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Can someone describe a few applications of blockchains in real world applications that cannot be implemented without a blockchain? I'm really struggling to come

by tabeth 9y ago

Can someone describe a few applications of blockchains in real world applications that cannot be implemented without a blockchain? I'm really struggling to come up with even a single case. I thought some sort of secure voting mechanism would be a good candidate, but that too could be done with an immutable database. EDIT: Besides crytocurrencies, I mean.

mpfundstein 9y ago
Bitcoin?
Bartweiss 9y ago
> an immutable database I guess the question would be: if you don't trust a central authority to keep that database immutable and add records honestly, how do you design a distributed solution? Blockchains are pretty much just an append-only log, but they were the first decentralized answer to the double-spend problem. So I'm not sure it's a case of what blockchains can do that immutable databases can't - they're a way of implementing decentralized immutable databases.
- kang 9y ago
  > Blockchains are pretty much just an append-only log By this definition, ethereum is not a blockchain[0] > they were the first decentralized answer to the double-spend problem Physical reality is decentralised answer to double-spend problem (the gold molecules 'exist' in your hand, no centralised god manifested it but physics worked on universal matter in a decentralised manner). The 'problem' is created when we assumed centralised trust is even possible. A blockchain is decentralised answer to double-spending a 'non-physically interactable' good(don't mean 'virtual' because POW is real). [0]https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how-does-a-hard-fork-rollback-transactions https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how-does-a...
Zhyl 9y ago
Blockchain is to crypto what AOL was to the early web. We've had hashing, dencentralisation, public key cryptography etc for years, but all of it was kind of academic, kind of out of reach. Similarly AOL brought email, the web, IM together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the internet beforehand. AOL brought the news homepage, Ethereum has brought crypto-cats. AOL gave 8-year-old me an interest in dial-up connection sounds, bitcoin gave me an interest in staring at financial graphs.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  AOL was a company, not a class of applications or a technology. It's totally incomparable to a distributed blockchain.
  - lelbloster 9y ago
    he means philosophically, not literally/technically i actually think it's a pretty good simile its bringing a new tech development to the masses in a very clunky way - just what AOL did.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      The technology here is far greater than the sum of the parts (public key cryptography, hashing, etc). The innovation of the blockchain is distributed consensus, and none of the component technologies can provide that alone.
      - lelbloster 9y ago
        huh? you're missing the point here dude; me and the other guy are just saying that it's a similar situation: > X brought Y together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the Z beforehand that applies to AOL and blockchain.
        CryptoPunk 9y ago
        "huh" doesn't really tell me anything about your understanding of my point. If you could specify what part of my statement doesn't make sense for you, I could at least try to clarify it. >>X brought Y together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the Z beforehand If AOL provided a major innovation not available in either X or Y, then it would be analogous to the blockchain. The reason why AOL faded away and the blockchain won't is that the latter solves a major problem that could not be solved by any previous technology, including any of its component technologies alone, while the former did not.
carver 9y ago
The most natural follow-up to currencies on a blockchain are assets, like a ticket to a concert, shares in a company, or a deed to a car. Once more assets are represented this way, many kinds of applications would be valuable. One simple and powerful example is escrow. Enabling one-shot, instant escrow with strangers on the Internet has real-world benefits. For example, the current safest way to exchange Burning Man tickets is to meet someone in person, inspect the tickets and cash, and trade them by hand. If they were a blockchain asset, they could be traded nearly instantly and safely across the world. With a stable dollar asset, the official escrow service could even make it more difficult to sell above face value.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 9y ago
  How does the blockchain help? The important issue is the dispute between humans as to whether the tickets and money are valid. You can only do that if the transaction is atomic, which requires that the tickets and money are on the same blockchain and exchanged in the same transaction.
  - Donzo 9y ago
    Yes, the comment is premised on the future representation of assets in the blockchain. If the tickets were on the blockchain, they could be exchanged in the way that you describe.
  - AroundTheBlock_ 9y ago
    It doesn't. His example is nonsensical. The best use cases for smart contracts are gambling apps (i.e., financial markets, exchanges), escrow services (collateral-based trustless loans), and perhaps some identity services
    - weego 9y ago
      People always seem to come up with gambling. No on in the gambling industry would want to have their business on top of a public blockchain so good theory but nope.
zodPod 9y ago
Why does it have to be something that can't be done without it? I think the idea is it does it in a different way that might be beneficial in some ways. In dev work there's not a lot of single ways to do anything. It's more just choosing which tool would be best for the current task.
1up8192 9y ago
To me the most obvious one is sharing economy without a completely useless money grabbing central authority (see virtually any popular sharing economies like uber, lyft, airbnb etc). These all can be created in a decentralized manner with blockchain tech, especially Ethereum.
52-6F-62 9y ago
They don't really talk about it on their website, but IIRC the Brooklyn Microgrid project uses a blockchain to keep an immutable ledger of transactions between net consumers of power and net producers and handle transactions between the two. The website is directed more toward potential neighbourhood participants, so it doesn't really get too technical. Heard a talk last spring on the subject by a professor from Ryerson (Toronto. I can't recall his name off the top of my head) who went into detail on how the project works. http://brooklynmicrogrid.com/ http://brooklynmicrogrid.com/ I'm not sure this necessarily couldn't be implemented otherwise, but it is a core part of how it has been functioning as far as I know.
magnat 9y ago
A cross-CA transparency log for certificates.
JamesLeonis 9y ago
I doubt you will find many that cannot live without a Blockchain system. Instead see it as a tradeoff between performance and where you place your trust. Centralized systems are performant, but the burden is managing the security/trust of that system. A decentralized system of trust removes this burden, but it comes with a performance penalty. An example I'm working on right now is a system of authentication using Ethereum to replace passwords. The decentralized identity of addresses, combined with the cryptographic primitives provided, paves the way for a whole new way of managing identity and authentication even in the "old web" world. Hopefully I'll finish my demo by the end of the weekend.
aenigmaclamo 9y ago
No, there isn't one. The reason is that you can do everything the blockchain data structure can without using blockchain by just putting it in a traditional database with more ease. If we take a look at Bitcoin, think how much easier it is to implement if we just didn't use blockchain -- it's literally just a single SQL table of transactions and some sort of API to be able to submit transactions. From an application development perspective, all the extra cruft that Bitcoin needs to work makes blockchain less useful for normal application development. The point of a blockchain is to essentially be able to do what we do normally in a centralized application in a decentralized way with a different set of controls in terms of trust. It also acts as a specific secure by design architecture that allows us to build these distributed applications using an established model. Don't get me wrong, though, having a different trust model is significant. It can allow us to make applications which we otherwise couldn't make before because of non-technical reasons. For example, an application like secure voting isn't done (or is discouraged) with an immutable database because we don't trust the central authority -- but with blockchain, we can better trust that all votes are valid.

