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Comment by karxxm | Hacker News Reader

> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted.

What if a group of trusted organizations run a blockchain together?

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Plenty of people trying to sell private blockchain snake-oil for precisely that purpose. It’s all rubbish, just use a database.

the blockchain is just a database. a database timed and validated by block. After all a database has advantages / constraints.

Certificate transparency is a permissioned blockchain (a merkle hash tree), ran by a group of trusted organizations and observed by third party monitors ("validators"). Your browser probably queried that blockchain when you opened hackernews.

It's a Merkle hash tree.

You can call that a blockchain if you want, but we already have a much older and more specific term for it: Merkle hash tree.

Sure, I just wanted to point out that building merkle hash trees, or blockchains, or whatever you want to call it, isn't "all rubbish". There are some valid use cases.

My point was that people who talk about blockchain typically refer to something other than a Merkle hash tree - they refer to a hash tree plus some consensus mechanism for trustless addition. I don't know of a term other than "blockchain" that can be used to refer to this concept.

It doesn’t even have to be trustless, some of this crap is using RAFT (for speed), the assumption being that the participants are all trusted.

They could also just run a SQL database together and it'd be much less complicated and more efficient.

I mean this is just a dumb argument. Who hosts the database? How do you trust them? It's as if people are being wilfully ignorant when they use this as a line of attack. Go learn about Byzantine fault tolerance and think a bit about what problems it attempts to solve

Certificate transparency logs are essentially a blockchain. Would you prefer Google and the other stakeholders to run an SQL database instead, containing these logs?

To be honest I don't know anything about certificate transparency logs. Maybe they should be on a blockchain. It doesn't mean money should be on a blockchain.

Then it'll automatically be seen as an attempt to build a cartel and keep competition out of the particular domain they operate in.

These kind of networks exist. Not all of them rely on a blockchain datastructure. In general, they are thousands of times more efficient than a system like bitcoin, and require no mining, however, are subject to the whims of the various political jurisdictions that those organizations exist under.

Like the one for Certificate Transparency: https://certificate.transparency.dev/logs/

Then it's just a regular network, hence why permissioned / private blockchains are a lies to crypto enthusiasts

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