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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

by 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.

by dack 9y ago

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.