by tabeth 9y ago

mpfundstein 9y ago

Bitcoin?

Bartweiss 9y ago

> an immutable database I guess the question would be: if you don't trust a central authority to keep that database immutable and add records honestly, how do you design a distributed solution? Blockchains are pretty much just an append-only log, but they were the first decentralized answer to the double-spend problem. So I'm not sure it's a case of what blockchains can do that immutable databases can't - they're a way of implementing decentralized immutable databases.

kang 9y ago
> Blockchains are pretty much just an append-only log By this definition, ethereum is not a blockchain[0] > they were the first decentralized answer to the double-spend problem Physical reality is decentralised answer to double-spend problem (the gold molecules 'exist' in your hand, no centralised god manifested it but physics worked on universal matter in a decentralised manner). The 'problem' is created when we assumed centralised trust is even possible. A blockchain is decentralised answer to double-spending a 'non-physically interactable' good(don't mean 'virtual' because POW is real). [0]https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how-does-a-hard-fork-rollback-transactions https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how-does-a...

Zhyl 9y ago

Blockchain is to crypto what AOL was to the early web. We've had hashing, dencentralisation, public key cryptography etc for years, but all of it was kind of academic, kind of out of reach. Similarly AOL brought email, the web, IM together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the internet beforehand. AOL brought the news homepage, Ethereum has brought crypto-cats. AOL gave 8-year-old me an interest in dial-up connection sounds, bitcoin gave me an interest in staring at financial graphs.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
AOL was a company, not a class of applications or a technology. It's totally incomparable to a distributed blockchain.
- lelbloster 9y ago
  he means philosophically, not literally/technically i actually think it's a pretty good simile its bringing a new tech development to the masses in a very clunky way - just what AOL did.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    The technology here is far greater than the sum of the parts (public key cryptography, hashing, etc). The innovation of the blockchain is distributed consensus, and none of the component technologies can provide that alone.
    - lelbloster 9y ago
      huh? you're missing the point here dude; me and the other guy are just saying that it's a similar situation: > X brought Y together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the Z beforehand that applies to AOL and blockchain.
      - CryptoPunk 9y ago
        "huh" doesn't really tell me anything about your understanding of my point. If you could specify what part of my statement doesn't make sense for you, I could at least try to clarify it. >>X brought Y together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the Z beforehand If AOL provided a major innovation not available in either X or Y, then it would be analogous to the blockchain. The reason why AOL faded away and the blockchain won't is that the latter solves a major problem that could not be solved by any previous technology, including any of its component technologies alone, while the former did not.

