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?

  • mormund@feddit.org
    34·
    2 days ago

    Good summary, a few additions from my side:

    • Being public is not required. E.g. banks could form an internal block chain shared only with other banks.
    • Blockchains are a database. An immutable and usually distributed database.
    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
      24·
      2 days ago

      Also worth noting that the computations don’t have to be expensive either, it’s only there in cryptocurrencies to artificially limit the number of blocks generated on a public system and tie it into the reward system.

      So for a bank, that could be a plain single iteration of a sha256 hash, and once share everyone agrees those were the transactions and you can’t go back and change one without having to change the whole chain.

      Make it sha1 and you basically have git.

      A blockchain is more or less just an append-only database. Or even an append-only replication log with built-in checksums.

    • msage@programming.dev
      31·
      1 day ago

      I would argue against blockchains being a database… its more of a ‘signed sequential log’ than a database.

      • mormund@feddit.org
        3·
        1 day ago

        Well, Wikipedia describes it sufficiently vague: “a database is an organized collection of data”. But is a linked list on its own a database? I’d say the blockchain itself is the data structure but any software using it is most likely a database.