> I'm not sure how append only lists allow idea sharing in ways a database does not.
So at the software developer level of the stack, what we get are new tools for managing reputation, identity, authentication, transparency, accountability, etc.
If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.
To give a more concrete example, think of the 2008 real estate collapse. The reason the market failed isn't because people didn't have the data, it's because no one one going to read through a 3,000 page paper print out to figure out what was actually in whatever debt tranche they happened to buy. But when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen. And because a big portion of the lemon market problem is ameliorated, that creates new ways to finance big capital investments that would be completely impossible today.
Think about why we weren't able to have large corporations before double entry was invented/popularized in Florence in the late 1400s, because there was no way to really know if you were making or losing money once you got beyond a certain scale. Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x, we can (and will) restructure all aspects of society in ways that just aren't possible currently, everything from supply chains to social networks. I think it stands to reason that blockchain is going to be the most financially important technology of the last 500 years, since imho it's the biggest innovation since double entry accounting.