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?

    • lemmyng@piefed.caEnglish
      152·
      1 day ago

      There’s a few issues with that approach:

      • Blockchains can’t forget, but they also need to add new blocks on every period, meaning that there’s a lot of idle events that are added to the chain. You can increase the period, but then the chain has more latency. Either way, the disk space needed to store the full chain grows really fast, which becomes a problem when trying to bootstrap a new root node, or backup an existing one.
      • Unless you’re trading land titles internationally (read: there’s no single trusted authority), blockchains could just be replaced with a regular distributed database and servers.
      • Chains don’t offer out of band recovery and error correction.
      • frank@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        1 day ago

        Totally agree. And my problem with the example of land use that a single entity (the government where the land is) will be the sole enforcer of it. So who cares if the information is slightly less centralized, when the actual product is just as centralized as ever?