I would think that since okTurtles is more about encrypted communication and distributed authentication (e.g. NameCoin) than crypto-currencies, it makes a lot more sense to talk about the blockchain mechanism in general than to talk about Bitcoin. The technology might be largely the same, but the use case is very different.
You're missing the point. Since 2009, people have been thinking about what blockchains are good for. The first answer was just money—Bitcoin itself. Today's answer is that we can use blockchains to mediate all economic activity in ways that eliminate economic transaction costs, obsolete most of the notion of economies of scale, and make individuals freer and wealthier.
Venture capital hasn't made people stop saying "Bitcoin." It just turned out that there's a lot more to talk about than Bitcoin.
Engineers have built new methods to secure blockchains that don't require mining. Maintaining a blockchain can be almost free. You could do it using an unnoticeable fraction of your computer's power and bandwidth.
The idea is that personal computers are ubiquitous and cheap, pack plenty of computational power and storage. Bandwidth is relatively cheap as well. Running a node or a thin client thus doesn't prevent you from using the computer to do other things.
People will buy computers anyway, why not use them to run a blockchain network as well as for word processing? The costs are amortized by the users.
Something a lot of bitcoiners don't seem to realize: the security of a blockchain is entirely due to the fact that it is too expensive to attack it. If your blockchain is "secured" by a motley bunch of ragtag microcontrollers, the first guy to point an ASIC at this chain can 51% attack it willy-nilly and render the blockchain useless.
PS. This is not a theoretical statement. It has happened to numerous altcoins.
PPS. In case it needs spelling out, the fact that its too expensive to attack the blockchain means that it is even more expensive to secure it (because miners need to make a profit).
