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?
As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.
The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.