> Its central goal of providing a clear ordering of events by the time at which they happened (t1 < t2 < t3) is not necessary to distribute software updates.
I guess that's not strictly necessary just to provide a binary update, but this feature could also be used to make the blockchain itself host the repo and its commits. Branches, pull requests, reverts, and everything could be stored as events on the blockchain. Differential commits do need that clear ordering of time to work.
Basically, imagine a decentralized version of Github.
No, they do not need ordering of time, they need the precise ordering their developers chose for them to make sense:
Code is a well-chosen piece of logic to make sense as a whole.
You can't just arbitrarily take to pieces of code and mash them together just because two random developers on the planet happened to write them one after the other in a sequential fashion of time.
E.g if you ask a classroom "What's 1 + 1 ?" then someone might say "3" right after you asked but before someone else says "2", but that does not make "3" right.
Proper order of commits is established by a MUCH more simple mechanism in fact: A git commit includes the hash of the previous commit in the history.
So the plain aspect of "storing some bytes" is needed, not a blockchain :)
As someone else said, Git provides just that.
FWIW, censorship-resistant networks such as the aforementioned Freenet can and are used to publish Git repositories in a robust fashion. But no blockchain magic is required here either :)
git itself doesn't support a decentralized push as far as I know, or rather that decentralized hosting infrastructure hasn't been built to seamlessly work with git.
I'm a blockchain skeptic with the best of them, but this does not solve the problem GP is describing. Yes, git supports multiple remotes, but there is no durable, decentralized hosting infrastructure for arbitrary repos that I am familiar with.
I guess that's not strictly necessary just to provide a binary update, but this feature could also be used to make the blockchain itself host the repo and its commits. Branches, pull requests, reverts, and everything could be stored as events on the blockchain. Differential commits do need that clear ordering of time to work.
Basically, imagine a decentralized version of Github.