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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

One datapoint: I've started seeing small dev shops who offer to their clients that they can do things "on the blockchain". "Bitcoin is hype, but blockchain is the underlying technology."

Seems like MySQL could solve the problem just as well.

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It's a fair read, the private blockchain market is underserved/misserved by the "widely" used platforms (IBM Fabric/R3 Corda). The thing that most everyone misses (including IBM and R3) is that the point of a private blockchain isn't the blockchain... it's smart contracts.

REST APIs + a DB can replace most "private blockchains as a time-stamper" usecases but here's the thing they can't do: replicate and trustlessly execute user logic. It's almost like you said _we're fixing SQL injection by making it irrelevant and making SQL into a full language_.

The blockchain itself just provides the trustless/high assurance substrate to then have trustless logic execution.

I feel like most meaningful contracts probably already involve some level of trust though - so it's not much of a stretch to add a little more.

I've been getting more serious about Hyperledger Fabric, and with time, I can't seem to see any use case that can't be solved by a typical distributed app. I see the utility of permissionless blockchains, but private blockchains, I don't get it.

A blockchain is a database with virtue.

  utility of permissionless blockchains

Is there actually any purpose of a 'permissionless blockchain' other than turning the security model into an x-threshold of capital needed to compromise the system type threat model?

So far all iterations of permissionless blockchains have been subject to take over from any modestly funded entity.

This a million times this. At the same time, if we compare this to the past when shops would offer any thing with a pulse to build a website - maybe that is a teaser to the future ubiquitousness of Blockchain technology.

One can't "Roll back" in mysql. Mysql also can't easily create N master-master replication nodes.

I am not sure it would be practically feasible for a "rollback" in a blockchain based system.

Miners would lose a lot of their reward if you suddenly say that this chain is invalid and all data has to be entered again.

It would use a lot of computing resources as well.

Rollback is typically only discussed with regard to private or closed blockchain implementations. Which just highlights the root "why blockchain?" question even further when discussing private implementations.

It is, in fact, fairly simple to track every change in a traditional db, who did it, and what the prior and subsequent state were. You can rollback such transactions without rewriting the whole db (as you'd have to do with a blockchain).

Devs push updates to the nodes. They can do whatever they want with it.

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