Fine, let's say it it's a ledger, good enough for me.

But again, if you write something wrong or dishonest, you have written it forever, out where it can never be edited. Mistakes will be made because we're people but a pattern of "mistakes" is either incompetence or malfeasance and now that it's there forever, anyone can investigate

Agreed, but with a lot of these things the paper trail isn't necessarily even the problem. Let's take Trump's taxes, for example. There is documentation out there that shows he's probably done illegal things, he just hasn't been prosecuted either due to the IRS being under-resourced, or political considerations. The documentation itself does not seem to be the issue.

I think you definitely have a point about dodgy dealings by state officials in places like India, but again I don't think this is a technical problem as much as it is a political problem. They could have good records without blockchains if their politicians really wanted it, but clearly they don't.

No. With a public blockchain the durability increases with the number of copies. A 51% attack on an authentication blockchain would create two blockchains. Any transaction that happened before the 51% attack would be on both blockchains while any transaction that happened after the 51% attack would only be on one. if KBChain made the mistake of letting anybody on board, and got 51%attacked, KBChain Classic would release a memo saying "well that was dumb, we've still got your original verification and we're making our admissions standards more stringent." The data itself remains inviolate.

I don't disagree with the technical case, but the point I was making is that you can completely recalculate the entire block chain to your liking if you have access to enough copies of the chain, or have enough friends who do. And in your example, it still very much depends on people trusting you (or some group) to be the arbiter of KBChain.

Blockchain creates a robust ledger, one where no single actor can simply cross out a name in a document, which is good, but you could also achieve that by having a database that tracks changes over time. I guess your point is not that it's impermeable, but rather that it makes it harder to mess around with it. I don't disagree with this, but other secure systems are probably just as good?

That's 100 Raspberry Pis or the equivalent. Give each of 'em a 1TB hard drive. You're talking about a $500 cost for companies that don't sell watches for less than $5k ea. Breitling did 530m CHF in sales last year. I would say "effectively zero" is an accurate description.

Absolutely, but I did say it can be good for some applications.

I have the feeling that we basically agree, maybe I just think that the things blockchains do aren't quite as revolutionary as you do.