> Blockchains just are not a particularly good datastructure for most applications. Very few applications are bottlenecked by the efficiency of their data stru

> Blockchains just are not a particularly good datastructure for most applications. Very few applications are bottlenecked by the efficiency of their data structure. Computing is filled with examples where we make significant performance tradeoffs to achieve other goals. E.g. software applications are orders of magnitude less efficient than dedicated hardware, yet we accept that tradeoff because software is far more flexible and faster to develop. Similarly decentralized blockchains may be orders of magnitude less efficient than centralized databases, but for many applications that simply doesn't matter. The most scalable chains cost $0.0001 per transaction and can process tens of thousands transactions per second. Yes, a very optimized database may only cost $0.00000001 per transaction and can process millions of TPS. But the fact is none of this matters to your typical CRUD app. What you do get for that tradeoff is much better guarantees around durability and reliability, observability, transparency, censorship resistance, decentralization, and a much more credible commitment to the users that the app will not stop operating, delete their data, or change its behavior in unexpected ways. That doesn't mean the tradeoff is always worth it. The most performance critical systems will still probably run in centralized databases, just as the most performance critical applications run on custom ASICs instead of software. (Even then, we'd probably still expect databases to commit frequently commit their Merkle root to decentralized blockchains for trust, transparency, trust, auditability) But we know that blockchain technology continues to improve at exponential Moore-like rates (in the past ten years, blockchain capacity has doubled about every 24 months). We'd therefore expect the performance tradeoffs vis-a-vis centralized databases to become increasingly de minims, whereas the positive characteristics of decentralized chains should only improve as the general tooling and technology gets better.