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Is crypto-currency considered to be the most innovative use of blockchains? Is there anything that currently doesn't use blockchains that could see a benefit fr

Is crypto-currency considered to be the most innovative use of blockchains? Is there anything that currently doesn't use blockchains that could see a benefit from doing so?

adventured 9y ago
Food security / safety is a trillion dollar business. There are several early stage efforts to apply blockchain to that problem. As a segment it's almost entirely backwards technologically (the best innovation consumers have seen on that front in 20 years, has been laughably flawed use-by dates). Fighting imposter products may have extremely valuable applications for blockchain, for example knock-off Gucci bags etc. It'll take years before authoritative systems emerge that dominate that product validation space, but it's probably inevitable that they will.
- krrrh 9y ago
  > Fighting imposter products may have extremely valuable applications for blockchain, for example knock-off Gucci bags This example always gets brought up but Gucci bags already come with serial numbers and receipts that you can use for lookups and registration with Gucci. Presumably Gucci is using a database to store this information. What benefit would consumers realize if Gucci changed out their database for one that was immutable? Is there really any significant number of Gucci consumers who don’t trust the company to maintain the integrity of the product database they currently use? The interests of the company and their customers seem pretty aligned. Perhaps there would be some benefit to having the full sales database easily and instantly accessible by anyone in the world? But absent any demand from consumers for them to go farther than they already have that would seem to be outweighed by Gucci’s desire to not reveal all of their sales data to competitors (or GDPR-busting private information for that matter). If they did want to give up such detailed information then why not just provide weekly sql dumps on the web and avoid the consultant fees and expense of maintaining a more inefficient database? Perhaps they could also make customers sign a contract that prevents hem from engageing in private sales without registering the sale with GucciCentral. The fact they have never taken a simple steps like these to dispell any trust issues between them and their customers tells me that there may not be many that their current systems don’t already address adequately. Please tell me if I’m missing something. This one has puzzled me for years.
ufo 9y ago
I haven't seen any examples yet. Proposed uses of a blockchain tend to fall into one of the following two traps: 1) The problem domain doesn't need decentralization. If there is a trusted central authority then a cryptographically signed git database suffices. 2) There is no economic incentive for mining. With Bitcoin, there is an incentive for miners to spend significant amounts of electricity and computational power competing to add blocks to the blockchain, since they are rewarded with newly minted coins and transaction fees. The security of the whole network depends on this being a very expensive process because the more costly it is to add a new block to the ed of the chain, the more costly it will be for a malicious adversary to construct an alternate blockchain history (to perform double spend attacks and more). Non-currency blockchain solutions can't award in-chain rewards to the miners so an offchain inentive must be found (which is extra tricky if you follow rule 1 and assume that the network participants do not trust each other)

Is crypto-currency considered to be the most innovative use of blockchains? Is there anything that currently doesn't use blockchains that could see a benefit from doing so?

adventured 9y ago

Food security / safety is a trillion dollar business. There are several early stage efforts to apply blockchain to that problem. As a segment it's almost entirely backwards technologically (the best innovation consumers have seen on that front in 20 years, has been laughably flawed use-by dates). Fighting imposter products may have extremely valuable applications for blockchain, for example knock-off Gucci bags etc. It'll take years before authoritative systems emerge that dominate that product validation space, but it's probably inevitable that they will.

krrrh 9y ago
> Fighting imposter products may have extremely valuable applications for blockchain, for example knock-off Gucci bags This example always gets brought up but Gucci bags already come with serial numbers and receipts that you can use for lookups and registration with Gucci. Presumably Gucci is using a database to store this information. What benefit would consumers realize if Gucci changed out their database for one that was immutable? Is there really any significant number of Gucci consumers who don’t trust the company to maintain the integrity of the product database they currently use? The interests of the company and their customers seem pretty aligned. Perhaps there would be some benefit to having the full sales database easily and instantly accessible by anyone in the world? But absent any demand from consumers for them to go farther than they already have that would seem to be outweighed by Gucci’s desire to not reveal all of their sales data to competitors (or GDPR-busting private information for that matter). If they did want to give up such detailed information then why not just provide weekly sql dumps on the web and avoid the consultant fees and expense of maintaining a more inefficient database? Perhaps they could also make customers sign a contract that prevents hem from engageing in private sales without registering the sale with GucciCentral. The fact they have never taken a simple steps like these to dispell any trust issues between them and their customers tells me that there may not be many that their current systems don’t already address adequately. Please tell me if I’m missing something. This one has puzzled me for years.

ufo 9y ago

I haven't seen any examples yet. Proposed uses of a blockchain tend to fall into one of the following two traps: 1) The problem domain doesn't need decentralization. If there is a trusted central authority then a cryptographically signed git database suffices. 2) There is no economic incentive for mining. With Bitcoin, there is an incentive for miners to spend significant amounts of electricity and computational power competing to add blocks to the blockchain, since they are rewarded with newly minted coins and transaction fees. The security of the whole network depends on this being a very expensive process because the more costly it is to add a new block to the ed of the chain, the more costly it will be for a malicious adversary to construct an alternate blockchain history (to perform double spend attacks and more). Non-currency blockchain solutions can't award in-chain rewards to the miners so an offchain inentive must be found (which is extra tricky if you follow rule 1 and assume that the network participants do not trust each other)