8 ms·

Well, he has a point. Unless you use a cryptocurrency, I can't think of anything that needs the blockchain. I have seen plenty of people trying to shoehorn the

Well, he has a point. Unless you use a cryptocurrency, I can't think of anything that needs the blockchain. I have seen plenty of people trying to shoehorn the blockchain into areas that don't need it - goods distribution, electricity supply, you name it and someone is trying to do it. Almost all of those things would actually work better with a centralised database. The Blockchain is an awesome technology for an incredibly niche market. So his article is right - in most cases, you probably don't need a blockchain.

dack 9y ago
agreed! I don't think there's any particular application outside cryptocurrency that I would strongly defend as "needing" a blockchain - then again, I'm not the most imaginative person, so I think others will eventually come up with some genuinely unique and valuable uses!
- dlubarov 9y ago
  It's not really "needing", but one of the strong use cases is disrupting escrow. If domains, car/house titles, etc. existed as blockchain objects then they could be sold securely with no escrow.
  - nosuchthing 9y ago
    so you can lose the deed to your house because it gets hacked..?
    - dlubarov 9y ago
      Physical deeds are forged all the time, and sorting it out requires a quiet title lawsuit. A stolen electronic deed would be handled similarly. You would ask a court to declare the stolen title invalid and issue a new one.
      - voiper1 9y ago
        so if the court is doing that, then we have a centralized power... the opposite of the idea of blockchain.
        dlubarov 9y ago
        Just to make sure it's clear, I'm not saying that courts should have any special power to manipulate the blockchain, just that they could declare a stolen title invalid, and issue a new one in the form of a new colored coin on the blockchain. I'm not claiming any benefit related to government control, just that escrow would be unnecessary.
        nosuchthing 9y ago
        At which point the blockchain is not needed. A centralized source will be held accountable to the legal demands, thus as trustworthy as the blockchain yet significantly more beneficial for all users in terms of speed, storage and utility.
- langitbiru 9y ago
  I give you one shining example. Secure and untampered voting. Let's say you record voting based on SMS for American Idol show in MySQL database. Singer A got 1000 votes, singer B got 700 votes. But singer B is more viral and popular in social media. You think if singer B goes to the next level, it will increase the rating of the show much more compared to singer A does. So you decide to bump up the singer B's voting number to 1100. Blockchain can prevent this malicious behaviour.
  - nstart 9y ago
    Not a good case for shared write access. Just shared read access. DB's come with their own logs. If one wanted to provide verification one only needs to provide logs that other people can read and maintain diffs/copies of
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      You can’t prove that logs haven’t been tampered with, though. The running system is a black box that could be doing anything to that file before making it available.
      - lalaland1125 9y ago
        This is quite simple. You simply have the running system constantly have the file or data be readable to the public. Now anyone can prove that the logs haven't been tampered with. Even better, you can just use a merkle tree data storage solution like Git to make that verification easy and fast. See Certificate Authority for a fully fleshed out solution in this nature. (I guess you could claim that merkle trees are blockchains, but in that case I would argue that the word "blockchain" is pretty meaningless. Just call them merkle trees.)
        Karunamon 9y ago
        But it's turtles all the way down. How does the public know that they're getting the data and not a surrepetitiously modified version? At some point you're relying on the system to be truthful about its contents.
solotronics 9y ago
Anything where chain of custody is important is a great application in my humble opinion. Currently a huge problem in engineering is guaranteeing the legitimacy of parts. Everything from electronics to commercial jet parts have knockoffs being made and passed off as legitimate. If you have unique QR codes for each part from the manufacturer you can use a blockchain to track chain of custody of the part. Beyond that you can make something unique digitally and hash it and someone can "own" that digital thing, instead of money it can be items in a game or art or anything really. A musician can make a song for a single person and sign it into a blockchain and you can prove who it was for. Lots of neat applications that haven't been created yet just like the internet when it was new.
- qeternity 9y ago
  A centralized database run by the manufacturer would accomplish the same thing. The number of trustless use cases, where blockchain really shines, is just not that large. Decentralization has a huge cost and most of the time it’s not worth the overhead.
  - _trampeltier 9y ago
    In a centralized database it is allways possible to cheat. I think something like qualitiy data from a factory. Once you stored the data, there will be no way to change it later.
    - zaarn 9y ago
      Why would a vendor cheat in a database that contains only a list of legitimate parts from the vendor? It is in their interest to sell those parts and not have any knock-offs sold. The same goes for quality data, mostly because even if the vendor provides it, basically any industry partner will absolutely insist on doing sample tests on the quality anyway. That also doesn't remove the factor where the quality results are cheated before being put on the blockchain. A blockchain is not very useful when A) all participants are trusted or B) there is no incentive to cheat or C) if there is incentive to cheat there are already countermeasures available that are more useful (ie, doing samples and having a contract that specifies damage payments in case quality does not match)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
adrianN 9y ago
I'm just waiting until Oracle offers something called "blockchain" in their database products. That way you can have the buzz, without the fuss.
- zwischenzug 9y ago
  https://www.oracle.com/cloud/blockchain/index.html https://www.oracle.com/cloud/blockchain/index.html bonus points if you can work out what it is.
bobbygoodlatte 9y ago
You can't think of anything? There's a half dozen use-cases that immediately come to mind that aren't possible without a blockchain. One obvious use case is collectible items for games. People spend thousands on games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale. Imagine if the cards you collected in such a game were ERC20 tokens. Instead of all that value being locked up within Blizzard or Supercell's servers, you could freely trade or sell your in-game items. I think that would encourage players to spend even more money on these types of games, and could open up huge new marketplaces for digital goods.
- icebraining 9y ago
  But if the game company wanted to make them tradable, they already could - see TF2. And if they don't want, they're also not going to implement a game with ERC20 tokens.
- eridius 9y ago
  A marketplace where none of the money is going to Blizzard or Supercell. Where's the incentive for them to do this? There's also a lot of technical issues here. What happens if I sell a card while I'm in the middle of playing a game? And of course the usability issues. What happens if I get hacked and someone steals all my cards? Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right short of giving out free copies of cards to people (which would quickly become an avenue for fraudulently duplicating cards by having various accounts get "hacked"). And more generally, in order to participate, I need a private key that I keep secure. What happens when I lose that key, because I'm not a crypto nerd but am just an average computer user playing a game? Now I've lost access to everything I spent my hard-earned money on, and once again, Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right (short of giving out free copies of cards, which leads to fraud, etc). About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues.
  - slavik81 9y ago
    > What happens if I get hacked and someone steals all my cards? Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right short of giving out free copies of cards to people The blockchain is a distributed public ledger, but everything in the actual game itself is controlled by the game developer's centralized servers. The provenance of any token can be known just by looking in the ledger, and the game's developer could simply blacklist that token on their game's servers, rendering it useless. The blockchain does next to nothing in this game token scenario. It's still mostly a centralized system. > About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues. Exactly. Although, given that you can't use the tokens when the game servers are down, being unable to trade them when servers are down is probably not a big loss.

