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No one said you have to use the technology for illegal things, or even as money. Even Bitcoin-the-blockchain is only a timestamping system (seriously, even the

by jude- 5y ago

No one said you have to use the technology for illegal things, or even as money. Even Bitcoin-the-blockchain is only a timestamping system (seriously, even the Bitcoin whitepaper explicitly states that this is the purpose of the blockchain -- a peer-to-peer timestamper), which uses a token to prioritize transactions for consideration when the network is congested. I can think of non-financial uses for that!

acjohnson55 5y ago
It's very interesting. But it's also noteworthy that there are very few gamechanging use cases for the consumer or business worlds, despite an enormous amount of attention and investment.
- jude- 5y ago
  The problem is that most of the money (and developer interest) flowing into this space is driven by speculation on the rate-limiting token. This is clearly unfortunate. If you look past that, what you have is a highly resilient, replicated, totally-ordered log of data you can use to build other p2p services. For example, you could use Bitcoin transactions to implement an open registry of all Mastodon servers by binding their IPs and public keys to server names in a first-come first-serve basis. This would provide a one-stop-shop for discovering all Mastodon nodes and their public keys. As another example, you could build a p2p Docker image deployment system by binding a public key to a sequence of transactions that contain the hashes of fixed-sized chunks of the image, as well as a seed IP address. From there, peers with the public key could scan the hash sequence and seed IP address, discover one another, and self-organize into a random flood network to replicate the chunks and reassemble the image. The image author would publish a new series of hashes (or perhaps the Merkle root of a series of hashes if space is a concern) when a new image is published. Point is, you can do so much more with the tech than what is being hyped.

by jude- 5y ago

acjohnson55 5y ago

It's very interesting. But it's also noteworthy that there are very few gamechanging use cases for the consumer or business worlds, despite an enormous amount of attention and investment.

jude- 5y ago
The problem is that most of the money (and developer interest) flowing into this space is driven by speculation on the rate-limiting token. This is clearly unfortunate. If you look past that, what you have is a highly resilient, replicated, totally-ordered log of data you can use to build other p2p services. For example, you could use Bitcoin transactions to implement an open registry of all Mastodon servers by binding their IPs and public keys to server names in a first-come first-serve basis. This would provide a one-stop-shop for discovering all Mastodon nodes and their public keys. As another example, you could build a p2p Docker image deployment system by binding a public key to a sequence of transactions that contain the hashes of fixed-sized chunks of the image, as well as a seed IP address. From there, peers with the public key could scan the hash sequence and seed IP address, discover one another, and self-organize into a random flood network to replicate the chunks and reassemble the image. The image author would publish a new series of hashes (or perhaps the Merkle root of a series of hashes if space is a concern) when a new image is published. Point is, you can do so much more with the tech than what is being hyped.