A Byzantine fault-tolerant, distributed NTP protocol that does not rely on a trusted third party. That is a concrete, legitimate use case for a blockchain that meaningfully improves through a trustless, permissionless and decentralized system. For example, this could augment Google's RoughTime NTP protocol.[1]
More abstractly, blockchains resolve many hard problems in cryptographic protocols that would otherwise require trusted third parties. There has been nontrivial academic attention for this particular possibility, including support from DARPA and the NSF.[2]
Now you have heard someone making this claim and being specific about it on HN.
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