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Comment by canoebuilder | Hacker News Reader

>But this is already too long :)

Not at all, I appreciate the info.

Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort.

What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model?

What sort of applications most excite you? Are there places the distributed model works better than the traditional? Are there applications the distributed model enables that the traditional does not?

And vice versa, what are the limitations of the distributed model? What things just aren't feasible? Could you build Twitter or YouTube like systems?

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> Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort.

Yes, but smart contract languages (Plutus in Cardano's case) generally are unrelated to the specific consensus algorithm of the blockchain platform.

> What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model?

In general, public blockchain platforms run by incentivizing the operators within the system itself. PoS and PoW are different versions of this (staking v mining).

> Are there applications the distributed model enables that the traditional does not?

Crypto, and DeFi (decentralized finance), is conducting a huge "live beta" in decentralized corporate governance and finance. There is a crapton of innovation happening with financial engineering and exchanges, completely new models like Uniswap (constant product DEXs) or new versions of existing things, like on-chain options.

Is it world-changing? No, or not yet certainly. But by construction, DeFi can only happen on a decentralized smart-contract blockchain, so it's genuinely new.

> What sort of applications most excite you?

Outside of crypto, there are many areas within industries which require the sharing and use of data across multiple organizations, markets, and even intra-industry. Think of Healthcare and the multitude of data sources, processes, and interaction between parties. In areas like this, where multiple parties have many different roles and responsibilities in a shared business process, I think the opportunity for private blockchains is promising. I admit that these are niche use cases and the use of these type of applications has not taken off yet.

Do note that these types of applications are very different from the decentralized implementations seen in the crypto sphere. These are the private, permissioned models that people speak of.

In that case they don't need a blockchain, they just need a database.

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