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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I would find amusement if the solution to the spamming of npm turns out to be a genuinely useful use case for blockchain.

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One of the first proposals for blockchain was a email with a minuscule, verifiable fee to make email spam uneconomical.

Spamming emails is one of the cheapest things you can do with a network connection. Even $1 per 1,000 emails would make spam untenable.

And the first proposal for proof-of-work was having emails include a proof-of-work to make it computationally expensive to mass-send emails.

I'd rather have my ISP donate 0,1 cent to some national park foundation when I send an email or whatever than have me waste power though.

> I would find amusement if the solution to the spamming of npm turns out to be a genuinely useful use case for blockchain.

I think you can implement a web-of-trust without a blockchain.

You can (because it's been done); this is a use case where "distributed but extremely slow database" is a pretty natural fit for the problem.

What advantages specifically would a blockchain have? Where does the existing solution, of using a fast database and trusting someone's private key, fall short?

indeed, blockchain makes trusting people much harder. The hijacked sense of "trust" used by the crypto-hype is a trivial technical sense in distributed databases.

Rather, an immutable ledger is a terrible system for trusting /people/, since if the data input into the system isnt reliable, there's no way to change it.

You then need to build an actual layer of trust on top of your untrustable blockchain, and then you end up spending 1MWHr and $100/review to recreate rotten tomatoes.

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