dack 9y ago

agreed! I don't think there's any particular application outside cryptocurrency that I would strongly defend as "needing" a blockchain - then again, I'm not the most imaginative person, so I think others will eventually come up with some genuinely unique and valuable uses!

dlubarov 9y ago
It's not really "needing", but one of the strong use cases is disrupting escrow. If domains, car/house titles, etc. existed as blockchain objects then they could be sold securely with no escrow.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  so you can lose the deed to your house because it gets hacked..?
  - dlubarov 9y ago
    Physical deeds are forged all the time, and sorting it out requires a quiet title lawsuit. A stolen electronic deed would be handled similarly. You would ask a court to declare the stolen title invalid and issue a new one.
    - voiper1 9y ago
      so if the court is doing that, then we have a centralized power... the opposite of the idea of blockchain.
      - dlubarov 9y ago
        Just to make sure it's clear, I'm not saying that courts should have any special power to manipulate the blockchain, just that they could declare a stolen title invalid, and issue a new one in the form of a new colored coin on the blockchain. I'm not claiming any benefit related to government control, just that escrow would be unnecessary.
        nosuchthing 9y ago
        At which point the blockchain is not needed. A centralized source will be held accountable to the legal demands, thus as trustworthy as the blockchain yet significantly more beneficial for all users in terms of speed, storage and utility.
langitbiru 9y ago
I give you one shining example. Secure and untampered voting. Let's say you record voting based on SMS for American Idol show in MySQL database. Singer A got 1000 votes, singer B got 700 votes. But singer B is more viral and popular in social media. You think if singer B goes to the next level, it will increase the rating of the show much more compared to singer A does. So you decide to bump up the singer B's voting number to 1100. Blockchain can prevent this malicious behaviour.
- nstart 9y ago
  Not a good case for shared write access. Just shared read access. DB's come with their own logs. If one wanted to provide verification one only needs to provide logs that other people can read and maintain diffs/copies of
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    You can’t prove that logs haven’t been tampered with, though. The running system is a black box that could be doing anything to that file before making it available.
    - lalaland1125 9y ago
      This is quite simple. You simply have the running system constantly have the file or data be readable to the public. Now anyone can prove that the logs haven't been tampered with. Even better, you can just use a merkle tree data storage solution like Git to make that verification easy and fast. See Certificate Authority for a fully fleshed out solution in this nature. (I guess you could claim that merkle trees are blockchains, but in that case I would argue that the word "blockchain" is pretty meaningless. Just call them merkle trees.)
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        But it's turtles all the way down. How does the public know that they're getting the data and not a surrepetitiously modified version? At some point you're relying on the system to be truthful about its contents.

