It’s easy to get distracted by the ‘technology’ when assessing a public blockchain i.e. how many transactions per second it can process and how cheap it is to use, while these are nice to have, in my opinion sacrificing on the ability for individuals to be able to run a node and verify transactions in their home is not worth whatever improvements in scalability are achieved at the base layer. If performance and cost are super important to you, then might as well run it on AWS or use a rollup with a public blockchain for consensus and security.

To understand why public blockchains are important let’s look at the current method of maintaining a ledger. Whether it is the ledger of your federal government’s spending or even the database that stores your instagram account information. The problem with most ledgers today is that they tend to be a double entry system where whoever controls the books/database can always go back and edit the records without anyone being aware and with no consequences. This is why there is a multibillion dollar industry of auditors to ensure what an individual or corporation reports is on the up and up and even these auditors occasionally get it wrong see Enron.

Public blockchains solve this problem by introducing a triple entry accounting system, where after a few confirmations it is highly improbable a transaction entered in the ledger can be edited or reversed, instead of having human auditors who might get it wrong the nodes that verify transactions are the auditors ensuring the transaction meets the protocols requirements before it is recorded in the ledger. This, to me is ultimately one of the key changes introduced by public blockchains. you can trust what you are seeing is the truth and has not been altered.

The potential this presents to change how we fundamentally interact as a species is immense.