To further explain, I know it can sound confusing just saying we've done away with all trust, when in fact we're just replacing it with something different. Bl

To further explain, I know it can sound confusing just saying we've done away with all trust, when in fact we're just replacing it with something different. Blockchains allow parties to achieve consensus without trusting any other member. The innovation being that any social system that relies on trust brings with it the problems and implications of the trusted. Common examples include being more costly (overhead/greed), socially exclusionary / corrupt in some circumstances (eg banning protesters). It also facilitates new innovations such as cryptocurrency. In public blockchains, trust is instead put into the security of the network in terms of its proof-of-work, its developers who maintain the software, the community at large (especially in the case of forks) and so on... Not mentioned often however is why corporations also are loving the idea of private blockchains (IBM Hyperledger, R3, etc). Private blockchains involve trusting only a couple participants to join the network. A set of banks can define a mutual settlement protocol in a standard smart contract for example - in using a blockchain, they mitigate the risk of other banks affecting their system. A better example of where a private blockchain would do wonders is in BGP routing. You hear almost every year of a news story where an Indian ISP accidentally broadcasts they forward for Google's IP subnet, and subsequently disrupts all of India's Google access until they manually fix it. A private blockchain among BGP hosts would vastly improve these situations if everyone could agree on which routes they were routing, and globally optimise in the case of failure. I think the key to achieving anything with the blockchain approach is to not try replace something with a blockchain (ie Facebook) for the sake of removing trust, but pinpointing specific pains that derive from having to trust other parties and then focussing there.