Hm, thanks for the argument, I guess I'm turning it into semantics; filecoin and "permissioned block chains" sound more like reputation / web of trust systems. So to me it only becomes blockchain when there's some consensus mechanism not based on people making choices (because then we're just back to having a DB with auth...)
It's a little different than a DB with auth. They have to make those choices in the clear, and they have to follow whatever rules are enforced by the protocol while they do it.
Unlike a DB with auth, if the process is trustworthy then the people don't have to be. Can such a thing exist? I dunno, but there's no evidence yet that it can't, and golly it would be cool if it did.
