Oh, right. That seems like not a property you want in software releases - there shouldn't be a possibility of getting spoofed data (or metadata), either you get a signed release or no release at all. Bitcoin needs that because there's no signing authority.
The key thing here is that there is an obvious central authority for software releases (the NPM registry, or GitHub, or Debian, or whatever), so proof-of-work-style systems are overkill because you don't fundamentally need decentralization. You could imagine some sort of decentralized first-come-first-serve software registry, but that doesn't seem obviously better than a central one.
The key thing here is that there is an obvious central authority for software releases (the NPM registry, or GitHub, or Debian, or whatever), so proof-of-work-style systems are overkill because you don't fundamentally need decentralization. You could imagine some sort of decentralized first-come-first-serve software registry, but that doesn't seem obviously better than a central one.