I think one of the clearer use cases is digital identity. uPort, Blockstack and Civic are some of the companies that are trying to address this need.
gpg already solves that as well, again without blockchains.
Blockchains do no more for identity gpg. Whether they're more or less usable is debatable.
It achieves this because cryptographic signatures exist fine without blockchains
The claim I'm refuting is that digital identity was impossible before the blockchain (Edit: or more difficult, either way, point stands). Digital identity is a cryptographic thing and a distributed thing. That doesn't mean it needs a blockchain.
People have been proving digital ownership and identities for longer than the blockchain, and the blockchain brings nothing new or interesting to the table in terms of identity.
> Are there any concrete uses of a blockchain that have clear advantages than to using a standard database other than cryptocurrencies?
Seems you're refuting something no one said, as far as I can tell.
Edit:
> Digital identity is a cryptographic thing and a distributed thing
How is it distributed? I assumed it was some company's servers -- maybe in multiple data centres around the world. But nothing like 24k nodes (& possibly more in the future).
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Edit (reply to your edit):
I think the claim is that the identity system will be more resilient, not that it will be easier to implement. Censorship resistance.
I'd imagine it'll be harder to implement & cost more. A trade-off.
Which is along the lines of what I originally asked,
> Is Keybase resilient against the country's government in which it resides?
You said that gpg was. But didn't mention the computers. I asked about the servers & the ppl. (We didn't talk about the team).
The need wasn't specified. I'm presuming it's censorship resistance. Governments can't meddle with identities. Wipe someone off the face of the earth.