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Comment by binaryorganic | Hacker News Reader

There's beginning to be a lot of movement in the alt-coin space where people are trying to DO things with the blockchain, far beyond just a store of value.

There's not a lot of love here on HN for a lot of that effort, but it's not terribly controversial to say that there are a large number of dev teams working on products in a multitude of fields that are putting the blockchain to work.

The controversy seems to be whether blockchain tech is a sensible solution to some of these problems (that is, people ARE actually building lots of things, but the verdict is contentiously out on how sensible/lasting those things will be).

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I guess it depends on how you define "blockchain". If it's a system that involves distributed, untrusted participants and the need for proof-of-work, then I too wonder how useful that ends up being in the general case.

The general case is: federation of individuals can compete with single large corporation because cryptocontracts provide equivalent operational stability to what a single controlling entity can provide.

When corporate bylaws are written in code, you can replace a single legal entity with thousands of former employees operating as sole proprietorships.

Sure, but you don't need proof-of-work for that. All you need is for every participant to ratify the bylaws-as-code, which you can do with simple public/private signing. The only reason that proof-of-work is needed for a currency is that the ledger is changing constantly. For something that changes infrequently, the double-spend problem (or the contractual equivalent) isn't nearly as big of a deal.

Like I said, it depends on how you define "the blockchain". Many problems don't involve an open set of untrusted peers, and many problems don't require proof-of-work. So if you include those in the definition, then the blockchain isn't appropriate for a lot of those problems. And if you exclude those aspects, then what do you have left? A chain of cryptographically signed nodes that each point to their predecessor? That's been an underpinning of x.509 for, what, over 20 years? It's nothing new.

How do you verify the ratifications without a blockchain? You’d need to meet in person ahead of time right?

(I do agree that 99% of the decentralization of protocols can happen off the blockchain, amongst trusted parties... just saying that doesn’t get you all the way to “McDonalds Corp Replacement”.)

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