> One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it.

Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the actors involved. This is the main distinguishing feature of blockchains IMO, the reason we have proof of work, proof of stake, etc. It's also the main thing I saw people getting wrong when using blockchains during the earlier waves of cryptocurrency fever; most proposals for blockchains did make sense as distributed public ledgers, but didn't really need the extra computational overhead because only trusted parties were adding blocks to begin with.

I understand all of this and I stand by my claim of pointlessness.

Stripe, nor any other bank or bank-esque thing needs this because they have already well solved their problem of "trust."

"Blockchain" is pointless overhead here.

this is such a bizarre position, what you're describing has been not only possible but actually implemented in real-world systems for decades before even the idea of a blockchain was thought up

blockchains solve a self-invented problem

Whoever controls the protocol and network nodes can indeed unilaterally alter the blockchain just like any other data structure.

But this is a classical consensus setup where stripe has a front door to change anything about the network they want.

Never trust a cryptocurrency developed by a for-profit corporation.

Stripe would never create a blockchain they can't control, because if it has anything to do with fiat then it's going to need to have that control. I have an extremely high suspicion they have some sort of admin access.

You can sign records in a normal database. Implement some segregation of duty and don't give your DB admins access to any signing keys.

Which is by the DAO exploit on Ethereum was successful and not rolledback by the Ethereum Devs.

Oh, wait... I've been handed a piece of paper...

you get enough voting power and you can fork any blockchain to whatever state you want, no different than an admin doing an upsert

Can you name any significant economic fallout of any kind related to this attack vector?

Because I feel pretty confident that it is dwarfed by the volume of money that has been unlocked by tying crypto to ransomware.

I think this may be an insightful comment.

It's not for lack of trying that traditional, "database driven" cross-border payments are costly and unreliable. SWIFT have thrown technology at this problem: GPI, Swift Go, ISO20022, etc.

Unfortunately the ecosystem has an extremely weak technical culture. Banks rarely follow the standards as written – your perfectly crafted API payment may be re-keyed by a low-paid human operator on a slow, buggy UI written a decade ago.

I could believe that the developer experience and technical standards of the participants is where the value lies right now.

The one thing I'm not sure on is to what extent those ecosystems depend on reduced regulatory scrutiny compared to banks.

All pointless.

None of those things require a blockchain and are all made less efficient by doing them that way.

Again, truly decentralized cryptocurrency ADDS slow clunky overhead; that's the price of decentralization. Everything you're imagining is ALL done much easier with good ol' databases et al.

> the non existent "Database driven", uhh money tools.

Are you claiming here that things like banks and stock markets don't exist?

Genuinely curious though; what kind of 'money related features', that have no non-crypto counterparts, are you referring to?

Could you give an example of such a "money related feature"?

> No, instead it is about a whole variety of money related features and developer ecosystems that simply do not exist outside of the crypto space.

Like what? Speculation?

Well yeah, that's the point.

yeah, I guess a slow and shitty distributed database where there's no way to recover a lost or forgotten password (private key)

Yeah, worlds slowest and most in-efficient write-only database. And as soon as you need to interact with goods or services in the real world, then you still need trust anyway.

All these people harping on about: "Bro I just need to move my money without trusting anyone!, I just need a trust-less way to send currency bro!"

Trust is a good thing! Banks and financial middlemen aren't the devil. Look at how many TPS the visa network can do thanks to trust.

If it weren't for some minimum of social/institutional trust the whole of society would collapse anyway and your digital coins would finally converge to their true value (zero - or actually negative once you add in the externalities).

It's a LOT more than that. You are still stuck in satoshi-era. Things have evolved quite a bit that it's no longer just a db sync

The fees and slowness of BTC have essentially rendered it unusable as a "real cryptocurrency" and is more-or-less just being taken over by the banks.

The others aren't doing well right now despite the fact that the tech that runs them can do what crypto promised, often better. It will all come down to whether people will buy in?

Monero got 51% attacked