No Stupid Questions

Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like "Git" keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).

Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of 'Blockchain', but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they're just flailing about making shit up.

Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn't seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.

I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I've learned, the more convinced I am that it's completely useless. I've never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There's no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn't going to care that you've got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can't unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you're not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.

Blockchain isn't useful for anything important, and it's not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it's a dead-end technology.

The "blockchain" I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.

I find it to be an interesting solution looking for a problem. There could be many applications but I've yet to see one that blockchain could solve better than anything else that we already have, outside of crypto currencies.

Web3 is an interesting though experiment but I don't see how it would work in real life. It would be extremely slow, data loss would be a daily occurrence and it would be a privacy/security nightmare.

Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.

One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.

It doesn't really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.

So Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other large companies in the IoT space are using a blockchain as a federated data store: https://github.com/zigbee-alliance/distributed-compliance-ledger

It stores the data needed for Matter [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ] device attestation.

I think its an interesting use case on how entities that don't particularly trust each other can operate a federated system. Accounts are linked to an identity out-of-band in order to have write permissions to the chain. When an account writes, all the readers of the chain have reasonable assurances of the author of that write. No company can inject false state as another company without that company's guarded private key. All transactions are also auditable as an additional assurance the data isn't undergoing a malicious act.

tl;dr; interesting use cases for tamper proof federated ledgers.

IMHO technically speaking the concpt of a Blockchain and decentralized zero trust computing like in Ethereum are indeed "interesting" as concepts.

But in practice there are a ton of issues with current implementations and it's likely not going to be used on a large scale because zero-trust doesn't scale well.

The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don't generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven't really been built yet.

As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.

The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.

I've heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn't necessarily mean good)

1. I've been out of the industry for a couple years, but at the time I left both the US's NAR and CA's CREA were looking to create blockchains that would eventually hold an immutable history of every salable property in North America. The sales pitch is that no one will ever be able to hide things like flood damage or zoning changes if they're all those events are in a trusted database. Carfax, but for buildings.

2. Several US states with legalized Marijuana have what are known as Seed To Sale laws. One company was trying to move into this space and eventually into all of agriculture. The idea being that if you buy pot scanning a QR code would tell you what clone# the seeds were from, where and when it was planted, what pesticides/herbicides were used on/near it, when it was harvested, any tests it had gone through, etc.