carver 9y ago

The most natural follow-up to currencies on a blockchain are assets, like a ticket to a concert, shares in a company, or a deed to a car. Once more assets are represented this way, many kinds of applications would be valuable. One simple and powerful example is escrow. Enabling one-shot, instant escrow with strangers on the Internet has real-world benefits. For example, the current safest way to exchange Burning Man tickets is to meet someone in person, inspect the tickets and cash, and trade them by hand. If they were a blockchain asset, they could be traded nearly instantly and safely across the world. With a stable dollar asset, the official escrow service could even make it more difficult to sell above face value.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 9y ago
How does the blockchain help? The important issue is the dispute between humans as to whether the tickets and money are valid. You can only do that if the transaction is atomic, which requires that the tickets and money are on the same blockchain and exchanged in the same transaction.
- Donzo 9y ago
  Yes, the comment is premised on the future representation of assets in the blockchain. If the tickets were on the blockchain, they could be exchanged in the way that you describe.
- AroundTheBlock_ 9y ago
  It doesn't. His example is nonsensical. The best use cases for smart contracts are gambling apps (i.e., financial markets, exchanges), escrow services (collateral-based trustless loans), and perhaps some identity services
  - weego 9y ago
    People always seem to come up with gambling. No on in the gambling industry would want to have their business on top of a public blockchain so good theory but nope.

zodPod 9y ago

Why does it have to be something that can't be done without it? I think the idea is it does it in a different way that might be beneficial in some ways. In dev work there's not a lot of single ways to do anything. It's more just choosing which tool would be best for the current task.

1up8192 9y ago

To me the most obvious one is sharing economy without a completely useless money grabbing central authority (see virtually any popular sharing economies like uber, lyft, airbnb etc). These all can be created in a decentralized manner with blockchain tech, especially Ethereum.

52-6F-62 9y ago

They don't really talk about it on their website, but IIRC the Brooklyn Microgrid project uses a blockchain to keep an immutable ledger of transactions between net consumers of power and net producers and handle transactions between the two. The website is directed more toward potential neighbourhood participants, so it doesn't really get too technical. Heard a talk last spring on the subject by a professor from Ryerson (Toronto. I can't recall his name off the top of my head) who went into detail on how the project works. http://brooklynmicrogrid.com/ http://brooklynmicrogrid.com/ I'm not sure this necessarily couldn't be implemented otherwise, but it is a core part of how it has been functioning as far as I know.

magnat 9y ago

A cross-CA transparency log for certificates.

JamesLeonis 9y ago

I doubt you will find many that cannot live without a Blockchain system. Instead see it as a tradeoff between performance and where you place your trust. Centralized systems are performant, but the burden is managing the security/trust of that system. A decentralized system of trust removes this burden, but it comes with a performance penalty. An example I'm working on right now is a system of authentication using Ethereum to replace passwords. The decentralized identity of addresses, combined with the cryptographic primitives provided, paves the way for a whole new way of managing identity and authentication even in the "old web" world. Hopefully I'll finish my demo by the end of the weekend.

aenigmaclamo 9y ago

No, there isn't one. The reason is that you can do everything the blockchain data structure can without using blockchain by just putting it in a traditional database with more ease. If we take a look at Bitcoin, think how much easier it is to implement if we just didn't use blockchain -- it's literally just a single SQL table of transactions and some sort of API to be able to submit transactions. From an application development perspective, all the extra cruft that Bitcoin needs to work makes blockchain less useful for normal application development. The point of a blockchain is to essentially be able to do what we do normally in a centralized application in a decentralized way with a different set of controls in terms of trust. It also acts as a specific secure by design architecture that allows us to build these distributed applications using an established model. Don't get me wrong, though, having a different trust model is significant. It can allow us to make applications which we otherwise couldn't make before because of non-technical reasons. For example, an application like secure voting isn't done (or is discouraged) with an immutable database because we don't trust the central authority -- but with blockchain, we can better trust that all votes are valid.