> every block's cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the preceding block Eh no. Every git commits hash derives from the previous commit hash. T

> every block's cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the preceding block Eh no. Every git commits hash derives from the previous commit hash. That's a bona-fide cryptographic hash. And you can verify it. And git in fact does that when you merge changes. By recalculating the hashes. And it rejects your changes if things don't line up. > git is not a proper ledger due to .... an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log; Also no. It's called a commit log which is exactly this. It's tamper proof because you can verify the chain of hashes (and git does this). It's append only because of those hashes. If you break the chain, git will reject your merge attempts. Any repository fork you don't own, is read-only and won't be able to accept your force pushes with modified hashes because you won't be able to push anything at all. You can only request others to pull; which triggers the before mentioned checks. So you have no way of tricking others into pulling your broken chain of commits. You can only do that to your own repositories. And you have to opt in to it via force push. This is not a weakness but a simple feature. Your data, your choice. > ... cryptographically verifiable datasets Also no. Git uses sha1 hashes, which are cryptographic hashes that you can verify. Better hash algorithms are available and sha1 is not super safe at this point. But good luck creating commits that look legit and preserve the sha1 hash. As mentioned before, they include the hash of the previous commit. Your central, and only, argument is that you can modify your own copies of a repository via force push or poking around on the filesystem. Or whatever. Yes you can; just like with your local copy of whatever blockchain! But don't do that. Because you won't be able to get others to accept your changes/transactions because they'll trivially detect that you tampered with the merkle tree and reject your changes. That's why it's called force push, you opt into this. And others will opt out of it. So, that too is simply wrong.