Hello,

I have been researching about blockchains and stuff and it all seems like a big scam. It’s not sustainable and can be replaced by a simple database.

is there any legitimate use cases of blockchains or it is all just a big scam?

    • mormund@feddit.org
      1·
      1 month ago

      Good summary, a few additions from my side:

      • Being public is not required. E.g. banks could form an internal block chain shared only with other banks.
      • Blockchains are a database. An immutable and usually distributed database.
      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
        1·
        1 month ago

        Also worth noting that the computations don’t have to be expensive either, it’s only there in cryptocurrencies to artificially limit the number of blocks generated on a public system and tie it into the reward system.

        So for a bank, that could be a plain single iteration of a sha256 hash, and once share everyone agrees those were the transactions and you can’t go back and change one without having to change the whole chain.

        Make it sha1 and you basically have git.

        A blockchain is more or less just an append-only database. Or even an append-only replication log with built-in checksums.

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      The lack of a trusted central authority is key. If you have at least one authority you can trust just barely enough, the whole idea of a blockchain collapses. There needs to be an urgent trust crisis for this to work.