No, I don't have it backwards. Blockchain solutions offer decentralized, trustless alternatives to existing centralized, trust-based solutions. Further, it's bizarre reading this constant claim that nothing exists beyond hype, when a number of orgs have operating or in testing blockchain solutions for industries from manufacturing to finance. Inertia is a hell of a thing, as is "the way we do things", so it isn't surprising that it didn't suddenly replace everything, but it does have uses.
>No, I don't have it backwards. Blockchain solutions offer decentralized, trustless alternatives to existing centralized, trust-based solutions.
The problem is that the more we look at potential use cases, the more we found that trust relations are necessary to handle a load of basic process requirements that cannot be solved by blockchains alone, thus requiring the addition of trusted actors, thus removing the need of blockchains to begin with.
Blockchains proponents tend to see trustlessness as a benefit by itself. In their view, Blockchains are better than traditional databases because trustlessness is better than traditional client-server models.
System designers see trustlessness as a constrain. If you are in a bad situation where no single actor can be trusted by everyone else, then you can implement a decentralized database using blockchains. It's going to cost a lot in term of performance and efficiencies, but it's doable. But as soon as this constraint of truslessness is removed, why the hell would you bother with something like blockchains? And experience show us that, well, there's actually not a lot of contexts where trustlessness is an absolute requirement.
Please do list a couple of useful solutions where blockchain is the right/better tool for the jobs and thats outside of crypto coins or secondary layer of payment abstraction (and even there any payment option could work better in a lot of the cases).
Property title insurance is a great example. With blockchains it should be possible to reveal the owners of all properties and all transactions in order to remove ambiguity from the system. It is true that constructing and making use of such data implies trust in some sort of organization or process, but a robust store of ownership data is currently beyond keeping of property title records as currently performed by entrusted government entities.
Why would this work better? Not to be cynical but it seems from a engineering perspective that the trade off is security for data robustness? Anyone who takes control of the network will take control of all property title insurance data. In return at least i know up time will be 100%...