solotronics 9y ago

Anything where chain of custody is important is a great application in my humble opinion. Currently a huge problem in engineering is guaranteeing the legitimacy of parts. Everything from electronics to commercial jet parts have knockoffs being made and passed off as legitimate. If you have unique QR codes for each part from the manufacturer you can use a blockchain to track chain of custody of the part. Beyond that you can make something unique digitally and hash it and someone can "own" that digital thing, instead of money it can be items in a game or art or anything really. A musician can make a song for a single person and sign it into a blockchain and you can prove who it was for. Lots of neat applications that haven't been created yet just like the internet when it was new.

qeternity 9y ago
A centralized database run by the manufacturer would accomplish the same thing. The number of trustless use cases, where blockchain really shines, is just not that large. Decentralization has a huge cost and most of the time it’s not worth the overhead.
- _trampeltier 9y ago
  In a centralized database it is allways possible to cheat. I think something like qualitiy data from a factory. Once you stored the data, there will be no way to change it later.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Why would a vendor cheat in a database that contains only a list of legitimate parts from the vendor? It is in their interest to sell those parts and not have any knock-offs sold. The same goes for quality data, mostly because even if the vendor provides it, basically any industry partner will absolutely insist on doing sample tests on the quality anyway. That also doesn't remove the factor where the quality results are cheated before being put on the blockchain. A blockchain is not very useful when A) all participants are trusted or B) there is no incentive to cheat or C) if there is incentive to cheat there are already countermeasures available that are more useful (ie, doing samples and having a contract that specifies damage payments in case quality does not match)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

adrianN 9y ago

I'm just waiting until Oracle offers something called "blockchain" in their database products. That way you can have the buzz, without the fuss.

zwischenzug 9y ago
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/blockchain/index.html https://www.oracle.com/cloud/blockchain/index.html bonus points if you can work out what it is.

bobbygoodlatte 9y ago

You can't think of anything? There's a half dozen use-cases that immediately come to mind that aren't possible without a blockchain. One obvious use case is collectible items for games. People spend thousands on games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale. Imagine if the cards you collected in such a game were ERC20 tokens. Instead of all that value being locked up within Blizzard or Supercell's servers, you could freely trade or sell your in-game items. I think that would encourage players to spend even more money on these types of games, and could open up huge new marketplaces for digital goods.

icebraining 9y ago
But if the game company wanted to make them tradable, they already could - see TF2. And if they don't want, they're also not going to implement a game with ERC20 tokens.
eridius 9y ago
A marketplace where none of the money is going to Blizzard or Supercell. Where's the incentive for them to do this? There's also a lot of technical issues here. What happens if I sell a card while I'm in the middle of playing a game? And of course the usability issues. What happens if I get hacked and someone steals all my cards? Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right short of giving out free copies of cards to people (which would quickly become an avenue for fraudulently duplicating cards by having various accounts get "hacked"). And more generally, in order to participate, I need a private key that I keep secure. What happens when I lose that key, because I'm not a crypto nerd but am just an average computer user playing a game? Now I've lost access to everything I spent my hard-earned money on, and once again, Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right (short of giving out free copies of cards, which leads to fraud, etc). About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues.
- slavik81 9y ago
  > What happens if I get hacked and someone steals all my cards? Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right short of giving out free copies of cards to people The blockchain is a distributed public ledger, but everything in the actual game itself is controlled by the game developer's centralized servers. The provenance of any token can be known just by looking in the ledger, and the game's developer could simply blacklist that token on their game's servers, rendering it useless. The blockchain does next to nothing in this game token scenario. It's still mostly a centralized system. > About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues. Exactly. Although, given that you can't use the tokens when the game servers are down, being unable to trade them when servers are down is probably not a big loss.