Blockchain without bitcoin. Can it work?

[NorrisK]

There must be some incentive for securing the blockchain. A company could offer free cloud hosting for instance as a reward for your hashing. But nobody will secure (which results in centralized security) without a reward.

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[David Rabahy]

Maybe that's why number of nodes keeps decreasing? I think it's a bitcoin's weak point and support Justus Ranvier suggestion to monetize nodes https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-2-price-discovery/

Um, I, for one, felt that was a good article.

I currently run a Bitcoin full node for no direct compensation.  It consumes electricity which I pay for; it generates heat which I do pay to cool on some hot days; it might be wearing out my equipment faster than otherwise; it consumes space on my SSD (by choice as opposed to a regular hard drive) costing me some performance for other things I do; all the previous costs are well within my current means; there is some amount of environmental impact of all this; might be interesting to calculate all that.  However, I get way more fun personally (to each his own) out of this than paying to go see a movie, for example.  I want Bitcoin to do well and believe that running a full node helps.  So sue me.

For the record, I have consistently championed an unlimited block size.  Now, after reading the article, I believe I should be paid for the services I am providing by running a Bitcoin full node.  If/when the Bitcoin traffic grows to point of saturating my resources then no matter how much I want Bitcoin to do well then I would be limited (well, I could go get more resources but I am only so generous/wealthy).  I would suggest the main developers take this on soon or they are going to lose more of the full nodes.  If I'm the last full node standing then that's going to be a problem.

[ransomer]

There must be some incentive for securing the blockchain. A company could offer free cloud hosting for instance as a reward for your hashing. But nobody will secure (which results in centralized security) without a reward.

Yes and a million possible rewards can be thought up.

[countryfree]

We've already seen several articles about private bitcoinless company-centric blockchain. They're some kind of a cloud-based extranet with free access to all members of a given company. We'll see more and more of them since they're a robust way to store data among a network.

[Kazimir]

People seem to miss the importance of Bitcoin's massive network power as a key factor for the blockchain principle to work effectively and trustworthy.

See also: http://bitcoinanswered.com/4/myth--blockchain-technology-is-important-and-bitcoins-are-not

[jonald_fyookball]

There must be some incentive for securing the blockchain. A company could offer free cloud hosting for instance as a reward for your hashing. But nobody will secure (which results in centralized security) without a reward.

Yes and a million possible rewards can be thought up.

sounds like you are pretty creative.  and i'm not saying that confrontationally...but can you give me an example of one of the "millions" of ways?

[Outlander]

There must be some incentive for securing the blockchain. A company could offer free cloud hosting for instance as a reward for your hashing. But nobody will secure (which results in centralized security) without a reward.

Yes and a million possible rewards can be thought up.

sounds like you are pretty creative.  and i'm not saying that confrontationally...but can you give me an example of one of the "millions" of ways?

I could think out an scenario that a blockchain is supported by a centralized company, which give some kind of reward, such as money, token, or gift etc to those who are running the node and securing its network based on their online length or bandwidth.

[Kprawn]

Let's imagine a scenario where customers provide hashing services in return for "Zero Banking fee's" Some businesses pay huge amounts of money for banking fee's, but they have spare IT infrastructure or

bandwidth they can offer for lower or zero banking fee's. The opportunities are there for big companies like IBM or Intel or Facebook to provide for the sharing of their resources to establish a fully functioning

Blockchain. {This is, if they want to outsource this function} We think in terms of a public ledger, and tend to forget that these corporate banks, could have much lower transaction volumes, depending on what it

would be used for.   

[Possum577]

Idea of blockchain without bitcoin is becoming quite common nowadays. It's even getting discussed by banks and other mainstream heavyweight players. However, it doesn't make a sense for me. For blockchain to be reliable store of anything, it must be supported by some expensive process, like mining. And the most expensive mining is bitcoin mining. So if you want to store some valuable data in a blockchain, it must be bitcoin blockchain. Am I right or am missing something?

You're missing something. The blockchain could be used to verify the authenticity of sorts of transactions - from transaction based business to accounting practices for a major corporation. The mining likely wouldn't be involved but if it didn't the math wouldn't need to be so difficult (which is what drives the hard and expensive part of mining).

The blockchain could be the next mega trend in business...like the cloud in popularity, unlike the cloud in the fact that the blockchain will have much greater impact then "virtual storage".

[HCLivess]

It's all about being public and opensource.
Then there is that other crowd who only buy things in pretty packages in the supermarket.

[Kakmakr]

In this situation I cannot see that they would be going the Open source route. It would be much more secure if they make it totally proprietary and private. They can steal all the good properties of the protocol and achieve the same result, without public participation.

The whole system could run within their private VPN to add more security and they could have a global network running that host a decentralized ledger for security purposes. Hacking and backups could be less of a problem, if they implement it in that way.

[manselr]

Non bitcoins coins have blockchains and not all are PoW, so why would you need BTC?

The block chain is just newer ledger technology, there is no reason for banks to be unable to incorporate concepts based on bitcoin.

Yes, but what they would have would be a an intranet ledger for their own use. And if it has no token of worth attached to it then it's simply the same as programming whatever you like into an intranet ledger. That's not really a blockchain. That's just a cheaper banking system (for them.)

Huh, the banks would use it for the Dollar as an internal ledger, yes. Using block chain technology. They could develop that into many things. If your definition of blockchain is "not a blockchain if there's no cryptocoin attached" sure, but that's not what the blockchain is.

You don't need bitcoin to generate blocks of transactions and have internal nodes accept/reject.

A centralized blockchain is nonsense, it doesn't do all the cool features that a worldwide decentralized blockchain does. A centralized blockchain is an huge target for hackers and will never be even 1% as safe as a worldwide decentralized blockchain, specially the Bitcoin one which is backed by the most computing power ever seen.