Regarding the OP. Distributed systems can have much, much higher performance than centralized ones. BitTorrent is a good example: on a torrent with thousands of peers, it will literally eat up as much upstream and downstream bandwidth as you throw at it. If you had a big enough torrent it could take on a botnet for lunch.
More computers. More processing power. More bandwidth and storage. You just need to organize it effectively.
The reason Bitcoin and such are so slow is not because they're distributed systems. It's because transactions are propagated throughout the network in a flood fill, and there's a proof of work for each one. Bitcoin is inherently slow because of its design.
There are a lot of problems with these efforts, but there's the possibility they'll work them out.
I don't think blockchain is revolutionary or fundamentally new technology. But it's launching distributed systems into the public space and that can only be a good thing.
This has been driving me up the wall for the last few months.
I'm building a P2P project and everyone keeps asking me when I'm going to integrate blockchain into it. To what end?!
Blockchain is a way of solving the double-spend problem with distributed consensus. That's all. It's not even necessarily the best way to do that. But because someone built a Ponzi scheme on top of it, it's entered the public consciousness and now anything without a server is a ~blockchain~ app.
More computers. More processing power. More bandwidth and storage. You just need to organize it effectively.
The reason Bitcoin and such are so slow is not because they're distributed systems. It's because transactions are propagated throughout the network in a flood fill, and there's a proof of work for each one. Bitcoin is inherently slow because of its design.
It's a first-generation product. There are serious academic efforts to build blockchains that can rival credit card processors in performance: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australian-scientist-have...
There are a lot of problems with these efforts, but there's the possibility they'll work them out.
I don't think blockchain is revolutionary or fundamentally new technology. But it's launching distributed systems into the public space and that can only be a good thing.