9 ms·

I wonder what are the best use cases for an enterprise blockchain? EDIT: Great suggestions. How about some non-banking applications?

firefoxNX11 9y ago
Think about any business transactions between enterprises like shown in the demo. Using enterprise application integration both enterprises can work with each other but what if an auditor comes in and now has to get audit reports from two systems. Instead of that block-chain or hyper-ledger [1] can be used to keep single source of truth. [1] https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth
koolba 9y ago
Best use case I've seen is selling air to gullible enterprises.
- mdns33 9y ago
  haha. true that.
- Naomarik 9y ago
  Yes. Sprinkle a bit of blockchain pixie dust on your servers and now all of the sudden you can secure your data and go paperless. It wasn't possible before this. Software was useless before blockchain. Blockchain invented computers.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Ways to make money in 'blockchain' from worst to best: - employment at an enterprise company with a blockchain research division - employment at a blockchain startup - contracting at a blockchain startup - contracting at an enterprise company with a blockchain application - contracting at an enterprise company exploring a blockchain application - forming a contracting company to sell blockchain ideas to enterprise companies - trading cryptocurrencies - selling services for cryptocurrency traders - launching an ICO
ellius 9y ago
I think for large, dysfuctional corporations, it could potentially act as a single source of truth for certain data sets. In theory you could just use any database, but in practice a lot of times different departments get different setups from different parts of IT at different times. I work for a bank and our data is all over the map. I'd like it if everyone had to operate on and report from the same system, and that system was inherently auditable and unified.
- codeisawesome 9y ago
  Thanks, this helps answer the same question ("why not just any database?") when I read about it Walmart implementing a blockchain based solution to tackle food tampering.
- floatrock 9y ago
  The "single source of truth" is what people have been calling the Corporate Data Warehouse since the dot com era. The realities of that approach -- centralized gatekeepers, too hard to keep everyone on the same schema, different subgroups need different variations on the schema, slowness to iterate since everyone needs to accept the smallest change, etc. -- all those realities is what has largely given up on that Single Source of Truth vision in favor of microservices or data lakes or choose your buzzword du jour. Blockchain solves problems around auditability, but it doesn't really solve the practical difficulties around the original CDW vision. If you weren't able to make a centralized data store work with a sql database, you're not going to make it work with a distributed ledger.
  - rl3 9y ago
    >... all those realities is what has largely given up on that Single Source of Truth vision in favor of microservices or data lakes or choose your buzzword du jour. >If you weren't able to make a centralized data store work with a sql database, you're not going to make it work with a distributed ledger. The solution is clear: blockchain microservices. Each microledger is localized to the team using it, allowing for individual ledgers to be reused and composed to facilitate organizational agility across the enterprise. Stakeholder mindshare will soar.
riskable 9y ago
Well, for a bank it can be super duper useful because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain). So if you're transferring money from one bank to another it makes it all but impossible to mess with that transaction in flight (man in the middle attacks, timing attacks, replay attacks, etc). Another example would be trades: Most people think of trades as buying stocks and bonds in an open market but there's a lot of private/internal-to-an-organization markets too. The blockchain is an excellent way to facilitate such transactions. Being in banking (where we're trying to take advantage of blockchain transactions) the objections from management so far have been surrounding the inability to "undo" a transaction. Even though you can just make the same transaction in reverse afterwards the price of whatever it was that you're trading could've changed resulting in some troublesome circumstances. For it to work you have to negotiate contracts ahead of time to ensure that all parties participating understand the ramifications of such a system. Since the blockchain is new technology it will be difficult to get 3rd parties to sign of on such things.
- nawitus 9y ago
  'because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain)' I would think that blockchain requires it to be a distributed ledger. A non-distributed digital ledger is simply a Merkle tree? " So if you're transferring money from one bank to another it makes it all but impossible to mess with that transaction in flight (man in the middle attacks, timing attacks, replay attacks, etc)." You can use non-blockchain cryptography to guarantee that.
  - riskable 9y ago
