There's a growing literature and conversation about the tradeoffs between blockchains and the approach that CT takes. They are actually historically related to one another.
Ben Laurie (a co-inventor of CT) had some particular objections to blockchains, partly to do with the problem that the total computational power that is or will be brought to bear on mining is unknown and maybe unknowable.
I'd like to actually make a web page that talks about the historical relationship between blockchains and other decentralized append-only data stores, as well as the points of debate and trade-offs between different designs, and the space of proposals that achieve consensus about the contents of an append-only record.
The CT approach is a lot more efficient assuming a closed network of pre-registered "miners" (logs, in CT parlance). This works ok for CT because CT does not place such a large emphasis on decentralisation, nor does it need to. Ultimately the power in the SSL system lies with browser and OS vendors, in turn that means only a handful of people really. Having a super fancy ultra-decentralised system that will only be used by a handful of OS services and browsers doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko
Ben Laurie (a co-inventor of CT) had some particular objections to blockchains, partly to do with the problem that the total computational power that is or will be brought to bear on mining is unknown and maybe unknowable.
http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf http://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf
I'd like to actually make a web page that talks about the historical relationship between blockchains and other decentralized append-only data stores, as well as the points of debate and trade-offs between different designs, and the space of proposals that achieve consensus about the contents of an append-only record.