In reply to a post by https://snarfed.org/ on
Blockchain is heartbreaking. As a computer scientist, I love it. Itโs a fundamental breakthrough: the first open participation distributed consensus algorithm ever. Thatโs a big deal. As an engineer, I canโt responsibly recommend it to anyone for anything. Itโs slow, unreliable, immature, hard to use, and functionality impoverished. Itโs a database that hates you. Truly heartbreaking.
But blockchain is not (just) about open participation. Itโs about trustlessness (โwell actuallyโ there are โpermissioned blockchainsโ but thatโs just a glorified/terrible variant of Git pretty much). And society is built on trust. As Nicholas Weaver puts it, blockchains (trustlessness) is good for one thing only: censorship resistance, i.e. evading the law. Itโs just the only option for thing like ransomware. For everything else, systems with trust are many many orders of magnitude more efficient.
And Iโd say systems without trustlessness can be โopen participationโ. Dename was a pretty cool idea.