The RIAA, GitHub, and youtube-dl

The problem the blockchain solves is essentially distributed agreement on transactions with resistance to tampering *in the context of ongoing distributed agreement*, ie, further transactions and modifications from anywhere. I don’t think the security problems it solves are really of concern for a code repository - there’s a single authoritative version from somewhere, presumably, and a limited number of folks who can change it. Just sign or encrypt the thing being distributed.

In fact, if you don’t need to solve those specific security problems, blockchain is a shit way of distributing stuff - it has *massive* overhead vs a distributed protocol without “proof of work” (or proof of whatever you’d like). If your fundamental goal is to get *data* around in a trusted manner - rather than do distributed agreement type things - blockchain is not a good answer.

We know how to build distributed services, I think the problem is practicality and combining distributed service with ease of finding things and all the other stuff - as you mentioned - that a system like GitHub provides.