Re: Horses for courses
The blockchain is completely peer-to-peer with every peer communicating with every other peer. This is terrible for scaling (which is why Bitcoin can only process a handful of transactions per second)
That's only *one* reason why Bitcoin is terrible at scaling. There are other consensus protocols, like Raft, which scale pretty well for their use cases. It's the proof-of-work part of Bitcoin that bites, i.e. you have to burn real physical resources to be a significant part of the blockchain.
it's *only* advantage is that it is completely "trustless" in the sense that you do not have to trust a central controlling authority
Instead, you have to trust a cabal of mostly-anonymous shady organizations who are the big Bitcoin miners. If they collude, they *can* reverse a blockchain transaction. It doesn't happen very often, but it does - like when 184 billion bitcoins were created out of thin air by an integer overflow bug, and they decided that wasn't a good thing.
But they decide based on whether it's a good thing *for them*, not for anyone else.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
