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Hey, non-trolling question. Did that blockchain thing ever work out? Honest question. Like, it had massive hype and massive potential, and I still think it's significant tech. But what are some major apps that have been built on it? Not currencies, but platforms.

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Certificate Transparency.

scotthelme.co.uk

Certificate Transparency, an introduction

Certificate Transparency is an open framework for monitoring and auditing the certificates issued by Certificate Authorities in near real-time.

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CT logs are trusted parties, not distributed ledgers with a consensus mechanism. The way you're interpreting the definition renders it nearly meaningless and is something which already existed in widespread usage. CT logs are no more of a blockchain than a Git repository.

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SCTs also make them even more of a trusted party than a Git repository. Compare SCTs to OpenTimestamps. CT is just a notary system with trusted third parties. Blocks containing a hash of the previous block is just one property of a blockchain and was widely used before Bitcoin.

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Decentralization with a consensus mechanism rather than centralized trust is a core part of it. Blockchain is a generic term for the combination of technologies invented for Bitcoin (i.e. a decentralized, permissionless distributed ledger). A Merkle tree is just one part of it.

6:06 PM · Jul 20, 2020Twitter Web App

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Merkle trees are broadly used for many things including version control, integrity verification, file transfer, etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tr Blockchain combines this with a consensus mechanism like proof-of-work/proof-of-stake to make a distributed, decentralized ledger.