For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
i think there was a lot of hope among some at the public systems, no clue if it will bear out, the tech however is a viable PKI distro strategy that has been proven to work already in multiple large orgs in different forms. We don’t talk about how expensive or difficult it is to control your own PKI. Its one of the key reasons why you have to yield so much data and control to providers.
I could go on a long rant about what the internet was built to be vs what “big tech” has perverted it into, using p2p technologies to do it then saying “i dont see what the point is for people to have versions of this for themselves rather than it being only in the hands of big corps controlled by share holders” but thats about as far as Ill go.
as for private systems, this stuff is already starting to rule your world. distributed PKI systems in enterprise require expensive and technically onerous trust ceremonies for each cross system connection. you also require functioning cert trees from root to tip in order to validate anything in most of these systems (tools like pgp are the exception rather than the rule sadly). These systems are expensive to operate and add another single point of attack to the system. There are already chains doing internal asset management at companies, and its quite likely that any DiD standard that becomes a gov ID will be on a ledger network not that it should matter to end users.
the biggest push with the latest wave of the tech is to stop trying to sell to people, sell to enterprise, the usecases are more solid and don’t require strange economic games to function.
You will be using blockchain tech, but if its deployed right. You will never know. Do you know or care what app server or db your provider uses? of course not.