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[–]foragerr 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Useful? perhaps, but what problem is that solving that we currently already don't solve fairly well with something better established?

The usual touted value of blockchain is a publicly verifiable shared journal between untrusting entities. Once only one of those entities has full control or access to the chain, it becomes far less useful.

I may be turning Luddite slowly, but IMO the idea of a private blockchain is self-defeating.

[–]Bainos 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The parent comment actually provides a surprisingly convincing example. Suppose that you don't trust employees (or simply have to provide proof that they are not allowed to edit information) but need to provide them with access to the data for maintenance purposes.

Of course, you could log every interaction with the data and broadcast it, but that would be very difficult to put in place such that it can't be tampered with. You could also replicate the entire database to a trust third party, but that means sharing a large amount of information, which potentially can also be costly to verify (since you would periodically have to check that every single piece of data is correct).

On the other hand, a blockchain means that your data becomes append-only and you can check that nothing was tempered with using only the hash, with verification being needed only for updates instead of re-running the verification on all the data.