@Laurelai It amazes me how emotional people get about blockchain. I have yet to see a sober evaluation of blockchain tech that concluded that it was never useful.
@kara @Laurelai There are lots of criticisms like "it's not really decentralized because of pool mining" and "it's easy to attack because you don't really need a majority of hashing power" and "it'll destroy the planet because it uses too much energy". The first hasn't been a problem in practice; the incentives for miners are "better" than the incentives for central banks. For the second I say "well then feel free to go make your billions breaking it".
@kara @Laurelai Bitcoin has the largest bug bounty in history by several orders of magnitude. And the third one I've addressed before but it boils down to the fact that the electricity must be paid for by some combination of transaction fees and block rewards, so it has to grow far more slowly than the transaction rate in the long run, but that there will also be technological advancements to reduce it.
@seanl (let's untag Laurelai from the evangelism eh?)
you haven't really answered my question, though. Bitcoin is not a genuine engineering problem that needed solving
so...is there something _useful_ a blockchain can do for me?
@kara You also need some way of incentivizing folks to compete to try to insert blocks. Cryptocurrencies usually do this by some combination of giving them the transaction fees and letting them insert a special "unbalanced" transaction that gives them a reward with a predetermined value. For a naming system you could let them reserve a name or something.
Speaking of which, I have no idea how Twister incentivizes mining.
I guess this is all a long way of saying no, probably not.
@kara I missed the part about your saying Bitcoin isn't a genuine engineering problem that needed solving. Anonymous electronic cash is a problem people have been trying to solve for a long time. The previous best solution was David Chaum's Ecash using his blind signature scheme. That required a trusted issuer and de-anonymized people (though not their transactoins) at withdrawal/deposit time, though. So Bitcoin is a solution to that problem.
@kara I guess this is part of the reason I get so flabbergasted that people just dismiss it out of hand as not solving a problem. It's solving a problem I've been wanting to see solved since the mid '90s. I had previously thought the only solution was something like Ripple's original implementation using an "IOU graph" before they went to blockchain.
@kara Of course, I originally dismissed it myself, but for economic reasons. http://undergroundeconomist.com/post/1528511369
@kara Depends on what kind of stuff you want to do. Do you have something that requires a single agreed upon (but "eventually consistent" in that temporary forks are possible) ordering of signed blobs representing something like transactions? If so, is a single database sufficient? If a single database isn't sufficient, is a federation sufficient?