ask_111: How can having a public log that is extremely tamper resistant not have value?
Let's look at a concrete example: Bitcoin.
You can write something into the Bitcoin blockchain and be very sure that the information you wrote into it will stay there pretty much forever.
Is that enough, or do we also have to discuss why having such a tamper proof log has value?
I have a question for you that can short-circuit our discussion. You claim that the value is "so obvious" to you, why then one decade in there isn't one serious application of blockchain in the real world (not even in the dark web with early adpaters)? I mean a workflow that has been entirely transformed by it, despite all the investment and smart people working in the space? The lack of examples is the point that I find most baffling at all.
Even as a bitcion skeptic, its market cap went from $0 to $1T and you can't argue with that. But circa 2012 people started marketing blockchain as an independent technology that can solve all sort of problems. This is the bit I have issues with, there hasn't been a single successful use case sense.
(Yes, now we can devolve into a discussion about what "bad" means.)
But you can lock a database down to the point where only external auditors have access to the admin keys. It would make debugging challenging for sure, but that's anyway a tricky part of distributed systems such as bitcoin.
Your bankaccount is somewhat secure due to layers and layers of agreements and interdependencies of people. Bitcoin works the same way, but in a much more modern way and achieves much better security.
The git repo you mention elsewhere is something completely different. There is no security baked into git. A git repo is just a bunch of files.
No workflows have been transformed in a decade because workflows do not change that fast. TCP/IP and and the rest of the internet protocol suite was developed the 60s. It started to disrupted workflows 40 years later.
Is this true in practice? Haven't there been multiple massive bitcoin thefts? If these happened to a bank, you'd have a chance to get your money back. With Bitcoin -- it's just gone.
"Security" here means that a piece of data that was written to the log stays there unaltered.
"Theft" is on a much higher abstraction level. A "Bitcoin theft" is that someone steals your key and then appends a message to the log "Boplicity pays 17 BTC to Joe. Signed: Boblicity". Stealing your private key does not take place on the blockchain. And all previous entries to the log are still there.
Because achieving that tamper resistance the blockchain way is so energy-intensive that it has no value for me.
It is so obvious that we should not have records that cannot be deleted. Specially when talking about freedom. It seems to strange to me that supporters of blockchain talk about freedom while also saying that you can put up records that cannot be deleted.
I find the tech interesting, but that's not the same as useful to me.
What I wonder is rather are there enough instances where it has value to actually motivate the hype (investment etc)? I can definitely see several dozen people working with this tech a few decades from now…
How would this affect me in daily applications?
Slower than a database and hard to migrate. Check