"If you just need the above three things [History can be verified, Accessible to all + can't be shut off, Interoperate with other servers] you're much better off with an open peer-to-peer network (e.g. BitTorrent) that doesn't require strict global consensus - it's significantly more efficient and decentralized." This is a nice summary of Tim's talk at ZuSocial - there are use cases where you don't need blockchains and can build hybrid applications like Kiwi or Warpcast, which are primarily powered by P2P networks.
> Immediately, the first point, “history can be verified” is wrong. All high-performance chains (L2s, L1s, doesn’t matter) will prune / are already pruning history and state, and eventually even high-resilience chains like Ethereum L1 have a roadmap for both history and state expiry. Bitcoin is probably going to be the only remaining relevant chain where history can be verified. This is not an issue at all, because the public blockchains are not meant for storage or history - they are meant for real-time consensus. Indeed, there are far better solutions for historical storage, which will be used by chains for history. As long as there’s one copy, it’s all good. I hate this type of conversation point. As dapp developers, we absolutely do rely on history to be retrievable into perpetuity and that it remains retrievable within the network. We also sell and have been selling this property to consumers too (e.g. with NFTs). Theoretical researchers (like Polynya?) always remark that the one honest node assumption suffices and guarantees the data to be kept retrievable in perpetuity. But to me, this is an annoyingly academic answer to a problem that they do not seem to really understand in the practice of delivering credible, neutral apps to consumers. Many properties are not binary, and they cannot be modeled as game theoretic primitives - things are fussy, and that is actually their strength. Blockchains aren't just there to settle consensus, as much as Polynya likes to believe this, it is wrong.