Will blockchain lose its "meaning" without Bitcoin?

Recently, I (the original author) saw an article about blockchain on the Internet. Some of the comments about blockchain in the article were ridiculous to me. The article said: Blockchain "actually" allows people to jointly supervise the monetary system.

When people rushed to praise the huge potential of blockchain technology, many people overlooked some basic issues. If people think that blockchain technology is important, then it is more important to understand what blockchain is good at. It is not omnipotent and there are things it cannot do.

In my opinion, one of the very clever and innovative "tricks" of blockchain is that it can oversee the order of certain events or activities (such as Bitcoin spending) without the need for a central authority. The main security aspect of blockchain is not tamper-proof or proof of inviolability, because you can get these in many ways by using standard cryptography. Instead, it provides a consensus among the nodes in the network on the state of a distributed ledger (specifically, the order in which updates are added to the ledger).

Therefore, the statement that blockchain is "more secure" is an illogical inference because we have to discuss security under a specific condition.

Blockchain technology makes sense if you say that it is possible to reach consensus in a “democratic” way on the order of transactions on a decentralized public ledger without the need for any central authority.

However, if you don’t care about the order of transactions, then blockchain technology is meaningless, or it is meaningless due to massive over-engineering.

Furthermore, even if you do care about the order of events (like stock trades), but you need some central authority in the system (like a stock exchange), then blockchain is not only over-engineered, but its highly regarded mathematical algorithm is also compromised by institutions that scale it down, make it private, etc. So, do you get the point? The power of the original blockchain consensus algorithm lies in its massive network and the Bitcoin incentives it provides to miners to support it.

One of the greatest things about blockchain is that it inspires innovation. However, blockchain (Bitcoin’s blockchain) is only 7 years old, and the applications it has spawned have only “barely” made it out of the lab. Let’s not let misunderstandings ruin it in its early stages.

Talking about those companies and institutions that want to break away from Bitcoin or Bitcoin payment applications and build smaller, private or special-purpose distributed ledgers, they will detract from the original innovation of blockchain in two important ways. First, they replace the POW mechanism of the Bitcoin network with other economic methods (such as POS), which reduces the size of the mining pool and destroys the tamper-proofness of the blockchain. Second, if they add some command and control (such as permissions) to the original blockchain, then the reason for the existence of the blockchain will become unclear, and the incremental security margin seems to be greater.

Original article: http://www.zdnet.com/article/weak-links-in-the-blockchain/
By Steve Wilson
Translator: Bibit
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/blockchain-weak-links)