this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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Do you understand how blockchains work? I ask to gauge whether you have technical solutions for the problems blockchains solve, or are repeating criticisms of cryptocurrency you've read online.
Yes, I understand how blockchains work and that is exactly why I know that they never add anything. They literally solve no problem.
Blockchains only really "work" if they are part of a community so huge that nobody external can easily add 50%+1 nodes to the network or so useless that nobody would want to spend the money on that. But if you have huge blockchains they are totally impractical to store on every single device which wants to interact with them. Add to that the extremely long delay before anything is added to the blockchain and you can be sure that the longest surviving chain actually includes that block and the (with proof of work) huge waste of energy or (with proof of stake) bias towards people who already have a stake in the chain and you will quickly figure out that blockchain is never the best and in many cases not even any solution. Not to mention how many blockchain proponents think data written to the blockchain magically solves the problem that you need to verify that the data you write to the blockchain is actually accurate (e.g. with all those proposals to use it for proof of origins of products and similar things).
There is a reason all the major blockchains actually in use soon add a layer of services that interact with the blockchain for you and then actually doesn't interact for every transaction. They are all working around the inherent flaws in the technology.
What you're describing is a public ledger, and specifically how Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like, works; you aren't describing limitations of blockchain. Check out AWS's qldb for a non-cryptocoin blockchain db. Now, describe an implementation (in non-technical terms, if desired) that provides the features but that isn't a blockchain.