I don't think you can really split one from the other, the blockchain and its surrounding algorithms is how "you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units".
I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the same time once you hear how it works it sounds almost obvious. All the individual parts have been known for ages but they're combined in an innovative way.
I'm personally not convinced by the "political" side of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but on the technical side it's one of the most inspiring piece of software in the past decade IMO.
If you talk about the general idea of an append-only distributed database with no central point of control, I agree with you.
However the proof-of-work/auto-adjusting-difficulty method of asserting truth still seems horrible to me from a technical perspective.
Politically, I don't want to live in a world where this principle catches on and an ever-growing % of energy production would be spend on solving meaningless math problems.
Yeah the proof of work is probably the less elegant aspect of it all, I can agree with that. But theoretically you could replace by any other function that's difficult to compute but easy to verify. Maybe it's just a solution in search for a problem.
I don't understand how that would fix proof of work. The whole point is that the voting power is proportional to how much computational power you are willing to burn away, in order to protect against Sybil attacks.
I was thinking that eventually we may discover a proof of work that would actually compute something useful instead of burning electricity away. One can hope at least.
I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the same time once you hear how it works it sounds almost obvious. All the individual parts have been known for ages but they're combined in an innovative way.
I'm personally not convinced by the "political" side of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but on the technical side it's one of the most inspiring piece of software in the past decade IMO.