    > You can use non-blockchain cryptography to guarantee that. Not in the same way though. An attacker could still modify the transaction after-the-fact at both endpoints during or after reconciliation processes (sadly, most banking transactions still happen in batch and there's multiple reconciliation processes every day). They could hack the reconciliation process(es) to undo or modify transactions later in the same day or--depending on the banks in question--days later. Then there's also the possibility of just changing balances at one end of the transaction (flat out) with no way for the 3rd party to perform the equivalent of double-entry accounting to verify that the amount received matches what was sent. Bank transfer reconciliation catches problems like this all the time and it's baffling to me (but apparently has legitimate causes). A blockchain would completely negate any such attacks and make reconciliation pointless.
riskable 9y ago
I know I already replied but I forgot to mention another great usage of a blockchain: Logging. Not general-purpose logging, no. I'm talking about SOX-like "must be tamper-proof" transaction logging. So say you've got central logging setup at your organization. You're smart and are using rsyslog with SSL/TLS and your own CA. For the most part you can reasonably claim that your log messages are secure from the server that emitted them to the destination in your central logging system but can you guarantee they're not modified after that? No. You can't. From this perspective using a blockchain for logging security-critical events would be extremely useful. It would be impossible for an attacker to modify the logs after-the-fact so that you could no longer determine which account they used to login. You wouldn't want to use it for general logging because of the overhead but for things like login events, reboots, etc it would be fantastic.
- pasxizeis 9y ago
  I'm curious, has this ever been a problem in real life?
  - ryanschneider 9y ago
    While I haven't had any real life interactions with these, I can think of a couple scenarios where it might make sense: - Your company handles dangerous or highly regulated materials (prescription drugs, hazardous materials, etc.) and you are required to have controls in place to monitor your supply chain. - You deal with lots of vendors of questionable reputation, or have a history of graft, embezzlement, or other loss in your supply chain. For example, easily "misplaced" goods like cigarettes that need to be distributed to lots of retail locations.
  - corysama 9y ago
    Googling for enterprise blockchain scenarios, I find https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth/seafood-case-study https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth/seafood-case-s... I guess in this case the goal is to ensure customers trust in the enterprise beyond just reputation. These records are currently being stored in traditional databases and the customers trust that the records aren't being tampered with out of the expectation of consequences if the enterprise was caught cheating. But, with a blockchain record, cheating becomes extraordinarily harder. The customers do not need to trust. They can verify.
solatic 9y ago
Trying to parse through the buzzwords, it sounds like it's trying to replace the need for a traditional database for ledger applications. Let's say you're a traditional enterprise and you have a ton of geographically dispersed operations. Retail has shops open in malls across the country, logistics has warehouses across the country, and so on. Each one of these places has a local ledger - how much product is on the shelves, what came in, what went out the door. Many times, the ledgers are related - what leaves a warehouse should arrive at retail, and not drop off the face of the Earth. Traditionally, you had a centralized database to manage all of this, from which reports could be drawn and sent to management. The problem with having a centralized database, however, is that it's a single point of failure. The database can suffer a loss of availability, etc. If you replace it with a blockchain, then you can get rid of the database and allow all of your geographically dispersed operations to manage the ledger in a peer-to-peer manner, without the security problems that used to dismiss p2p solutions for enterprise, because the blockchain ensures the security of the ledger. Blockchain contracts can allow, say, a retail outpost to contract with a warehouse outpost to receive a shipment, even without connectivity to central management, and then central management can track the activity after-the-fact when it updates. The real question that enterprise blockchains have to answer is, "is it really worth it to dump a system that works most of the time for a benefit I rarely if ever need that'll cost the enterprise a small fortune to develop, or are we picking blockchains because they're fad of the month and people love resume-driven-development?"
- stefano 9y ago
  Is that any better than a distributed/replicated traditional database?
  - runeks 9y ago
    Is there even a difference between a traditional distributed database and a blockchain once you remove proof-of-work? Without proof-of-work, the Bitcoin P2P network would just be a distributed database storing a linked list of blocks (each block pointing to the hash of a previous block), plus some business logic.
schnevets 9y ago
In between different companies, I have seen some dumb implementations of an "electronic signature" (both homebuilt and using decrepit, ancient technology). Having one universally-adopted tool for establishing trust between parties, whether that's medical patient information, contract work, or supply-chain handoff could be revolutionary.
