Yup, that's pretty much it.
And you're exactly correct: it is a niche solution to a very specific problem.
And that makes the OP meme wrong and ignorant; an overly broad generalization that fails to educate, instead perpetuating a "crypto bad" mentality projected onto a useful piece of tech.
It's like saying "when do you need nuclear fission? Never" ignoring the fact that nuclear power is the perfect solution for some very specific use cases (like powering rovers on Mars) and a good solution to a few others (large scale terrestrial power generation)
Your responses have told me everything I need to know. This one isn't hard to discern.
The content of your statements are actively perpetuating the problem right now. Therefore, you are the problem.
Not super complicated.
I'm not questioning your intent. But the results speak for themselves.
You're right. They're not fragile and helpless.
You know how women protect themselves? How they demonstrate their strength and ability to help themselves?
By bringing other people when meeting strangers who are statistically likely to be larger and stronger than they are, and 60% more likely to commit a violent crime!
If you can't figure out the difference between "I distrust unknown men" and "I distrust you" then you have a hell of a lot to learn, dude :/
This is how you get lied to. This is how you wind up shocked when they reveal later that they had a friend nearby. Because they can't even trust you not to judge them for prioritizing their own safety.
You are the problem.
If you're talking about something like MHA those are largely made up with some influence from real naming patterns.
For what it's worth a quick Google search will usually tell you the answer for any particular name. Just like with English, there's a combination of:
Tell me you have no concept of the day to day experience of women without telling me you have no concept of the day to day experience of women, speed run edition
Right, but if it's being used internally within an organization then the business itself is the authority. I think I mentioned this in another reply somewhere but in many of these use cases it's about preventing tampering or falsification of records.
Let's take the pharmaceuticals use case as an example. In that scenario the important things to track are:
If the pharmaceutical company is the one managing that system, and they provide individual health care facilities (and any intermediate handles) with "private keys", that's the entire extent of the central authority that's required. Literally every other element can be encoded on the blockchain.
Compare that to a traditional system where you have to maintain databases, provide always-on connectivity to those databases for every participant, manage access control permissions for every user, etc etc etc
With blockchain, every participant can get the entirety of what they need with just their "private key" and a copy of the blockchain from one other peer. That's it. They can submit their blocks (for a leaf node, "I received this package"; "I gave the item to this patient"; etc) to that one peer and as long as there is a path through that peer to the distributed network, the rest of the network can authenticate the validity of those blocks through network consensus. Tampering is immediately evident. And every block they submit is traceable to whoever that private key was issued to. And once they submit a block to the chain it can never be undone or modified, even if they have all the "permissions" in the world. They'd have to take over a massive percent of the distributed network to alter consensus.
You've misunderstood. They're not using this for inter-bank transfers. They're using it for inter-branch/intra-bank communication. And most major banks - certainly the ones investing in blockchain - have hundreds to thousands of branches.
Not to mention signing+encryption and blockchain are not mutually exclusive. You can have signed and encrypted blocks on a chain
I don't mean to be rude but it sounds like you aren't very familiar with digital identity management paradigms in the first place?
Proving who you are is always a relative operation. It's always about the relationship between two things. "I am the person who generated this other message" or "I am the person whose face looks like this".
Key/certificate issuance follows a variety of different models depending on the use case. Sometimes "this object was generated/signed by the person who controls this key" is enough, as is the case with things like secure emails (think gpg/pgp). Other times you need an authority to give relative meaning to a key/certificate (think SSL).
It's certainly not necessary, it just provides specific advantages in terms of tamper resistance, validation, etc. If you're not working in a system where the integrity and authenticity is paramount and doing that validation over the wire constantly is prohibitive then there's no significant benefit. But there are lots of scenarios where those are EXACTLY what you want to prioritize. Several of the examples I added to my initial reply offer clear use cases that benefit.
As for my definition, I'll defer to the literal definition:
A blockchain is a decentralized, immutable digital ledger that records transactions chronologically in "blocks" linked together using cryptography. Each new block contains a hash of the previous one, forming a secure chain that is distributed across a peer-to-peer network of computers, making it tamper-evident and resistant to changes without network consensus. This distributed and transparent system eliminates the need for a central authority, allowing participants to verify and trust the recorded data.
Note that proof of work is NOT part of the definition. Proof of work is very specifically related to cryptocurrency, and exists only as a mechanism to prevent the arbitrary creation of additional currency (blocks). There is nothing about blockchain that requires proof of work. Often you use proof of stake instead of proof of work, but even that isn't strictly necessary
P.s. this is exactly what I mean when I talk about how grifters have ruined a perfectly good technology by poisoning the public awareness of it. The fact that you considered proof of work to be a core element of blockchain is because of cryptocurrency, and the notoriety it has received because of the grift. Other examples of this phenomenon include Tesla and their impact on the perception of autonomous vehicles (which Teslas are not, but try very hard to make you think they are), and LLMs and "AI" and their impact on the perception of real AI projects and other forms of machine learning.
Sure but when the Blockchain is restricted to operation within a specific ecosystem that is kinda moot, no? Like, if I'm managing a supply chain but have concerns about the participants in that supply chain being compromised, then it's okay for me as a central authority to define the standard and then use the decentralized nature of Blockchain to validate and distribute the use cases for that standard.
Take a company like Target as an example. They want to make sure that their supply chain ledger is immutable and trustworthy. They don't want anyone within their organization, from the CEO down to the shipping dock workers, to be able to falsify or tamper with line items in the ledger. As a central authority they can define a standard using Blockchain that solves that problem AND doesn't depend on a central authority to do it beyond the initial standard definition. That reduces attack surface significantly.
Oof. Well called out. I feel terrible. Removing