The difference is Linus won't take your arbitrary data and persist it in the kernel's history and Bitcoin will for a small amount of money. This makes some interesting schemes possible to implement: timestamping, proof-of-existence and similar services. For example Keybase.io uses Bitcoin like that to prove that are not messing with people's data [0]. Another interesting use is creating virtual tokens via Counter Party [1].
If you don't want to pay you also "abuse" Certificate Transparency logs to do basically the same job, just like Mozilla with their Binary Transparency [2].
[0]: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
Re:Blockchains Never Forget
by wordupmaking on Sunday May 28, 2017 @03:32PM
(#14435736)
> would require so many people to agree
You don't always have to remove something, you just need to introduce doubt. It only took x% industry shills to make any evidence for climate change effectively disappear for a lot of people.
And isn't this also how ordinary accounting systems work?
The place where it breaks down is that Bitcoin is for anonymous people who don't trust each other. With fraud there is no forgiveness.
In many other systems, people are not anonymous and mistaken transactions can be reversed, using the court system if it comes to that.