Ask Lemmy

Besides other refutations, I'm going to refute the fact that blockchain requires those three points.

Block chain is a shared incremental ledger in it's essence. Since its inception banking systems have adopted it to have shared ledgers between them to manage transactions between them in a secure way, without fear that the ledger has been tampered by some bad actor of the other bank, since the history of transactions is shared in a way that can't be tampered without alerting both parties.

So yeah, that. Banks adopted it pretty quickly to be used in transactions. The way you describe immutability is incorrect, you can mutate the current state into the next one, you just can't mutate past transactions. This example is very much not public, just shared between two private individuals, so not public either. I guess you can call it decentralised too.

You keep calling it "the block chain", when blockchain is just a name for a technology, a chain of blocks of information condensed incrementally in the next block, that's it. You are thinking too hard about it.

Edit:

Funnily enough, each one of these elements does have use by itself! For example, distributed databases have been around for decades, and are the basis for much of the tech you use today

Decentralised != distributed, a biiig !=. Decentralised implies that there's no main/master node coordinating operations, there's no main authority. whereas in distributed systems, the ones you mentioned anyway, there's always a main node coordinating what worker nodes do, worker nodes act on what the main node, there's a very clear authority role.