Good question. The way this works right now is you can submit a non-payment tx into the bitcoin network and attach tx fees to it just like you would with a normal payment tx. Miner collects the fees when they mine the block with your tx in it.

So from the miner's perspective the incentive is there. There's the "wasted bandwidth" angle there as well but that's a different story...

I get how it works with bitcoin - that's why I was saying the incentive is obvious there. The miner makes money.

I was asking what the incentive would be to go through the computational effort of creating a block in a system that doesn't involve money. The author gave the example of using blockchain to maintain a shared calendar. What incentive would I have to go through all the computational effort to create a block of calendar entries?

Or let me know if I misunderstood your reply.

I understood you correctly you're asking what is miner's incentive to process a tx if the tx does not involve transfer of funds.

There's nothing preventing the same tx fee system bitcoin is using from being implemented even if the blockchain itself is not used to transfer value. So now it is a can of worms, no doubt, as the system would have to have a way of attaching the fee to a "real world" value - along the lines of how Ether/Gas relationship works in Ethereum, but it can be done.

Another thing to keep in mind is blockchains the author is talking about in the article aren't necessarily public - with a private blockchain the nodes are paid for by the organization using it in some way shape or form.

Thanks for the reply. I'll check out Ethereum; I'm not at all familiar with it. Seems like you'd then be losing some of the - for lack of a better word - purity of the system. If I understand correctly, part of the point with bitcoin is that there really are no central entities, gatekeepers, etc. It's completely decentralized - of the people, for the people, by the people. But if you need a way to "pay" miners outside of what the system deals in, seems like you'd be bringing in some sort of central entity. Not that that's a bad thing, I just understood it to be part of what bitcoin was avoiding. And maybe it will make more sense when I learn a bit more. Thanks again.

That's why those systems shouldn't use mining. They should use something like PBFT. And the incentive to run a node is that you can catch other people cheating.