this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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They don't have to. If you don't have database replicas that are actively trying to subvert the system, inject bogus transactions, etc. then you don't have the set of failure domains for which blockchains are in theory useful for.
If you're running backups for a single organization, you just need replicated data storage on servers owned and operated by that organization. If you're running backups for a set of users who all trust your organization (e.g. if you're Dropbox or the like), you also don't need blockchain.
It's pretty reasonable not to implicitly trust an organization to always get things right or always be honest about what they are doing. Couldn't there be theoretical value in spreading backups across multiple organizations and having cryptographic evidence they are all doing their jobs correctly, to reduce the need for that trust?
Theoretically? Sure. But in reality, blockchain pushers are fanatics, scammers, or both, so no real organization should trust them.
IMO that's a pretty limiting perspective. The existence of a lot of noise around a technology isn't a great reason to take a hard stance against ever using it.
If you think you've found the one honest snake-oil salesman, you're almost certainly wrong. That's part of reality.
I can agree that it's a bad idea to trust a salesman trying to market a blockchain product or service, but part of the point of open standards and techniques is that you can evaluate them on their own merits and implement them without needing to trust anyone.
I am not talking about back ups but more of dealing with the problems of distributed data in general. I.E. How do you, across a network of intermittent reliability (at a certain scale this is a guarantee not a choice), in sure that a piece of data written to and read by multiple actors is constant and available across the system?
Spanner.
Cloud only and closed source, right?
I'm pointing at the architecture, not the specific implementation. Build something like Spanner, not something like a blockchain.