For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.
The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.