On: Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain

[placeybordeaux]

Given the amount of people that suggest blockchains in a trusted environment it seems perfectly reasonable to reiterate that you don't need a blockchain to have distributed consensus.

I was hoping for something different given the title though.

[dcdanko → placeybordeaux]

I think a benefit of blockchains is that a single(ish) protocol can support many different distributed applications.

It's sort of like apps that run on Electron, performance might be bad but it's easy on the developer.

[mrguyorama → dcdanko]

Except blockchains are incredibly complicated, and as the hacks have shown, programming on the blockchain is a great way to create a bug bounty that also shuts down your company

[dcdanko → mrguyorama]

Definitely, blockchains aren't secure in the way that many Ethereum apps seem to think they are.

But for certain types of lower stakes applications (say a log running on a mesh network of sensors) blockchains can provide a simple way to do something that could otherwise be fairly complicated. Certain blockchain implementations (I like MultiChain) are really easy to use.