.

@Laurelai It amazes me how emotional people get about blockchain. I have yet to see a sober evaluation of blockchain tech that concluded that it was never useful.

@seanl @Laurelai I've yet to comprehend just what magic it's supposed to do anyway. what problem was a "blockchain" supposed to solve

@kara @Laurelai It's a means of achieving a single agreed upon ordering of transactions without needing a trusted third party. That way, if someone tries to spend the same money to person A and person B, there's an algorithmic means of determining which is the valid transaction.

@kara @Laurelai There are lots of criticisms like "it's not really decentralized because of pool mining" and "it's easy to attack because you don't really need a majority of hashing power" and "it'll destroy the planet because it uses too much energy". The first hasn't been a problem in practice; the incentives for miners are "better" than the incentives for central banks. For the second I say "well then feel free to go make your billions breaking it".

@kara @Laurelai Bitcoin has the largest bug bounty in history by several orders of magnitude. And the third one I've addressed before but it boils down to the fact that the electricity must be paid for by some combination of transaction fees and block rewards, so it has to grow far more slowly than the transaction rate in the long run, but that there will also be technological advancements to reduce it.

@seanl (let's untag Laurelai from the evangelism eh?)

you haven't really answered my question, though. Bitcoin is not a genuine engineering problem that needed solving

so...is there something _useful_ a blockchain can do for me?

@kara Depends on what kind of stuff you want to do. Do you have something that requires a single agreed upon (but "eventually consistent" in that temporary forks are possible) ordering of signed blobs representing something like transactions? If so, is a single database sufficient? If a single database isn't sufficient, is a federation sufficient?

@kara You also need some way of incentivizing folks to compete to try to insert blocks. Cryptocurrencies usually do this by some combination of giving them the transaction fees and letting them insert a special "unbalanced" transaction that gives them a reward with a predetermined value. For a naming system you could let them reserve a name or something.

Speaking of which, I have no idea how Twister incentivizes mining.

I guess this is all a long way of saying no, probably not.