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Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? (theguardian.com)
mspohr writes: This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally). A linked article in The Economist expands the thought and discusses changes to the blockchain to improve performance, reduce overhead and accommodate different uses.
(See also this related poll.)
You can achieve similar things with a gossip protocol. Blockchains are just one step in the evolution of distributed and public logs. Blockchains are in fact a very very wasteful, with all that proof-of-work. Most of bitcoin is controlled by china, and most of china's energy comes from old-fashioned coal. So, Blockchains as of now are a very very dirty technology.
But I'm really looking forward in seeing newer approaches emerge which don't need this kind of proof of work but are still safe against spam. Bitcoin has done one very important thing IMO, it has put attention to this topic. There are tons of startups everywhere. One really has to fear that "blockchain" becomes a new buzzword.
In fact, the blockchain has been designed with distrust in mind. Unlike most other systems, it isn't the usual "just add a 3rd party everyone trusts, and lets call the problem solved" (like with TLS certificates, there you even have hundreds of parties everyone trusts), but it gives you a real hard number of people you can assume to act "hostile" and the system is still stable, without having a trusted third party. Its all real nice, in theory, except for the question of how to bring information about the current hashing speed of the network to the client. This is the only information you as non-hashing party have to trust.