dozzie 9y ago
First and foremost: blockchain, in its essence, is a document timestamping service. As such, it allows somebody reading it to tell the order of arrival of stored documents (documents themselves being unmodifiable, as they are usually identified by content in cryptography). It just happens that ledger is a quite good fit for document timestamping, and account balance can be used as a way to transfer money-like values (note that it's not the only way; cryptographers have a history of developing digital money systems). About the only thing new about blockchain is that it doesn't need a trusted third party (system with rights and means to modify the data) to timestamp documents to defend against adversarial modifications to the timestamps stream. Anyway, anything that would use ordering of documents/messages could be built on top of blockchain, but calculating proof-of-work is a very steep price to pay for the defense against some of the participating servers being malicious, given that enterprises happily trust regular databases that don't sign cryptographically anything.
vpeters25 9y ago
Maybe an auditable electronic voting system: each candidate's campaign can run their own "miner" making it impossible to tamper with voter results. On the other hand such a system might make the individual votes less anonymous ... Edit: campaigns and any other interested party such as the press
- greggyb 9y ago
  We did a POC for shareholder voting for the Indian stock exchange. Auth is handled by the stock exchange and votes / proxies are handled on the block chain portion. I wasn't involved in the project, but it seems like the primary benefits are public auditability and the immutable nature of the transactions were the value drivers. As implemented, full trust is placed in the (non block chain) central exchange for initial vote assignment and all auth.
skMed 9y ago
In theory, this benefits complex business processes running across corporations/agencies/gov/etc. requiring a distributed ledger. For example, mineral mining/procurement/certification/etc is a complicated lifecycle across many actors. I can't remember which podcast I heard it on, but the suggestion was anywhere there was a "clearing house" in use by multiple corporations for a particular process, there was an opportunity for blockchain/smart contract use. In practice, I have yet to see anything concrete, but I haven't exactly been looking hard.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  > In practice, I have yet to see anything concrete, but I haven't exactly been looking hard. "In theory yes, in practice no" - sums up every explanation I've seen of whether blockchain technology could be applied to a particular problem. I still haven't seen a "killer app" that's not better suited to a traditional database. Bitcoin became useful because it's an unregulated currency that has enough acceptance to be liquid and enough anonymity to be used for clandestine purposes. As soon as you try to use blockchain tech for "traditional" transactions you end up eating the computational cost of a distributed ledger for no apparent benefit.
apaprocki 9y ago
I always wished airline/hotel "point" programs were blockchain based. This would instantly create a valuable secondary market for people to transact points for things. This will never happen, of course, because I assume the business model for those programs factors into account that only a small % of the awarded points are ever redeemed. (I remember reading this many times over the years, but don't have a reference.)
wslh 9y ago
Use case inventory at https://wiki.hyperledger.org/groups/requirements/use-case-inventory https://wiki.hyperledger.org/groups/requirements/use-case-in...
ledgerdev 9y ago
Anyone have any thoughts about using block-chain for making/recording pension contracts and contributions?
silverlake 9y ago
Health care: the network of providers and insurance companies need to share limited information securely. Right now it's completely ad-hoc and broken (I was billed $3000 for a cancer drug. I had the flu!) Identity/reputation: If you have a certain reputation on eBay, you can't carry that reputation over to Amazon to sell goods. You must start from scratch. If the reputation score was independent of the service you could even post it on Craigslist and people could trust it. Real estate: I paid a lot of money for a completely useless title insurance. If the details of a home title were stored on a blockchain, there would be no need for this entire industry of bloodsucking leeches. :) Supply chain: there's an ad-hoc network of suppliers for many things (cars, planes, electronic doodads). There is no central authority, and it spans the globe. Having perfect knowledge of the supply chain can save companies lots of money. It's what made Walmart successful, now everyone can do it on a shared platform. The tech for this stuff is still very primitive. I'd compare it to when Jaron Lanier started virtual reality in the late '80s. He was right but several decades too early. There are still some limited contexts where a current blockchain can be useful right now, but it won't be a big thing for a while.
ozim 9y ago
Trustless, serverless big data that you can devops with your agile team. Actually most value will go to enterprise architects who can hire their friends as consultants.

