Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?
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?
I've been thinking about this for a while, and would love to have other, more knowledgeable (hopefully!) opinions on this:
I've been dwelling on how we might be able to enforce some sort of set of rules or widely agreed upon "morals" on artificial general intelligence systems, which is something that should almost certainly be distributed in order a single entity from seizing control of it (governments, private individuals, corporations, or any AGI systems), and which would also allow a potentially growing set of rules or directives that couldn't be edited or controlled by a singular actor--at least in theory.
What other considerations would need to be made? Is this a plausibly good use of this technology?