qnmaster

Every time it's been done, it's clearly an attempt by the developers to profit. Why else would one duplicate something, hardly change it, but attempt to pass it off as the original thing?

>weren't those forks of the ledger due to technological disagreements

That's their PR message, not their goal. They were pretty clearly social attacks trying to coopt the name.

This is a rabbit hole, but the TL;DR is that it's very resilient against precisely these types of attacks.

There's a lot of bullshit, but it would be a huge mistake to assume that there's nothing significant there. Check out the Bitcoin whitepaper for a technical primer.

It's not an end-all for supply chains, but that doesn't make it useless. It still prevents forgery of old records. If someone signs something, they can't later go back and change it or claim they didn't.

>as opposed to authorities signing current state

That's what it solves. It removes the need for trust and dependence in a central authority. There's no central actor to hack, or that can abuse the system, or be compelled to censor.

Consider Paypal. They're obligated to follow the regulations of every single government whose citizens they serve. Paypal themselves can also make value judgements. That severely limits who can use the system, for what purposes, in what quantities, and how frequently.

>Is that the point of mining? To make inserting hordes of cheap lying nodes impossible?

That's called a Sybil attack, and yes that's one of the reasons.

Mining also makes creating blocks have a real world energy cost. So rewriting history quickly becomes almost impossible as blocks are added. An attacker would have to have more than 50% of all mining power for a sustained period of time.

I suggest reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, it's short and sweet.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Except it does work.