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I'm not trying to argue that decentralization is bad (Napster vs. BitTorrent is a great example). And there's a lot of cool technologies around decentralized /

I'm not trying to argue that decentralization is bad (Napster vs. BitTorrent is a great example). And there's a lot of cool technologies around decentralized / anonymized networking. My central point is that a trustless, distributed database i.e. the blockchain doesn't really offer practical advantages / new applications over what can be done today w/o such a database.

robinhoode 12y ago
You are correct that "functionally" there may be no advantage. The value is not the functionality but the architecture. It is resilient to some very powerful attackers, both actual and theoretical. _That_ is where it derives it's power, not necessarily from functionality. If Bitcoin operated on a centralized database, as E-Gold did, it would have gotten shut down quickly (as E-Gold did). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold