replaced by a centralized server the point is whether it's more powerful open than closed.

Personally i find that any system where everyone can become the the validator will always be better in the bigger picture than if they can't.

[murbard2]

That depends on your threat model, that depends on what you're trying to achieve. There are very large engineering costs to using this type of solution, and in many cases, the benefits are much lesser.

[ThomPete]

Sure but there are many many cases where the cost is much less.

[murbard2]

There are, but I contend that most of what is being hyped makes no sense. What are the applications that can truly benefit from this model according to you?

[ThomPete]

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8659549

Also I think too many are focusing too much on the current state of Bitcoin instead of thinking about the potential.

The crypto-protocol is a product of 20years of research just the last 2 years alone we have seen a host of really intersting ways to improve it and make it less power-consuming.

Sidechains, Stellar and so on we have only just begun to scratch the surface and so I see no reason to be so negative around people trying to think about it conceptually.

But each to their own.

[murbard2]

> Digital Pokemón Cards. Basically the ability to create digital collectors items.

Benefits from being distributed, but can use a simple, trusted timestamping service given the low stakes.

> E-books that could gain value. You could sell ebooks at a premium and allow people to re-sell them. Because the history of their ownership is recorded you could even see them gaining value if they had been owned by a celebrity.

Celebrities are, by definition, not anonymous, double signing is not a problem. Doesn't need a public ledger.

> Private but public healthcare records for research and usage. Store the health-records publicly as personas but allow individuals people to link it with their identity. This would help with research in completely new ways.

That's a distributed database with signed edits. Since it doesn't require to maintain a mutable singleton, it doesn't need a ledger at all.

> Voting made public but anonymous Make it impossible to fake voting results by making the results available for everyone.

Potentially a good use of a decentralized ledger.

> Artificial Intelligence Using the protocol to create automated consensus models.

Also potentially a good idea. Those two ideas seem to be related to this proposal, http://tezos.com

> Companies without owners Build a company with a political purpose without any owner.

Potentially a good idea.