I think blockchains are overkill because they're trying to get a global consensus about every transaction in the world, which is very expensive (with electricit

I think blockchains are overkill because they're trying to get a global consensus about every transaction in the world, which is very expensive (with electricity, stake etc.). They're trying to solve the additional problem of preventing "forking" of a history. Whereas if you allow forks then CRDTs are more lightweight. Internet Computer canisters, Merkle DAGs (like IOTA), Hashgraphs and Holochains are probably a better architecture than Blockchains. Having said that, I think Merkle Trees are the future, for minimizing the amount of sync. They let you see exactly what changed, and so on. https://joelgustafson.com/posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-key-value-store-for-fun-and-profit https://joelgustafson.com/posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-ke... https://github.com/canvasxyz/okra-js https://github.com/canvasxyz/okra-js There's already great software done by Dat (later called Hypercore, now called Holepunch) that has an append-only log based on the SLEEP protocol. That's essentially all you need, in my opinion. They've built everything from key-value databases (hyperbee) to full-scale file systems (hyperdrive) on top of it. Beaker browser has been built on top of it. I mean, merging state-based CRDTs is cool, but you may as well just use operation-based CRDTs with something like Hypercore or the older PouchDB.