Blockchain at CMU and Beyond [video]
resources.sei.cmu.edu
resources.sei.cmu.edu
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/534km8/carnegie-m...
Better for what?
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Just found this: https://openbazaar.org/ Doesn't appear to use its own blockchain. Does use cryptocurrency though, for largely privacy and anti-censorship reasons. Uses multisig capabilities in Bitcoin to enable escrow/chargeback.
As to why you wouldn't do the same thing for bananas: Weed is illegal, so any business selling weed is in danger of being shut down. Something decentralised is more immune to getting shutdown. Compare Napster (centralised) to BitTorrent (decentralised).
> I conjecture that blockchain only solves peer-to-[peer] digital currency
You kinda just described something like Silk Road right?
in each of these, speed might matter, or size of the data, or interoperability, or high availability, or centralization, etc.
Blockchains could give more trust on one hand (corrupt authorities are all over the world), and optimization on the other (less people and processes involved).
A quick overview of applications is here: https://www.blockchaintechnologies.com/applications/
The question is indeed if it's disruptive enough to replace the current way of working.
Email surely isn't central, and it seems to be pretty cheap for consumers. Do you think we should centralize email to make it better?
Regarding email it's unfortunately a rather bad example. While I personally host my own email server on a dedicated host I seem to be among a rather small minority. Every time this subject comes up on HN people say that they had a lot of trouble setting up their own email server because they kept being flagged as spam by the big hosts like gmail and friends.
Email is clearly undergoing a rather massive centralization around a few big providers offering an ad-sponsored service.
There are also obvious advantages to centralizing email: when you have many users you can de-duplicate content more aggressively, you can catch spam much more effectively etc... Overall it is more efficient, privacy and independence notwithstanding.
There's also an other important difference between email and blockchains: even if you consider email a decentralized service not all nodes (SMTP servers) need to store the full state and history of all emails sent in the entire world. They just pass emails along and only keep those addressed to a user of this particular server. It's similar to other services like IRC or bittorrent for instance.
Full Bitcoin nodes need to store the full state of the blockchain to function. You can optimize it a bit if you're willing to lose some functionality (discard spent outputs for instance) but not everybody can do that or the system fails and that's still a massive amount of data to keep around forever.
Email is (potentially) decentralized but also distributed. Blockchain is decentralized but every node contains the full state of the system. That's a very big difference when it comes to scalability.
How will you pay me $0.001? Or $1 million in a few seconds? With the next gen of cryptocurrencies, available today. Zero fees, instant, worldwide.
This is always a phrase meaning "blockchains don't" - because if they did, the speaker would have listed the production examples.
Of course, the underlying Blockchain will still be there. And it will always be possible to build other "second layer" solutions to compete with Lightning.
Similar things are in the works for Zerocash and Ethereum.
IMO using an FP language with a strong strict type system based on algebraic data types, pattern matching and exhaustive checking would be a better approach.