Lets talk about blockchains
I&#x27;d argue that PoS&#x2F;PoW have nothing to do with the blockchain concept, and instead are a way of building virtual currencies on top of it. The easiest way (for me) of thinking of a blockchain is a distributed merkle tree (or a patricia trie, if you&#x27;re into ethereum or whatever), with a consensus mechanism. That&#x27;s it. What you put there is your own responsability - so if you decide to create a virtual currency and either reward work or reward possession, its up to you - but that&#x27;s on top of the &quot;blockchain&quot; concept.
And I&#x27;ve actually came across some pretty valid use cases - one good example is that blockchain could be used to enhance resiliency on systems like certificate transparency - that are already a centralized, versioned sparse merkle tree.