So you want to use a blockchain for that?
There are good reasons and bad reasons to use blockchains. In conversations with people thinking about blockchain use cases, I have noticed common confusions and conflations arising from words initially used in a narrow context (usually to describe bitcoin’s blockchain) being understood more generically for blockchains. In this post I hope to untangle some of these common misconceptions.
Theme: Blockchains are secure
Writing data
Bitcoin has some specific security for writing data due to the burden of proof-of-work. That is, in order to add blocks of transactions, you have to validate all the transactions within the block (easy) and then perform repeated calculations (called hashing) to find a magic number that makes your block valid and acceptable to the other participants according to the rules of the network (easy, but computationally expensive, therefore energy intensive, therefore expensive). This proof-of-work burden combined with the longest chain rule makes it expensive to mine your own subversive chain.
Private chains on the other…
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aainslie 