firefoxNX11 9y ago

Think about any business transactions between enterprises like shown in the demo. Using enterprise application integration both enterprises can work with each other but what if an auditor comes in and now has to get audit reports from two systems. Instead of that block-chain or hyper-ledger [1] can be used to keep single source of truth. [1] https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth

koolba 9y ago

Best use case I've seen is selling air to gullible enterprises.

mdns33 9y ago
haha. true that.
Naomarik 9y ago
Yes. Sprinkle a bit of blockchain pixie dust on your servers and now all of the sudden you can secure your data and go paperless. It wasn't possible before this. Software was useless before blockchain. Blockchain invented computers.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Ways to make money in 'blockchain' from worst to best: - employment at an enterprise company with a blockchain research division - employment at a blockchain startup - contracting at a blockchain startup - contracting at an enterprise company with a blockchain application - contracting at an enterprise company exploring a blockchain application - forming a contracting company to sell blockchain ideas to enterprise companies - trading cryptocurrencies - selling services for cryptocurrency traders - launching an ICO

ellius 9y ago

I think for large, dysfuctional corporations, it could potentially act as a single source of truth for certain data sets. In theory you could just use any database, but in practice a lot of times different departments get different setups from different parts of IT at different times. I work for a bank and our data is all over the map. I'd like it if everyone had to operate on and report from the same system, and that system was inherently auditable and unified.

codeisawesome 9y ago
Thanks, this helps answer the same question ("why not just any database?") when I read about it Walmart implementing a blockchain based solution to tackle food tampering.
floatrock 9y ago
The "single source of truth" is what people have been calling the Corporate Data Warehouse since the dot com era. The realities of that approach -- centralized gatekeepers, too hard to keep everyone on the same schema, different subgroups need different variations on the schema, slowness to iterate since everyone needs to accept the smallest change, etc. -- all those realities is what has largely given up on that Single Source of Truth vision in favor of microservices or data lakes or choose your buzzword du jour. Blockchain solves problems around auditability, but it doesn't really solve the practical difficulties around the original CDW vision. If you weren't able to make a centralized data store work with a sql database, you're not going to make it work with a distributed ledger.
- rl3 9y ago
  >... all those realities is what has largely given up on that Single Source of Truth vision in favor of microservices or data lakes or choose your buzzword du jour. >If you weren't able to make a centralized data store work with a sql database, you're not going to make it work with a distributed ledger. The solution is clear: blockchain microservices. Each microledger is localized to the team using it, allowing for individual ledgers to be reused and composed to facilitate organizational agility across the enterprise. Stakeholder mindshare will soar.

riskable 9y ago

Well, for a bank it can be super duper useful because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain). So if you're transferring money from one bank to another it makes it all but impossible to mess with that transaction in flight (man in the middle attacks, timing attacks, replay attacks, etc). Another example would be trades: Most people think of trades as buying stocks and bonds in an open market but there's a lot of private/internal-to-an-organization markets too. The blockchain is an excellent way to facilitate such transactions. Being in banking (where we're trying to take advantage of blockchain transactions) the objections from management so far have been surrounding the inability to "undo" a transaction. Even though you can just make the same transaction in reverse afterwards the price of whatever it was that you're trading could've changed resulting in some troublesome circumstances. For it to work you have to negotiate contracts ahead of time to ensure that all parties participating understand the ramifications of such a system. Since the blockchain is new technology it will be difficult to get 3rd parties to sign of on such things.

nawitus 9y ago
'because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain)' I would think that blockchain requires it to be a distributed ledger. A non-distributed digital ledger is simply a Merkle tree? " So if you're transferring money from one bank to another it makes it all but impossible to mess with that transaction in flight (man in the middle attacks, timing attacks, replay attacks, etc)." You can use non-blockchain cryptography to guarantee that.
- riskable 9y ago
  > You can use non-blockchain cryptography to guarantee that. Not in the same way though. An attacker could still modify the transaction after-the-fact at both endpoints during or after reconciliation processes (sadly, most banking transactions still happen in batch and there's multiple reconciliation processes every day). They could hack the reconciliation process(es) to undo or modify transactions later in the same day or--depending on the banks in question--days later. Then there's also the possibility of just changing balances at one end of the transaction (flat out) with no way for the 3rd party to perform the equivalent of double-entry accounting to verify that the amount received matches what was sent. Bank transfer reconciliation catches problems like this all the time and it's baffling to me (but apparently has legitimate causes). A blockchain would completely negate any such attacks and make reconciliation pointless.

