Absolutely. Amazing writer. His nuanced observation of human nature, his wit, his affection for his characters and their humanness.. his entire series, especially the stories that center around AM and involve Vetinari, Vimes or Moist Von Lipwig..
I think it's a problem of reputation, actually. Google and Apple keep stuff online because they promised they would, and there would be backlash if they turned it off all of a sudden. There's nothing stopping a random, anonymous "filer" (like miner) from stopping the upload stream.
To go even further, if you orchestrate several miners carefully (maybe computationally) they can together perhaps stop people from accessing certain files.
Optimised code is occasionally so cryptic that you'll just waste a few hours figuring out what it does, which basically nullifies the effect of faster compile time.
I think I can answer your question, because I asked an identical one on bitcoin.stackexchange.com about a year back.
The transactions are public because that's the only way account balances can be tracked in this system. There's no 'amount' associated with an account id at any point in time, as there is for a banking database. In Blockchain, all the money an account has to spend is the net of the transactions made to and from that account. In traditional banking, even if you deleted the transaction history, it would work, because the account balances would be correct. This incentives people to fudge the history and the final balance via fraudulent transactions. Blockchain prevents that, since it never stores the balance, and old transactions are set in stone.
As to your second point, yes, mapping the wealth is possible. But so is obscuring the account holder's ID. To get your money, you just need a private key, a little string of characters, to verify that account. Also, account creation is incredibly easy (literally just a function call returning a 256-bit hash). So, no one knows who is who on the network. Some transactions may go from a person to themselves, others may go from a person to another for services rendered. It's basically impossible to tell once the transaction volume grows large enough.
Actually, only the -coin currencies have no actual value aside from transactions, which as can be shown, is very easily duplicable. I would say that Ethereum is an application platform, and that does have value (see WordPress, AWS etc).
Ripple also has value for ForEx settlement, which currently can take on the order of days. Also, it can function as a universal liquidator.
The -coins though, are ephemeral. Only the underlying Blockchain tech is of any use.
