This Is Your Company on Blockchain

  Dumb question time: Aren't 95% of these use cases more  
  easily implemented with a single central source of truth, 
  possibly with distributed read-only replicas?

Absolutely. The tech press loves its fancy new craziness. Good engineering should be exciting enough (if they want to write about something cool they could write about immutable databases like Datomic), but no . . . _blockchain_!

It's probably fashion much of the time. Two friends of mine who work for big conslutancies already asked me what this 'blockchain' thing is because they heard some internal system is going to be using it. I both cases I couldn't really figure out why they'd not do as you suggest.

That's the only place where blockchains are genuinely useful - when there isn't a single trusted party to maintain a ledger. In this case everybody participating in transactions (which don't have to be monetary in nature) can be sure that their transaction is both unrevocable and untamperable.

I agree that yes there's plenty of hype in the blockchain/crypto world and those companies who can afford setting up "blockchain departments" :) very often do so to keep up with the joneses.

That said though - when trust is not an issue, the whole POW thing goes away and txs are getting processed very fast with "distributed, read only replicas" getting set up out of the box as soon as the system is up and running. Which it is super easy to get going with some of the "free + we charge for consulting" implementations out there.

These blockchains shouldn't use mining at all; they should use algorithms like PBFT or SCP. Such algorithms require out-of-band agreement on who is and isn't running a node, but once that has been set up they are similarly secure as POW.

It's a great point that often gets lost in the blockchain hype. Basically, the "coins" have to have some value, which comes from the intrinsic value that the blockchain in question provides - which may not be financial as such, though of course money is generally fungible with value. Namecoin is an example of an appropriate non-Bitcoin, non-"financial" use of a blockchain; the "coins" allow you to "purchase" space on a global namespace, which becomes more valuable as the namespace grows in popularity.

[edit: having read wmf's sibling comment, I was not aware that blockchains could be separated from mining. So take all of the above with a grain of salt.]

>How will there be any incentives to mine in non financial chains?

You could could pay miners with some other blockchain's assets. Say zoos trading animal tokens (because they don't believe in buying and selling animals) with a small Bitcoin transaction processing fee to pay the miners.

Maybe you could say "This Is Your Company on Web", which could imply plenty of things made possible by web technologies, like remote, distributed teams and cheap cloud infrastructure.

Blockchain, on the cloud. Synergised and vertically integrated for streamlined UX.

Just because it doesn't have "the" doesn't mean it's a proper noun. In this case I think it's being used as an abstract noun.

"This is your company on Agile" or "This is your company on Slack" doesn't sound too bad. So why not "blockchain"?

I dunno. To someone like me who is all up into Bitcoin but not too serious about it, it sounds okay. Faddish, but okay.

I think the crucial distinction is whether you're pointing at an approach versus some specific implementation. 'Blockchain', as I understand it, is a particular approach that isn't linked to some particular instance.

"Your company on website" doesn't work because there's really only one 'web'. "Your company on Facebook" does work, as does "Your company on SCRUM/NoSQL/AOL/Mobile/etc."

I'd prefer "on a blockchain", personally, but "on blockchain" doesn't strike me as too egregious.