riskable 9y ago

I know I already replied but I forgot to mention another great usage of a blockchain: Logging. Not general-purpose logging, no. I'm talking about SOX-like "must be tamper-proof" transaction logging. So say you've got central logging setup at your organization. You're smart and are using rsyslog with SSL/TLS and your own CA. For the most part you can reasonably claim that your log messages are secure from the server that emitted them to the destination in your central logging system but can you guarantee they're not modified after that? No. You can't. From this perspective using a blockchain for logging security-critical events would be extremely useful. It would be impossible for an attacker to modify the logs after-the-fact so that you could no longer determine which account they used to login. You wouldn't want to use it for general logging because of the overhead but for things like login events, reboots, etc it would be fantastic.

pasxizeis 9y ago
I'm curious, has this ever been a problem in real life?
- ryanschneider 9y ago
  While I haven't had any real life interactions with these, I can think of a couple scenarios where it might make sense: - Your company handles dangerous or highly regulated materials (prescription drugs, hazardous materials, etc.) and you are required to have controls in place to monitor your supply chain. - You deal with lots of vendors of questionable reputation, or have a history of graft, embezzlement, or other loss in your supply chain. For example, easily "misplaced" goods like cigarettes that need to be distributed to lots of retail locations.
- corysama 9y ago
  Googling for enterprise blockchain scenarios, I find https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth/seafood-case-study https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/sawtooth/seafood-case-s... I guess in this case the goal is to ensure customers trust in the enterprise beyond just reputation. These records are currently being stored in traditional databases and the customers trust that the records aren't being tampered with out of the expectation of consequences if the enterprise was caught cheating. But, with a blockchain record, cheating becomes extraordinarily harder. The customers do not need to trust. They can verify.

solatic 9y ago

Trying to parse through the buzzwords, it sounds like it's trying to replace the need for a traditional database for ledger applications. Let's say you're a traditional enterprise and you have a ton of geographically dispersed operations. Retail has shops open in malls across the country, logistics has warehouses across the country, and so on. Each one of these places has a local ledger - how much product is on the shelves, what came in, what went out the door. Many times, the ledgers are related - what leaves a warehouse should arrive at retail, and not drop off the face of the Earth. Traditionally, you had a centralized database to manage all of this, from which reports could be drawn and sent to management. The problem with having a centralized database, however, is that it's a single point of failure. The database can suffer a loss of availability, etc. If you replace it with a blockchain, then you can get rid of the database and allow all of your geographically dispersed operations to manage the ledger in a peer-to-peer manner, without the security problems that used to dismiss p2p solutions for enterprise, because the blockchain ensures the security of the ledger. Blockchain contracts can allow, say, a retail outpost to contract with a warehouse outpost to receive a shipment, even without connectivity to central management, and then central management can track the activity after-the-fact when it updates. The real question that enterprise blockchains have to answer is, "is it really worth it to dump a system that works most of the time for a benefit I rarely if ever need that'll cost the enterprise a small fortune to develop, or are we picking blockchains because they're fad of the month and people love resume-driven-development?"

stefano 9y ago
Is that any better than a distributed/replicated traditional database?
- runeks 9y ago
  Is there even a difference between a traditional distributed database and a blockchain once you remove proof-of-work? Without proof-of-work, the Bitcoin P2P network would just be a distributed database storing a linked list of blocks (each block pointing to the hash of a previous block), plus some business logic.

schnevets 9y ago

In between different companies, I have seen some dumb implementations of an "electronic signature" (both homebuilt and using decrepit, ancient technology). Having one universally-adopted tool for establishing trust between parties, whether that's medical patient information, contract work, or supply-chain handoff could be revolutionary.

