It can be an excel spreadsheet, I guess, how about a real database with a server attached to it instead, run from multiple secure locations? But if you do that you need to make sure someone isn't fucking with it, you need to trust the people running it and/or the people with oversite, you want the whole nation to trust these people with you, and you want to maintain that state of things permanently and without fail. It's possible but with all the money and assets of a large country at stake there's a massive incentive for fuckery, it's a very hard problem. This is the problem Blockchain solves, no need to worry about trust, at least when it involves 1s and 0s and simple operations upon them.
Blockchain doesn't solve that problem though. There have been several instances where blockchain instances have split and diverged, and you need to have trust to reassert the correct instance. You've fallen for tech advertising bullshit. Blockchain doesn't run 'permenently and without fail', and suffers from all the same trust issues that an excel spreadsheet can suffer from, but blockchain is vastly more inefficient and expensive to maintain.
Have you just like, not been paying attention to what has been happening with crypto in the past two years? I feel like I'm talking to someone in 2015. We have the use case scenarios now, it's not just cynical speculation, and it doesn't solve the problems it claims to solve.
I have been paying close attention and I totally disagree with you. It's no different than it's ever been. Always there have been hard forks both planned and actual, the first one being early on in the BTC blockchain, importantly the eth/etc split, and recently forks related to the merge. In most cases it was clear which fork to go with or there literally was not a competing fork, the only exception being etc/eth. But suppose there was a contentious fork in an important chain on which government depended, then you literally just pick one and go with it, it's not a problem and you can't make a mistake as long as the new fork fulfils your needs. If not, stay on the old chain or make your own fork. The difference with a spreadsheet is monumental, a spreadsheet can be messed with by anyone with access to it, at any time. Hard forks can only mess with a Blockchain if the community agrees that messing is actually good, assuming at least some of them are paying attention to the new code. They're a non issue, much less scary than things like 51% attacks, which is saying a lot because they're not that scary, and a necessary part of the system to be able to upgrade it
But why crypto, and not say, one Excel spreadsheet to rule them all?
It can be an excel spreadsheet, I guess, how about a real database with a server attached to it instead, run from multiple secure locations? But if you do that you need to make sure someone isn't fucking with it, you need to trust the people running it and/or the people with oversite, you want the whole nation to trust these people with you, and you want to maintain that state of things permanently and without fail. It's possible but with all the money and assets of a large country at stake there's a massive incentive for fuckery, it's a very hard problem. This is the problem Blockchain solves, no need to worry about trust, at least when it involves 1s and 0s and simple operations upon them.
Blockchain doesn't solve that problem though. There have been several instances where blockchain instances have split and diverged, and you need to have trust to reassert the correct instance. You've fallen for tech advertising bullshit. Blockchain doesn't run 'permenently and without fail', and suffers from all the same trust issues that an excel spreadsheet can suffer from, but blockchain is vastly more inefficient and expensive to maintain.
Have you just like, not been paying attention to what has been happening with crypto in the past two years? I feel like I'm talking to someone in 2015. We have the use case scenarios now, it's not just cynical speculation, and it doesn't solve the problems it claims to solve.
I have been paying close attention and I totally disagree with you. It's no different than it's ever been. Always there have been hard forks both planned and actual, the first one being early on in the BTC blockchain, importantly the eth/etc split, and recently forks related to the merge. In most cases it was clear which fork to go with or there literally was not a competing fork, the only exception being etc/eth. But suppose there was a contentious fork in an important chain on which government depended, then you literally just pick one and go with it, it's not a problem and you can't make a mistake as long as the new fork fulfils your needs. If not, stay on the old chain or make your own fork. The difference with a spreadsheet is monumental, a spreadsheet can be messed with by anyone with access to it, at any time. Hard forks can only mess with a Blockchain if the community agrees that messing is actually good, assuming at least some of them are paying attention to the new code. They're a non issue, much less scary than things like 51% attacks, which is saying a lot because they're not that scary, and a necessary part of the system to be able to upgrade it