dozzie 9y ago

First and foremost: blockchain, in its essence, is a document timestamping service. As such, it allows somebody reading it to tell the order of arrival of stored documents (documents themselves being unmodifiable, as they are usually identified by content in cryptography). It just happens that ledger is a quite good fit for document timestamping, and account balance can be used as a way to transfer money-like values (note that it's not the only way; cryptographers have a history of developing digital money systems). About the only thing new about blockchain is that it doesn't need a trusted third party (system with rights and means to modify the data) to timestamp documents to defend against adversarial modifications to the timestamps stream. Anyway, anything that would use ordering of documents/messages could be built on top of blockchain, but calculating proof-of-work is a very steep price to pay for the defense against some of the participating servers being malicious, given that enterprises happily trust regular databases that don't sign cryptographically anything.

vpeters25 9y ago

Maybe an auditable electronic voting system: each candidate's campaign can run their own "miner" making it impossible to tamper with voter results. On the other hand such a system might make the individual votes less anonymous ... Edit: campaigns and any other interested party such as the press

greggyb 9y ago
We did a POC for shareholder voting for the Indian stock exchange. Auth is handled by the stock exchange and votes / proxies are handled on the block chain portion. I wasn't involved in the project, but it seems like the primary benefits are public auditability and the immutable nature of the transactions were the value drivers. As implemented, full trust is placed in the (non block chain) central exchange for initial vote assignment and all auth.

skMed 9y ago

In theory, this benefits complex business processes running across corporations/agencies/gov/etc. requiring a distributed ledger. For example, mineral mining/procurement/certification/etc is a complicated lifecycle across many actors. I can't remember which podcast I heard it on, but the suggestion was anywhere there was a "clearing house" in use by multiple corporations for a particular process, there was an opportunity for blockchain/smart contract use. In practice, I have yet to see anything concrete, but I haven't exactly been looking hard.

AlexandrB 9y ago
> In practice, I have yet to see anything concrete, but I haven't exactly been looking hard. "In theory yes, in practice no" - sums up every explanation I've seen of whether blockchain technology could be applied to a particular problem. I still haven't seen a "killer app" that's not better suited to a traditional database. Bitcoin became useful because it's an unregulated currency that has enough acceptance to be liquid and enough anonymity to be used for clandestine purposes. As soon as you try to use blockchain tech for "traditional" transactions you end up eating the computational cost of a distributed ledger for no apparent benefit.

apaprocki 9y ago

I always wished airline/hotel "point" programs were blockchain based. This would instantly create a valuable secondary market for people to transact points for things. This will never happen, of course, because I assume the business model for those programs factors into account that only a small % of the awarded points are ever redeemed. (I remember reading this many times over the years, but don't have a reference.)

wslh 9y ago

Use case inventory at https://wiki.hyperledger.org/groups/requirements/use-case-inventory https://wiki.hyperledger.org/groups/requirements/use-case-in...

ledgerdev 9y ago

Anyone have any thoughts about using block-chain for making/recording pension contracts and contributions?

silverlake 9y ago

Health care: the network of providers and insurance companies need to share limited information securely. Right now it's completely ad-hoc and broken (I was billed $3000 for a cancer drug. I had the flu!) Identity/reputation: If you have a certain reputation on eBay, you can't carry that reputation over to Amazon to sell goods. You must start from scratch. If the reputation score was independent of the service you could even post it on Craigslist and people could trust it. Real estate: I paid a lot of money for a completely useless title insurance. If the details of a home title were stored on a blockchain, there would be no need for this entire industry of bloodsucking leeches. :) Supply chain: there's an ad-hoc network of suppliers for many things (cars, planes, electronic doodads). There is no central authority, and it spans the globe. Having perfect knowledge of the supply chain can save companies lots of money. It's what made Walmart successful, now everyone can do it on a shared platform. The tech for this stuff is still very primitive. I'd compare it to when Jaron Lanier started virtual reality in the late '80s. He was right but several decades too early. There are still some limited contexts where a current blockchain can be useful right now, but it won't be a big thing for a while.

ozim 9y ago

Trustless, serverless big data that you can devops with your agile team. Actually most value will go to enterprise architects who can hire their friends as consultants.