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What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? When we are talking about crypto currencies, it is a distributed database with a consensus mechani

What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? When we are talking about crypto currencies, it is a distributed database with a consensus mechanism that is extremely costly to run. But this is not something you would need or want in most other situations, because there is always some degree of trust with your counterparties (and legal recourse if necessary). If we strip away the consensus mechanism, all that is left is a trivial data structure that anyone with a CS background could come up with. So, the question becomes where the real value proposition is in "blockchain technology" outside of the realm of crypto currencies. What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology? It looks more like a marketing buzzword than anything that has actual merit for the average use case.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Blockchain is simply a sexy term for a distributed ledger, which has its place in a limited set of use cases.
- RyanShook 9y ago
  The question that no one bothers to ask is, "What problem is this technology solving that can't be solved cheaper and just as effectively with 'traditional' technology?" When you look at it this way I think the realistic use cases go way down.
  - throwawaylolx 9y ago
    People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head: - Seamless global payments - Store of value - File storage - Decentralized exchanges - DNS lookup - Prediction markets - International contracts - Untraceable payments - e-Voting - Copyright or proof of ownership - Distributed computing It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with every non-believer.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Distributed ledgers are overengineering for most of these use cases.
      - throwawaylolx 9y ago
        How so?
    - acdha 9y ago
      Those are commonly copy-pasted claims but the reason why it keeps coming up is that the question of what makes it better is either unanswered or, in cases like voting or storage, known to be worse. Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
      - throwawaylolx 9y ago
        >voting https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf Also, https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf Section 4.4.2 >storage https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf https://storj.io/storj.pdf https://storj.io/storj.pdf ^ Detailed analyses that explain why blockchain is an appropriate solution But please do elaborate how they are "known to be worse." By whom and can you cite the analysis that proved so? Certainly not known by Google if they invested in a blockchain-based storage solution? >well understood tradeoffs That's definitely not the case if you take the time to read any blockchain-related thread on HN. But, please, feel free to tell me what are better solutions for the cases I mentioned.
        acdha 9y ago
        Your second link discusses the problems with voting and correctly votes that they are unsolved, which was the entire point. Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion, so it’s dishonest to claim that as anything other than an area which could become not-worse if future fundamental breakthroughs occur. File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
  - tibyat 9y ago
    yeah...because nobody has asked this.........
- throwawaylolx 9y ago
  There exists non-blockchain distributed ledger technology such as the ledger implemented by the IOTA team.
SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
>What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? Mathy Database, and yea just buzzwords and hype. The next big thing, won’t have people standing around looking at it and wondering where it goes.
tacogordito 9y ago
This is my question as well. Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency, yes. But where else in the real world is it even applicable?
- chiph 9y ago
  Anything where you need to track serial ownership of something. One example of which might be car titles.
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    In the real world, ownership is more complicated than that, which is why the law is interpreted by judges and not computers. E.g., courts can transfer ownership of your car from you to someone else for a variety of reasons, without your consent. How does this work in a blockchain world? Your answer might be that the State (or the judicial system, I suppose) should have some special private key that lets them sign transactions transferring anything to anyone, even if the previous owner doesn't consent. If so, why is that better than just having a plain old centrally controlled, publicly accessible database that the State signs with their private key? What does blockchain technology give you over that?
    - oculusthrift 9y ago
      why should the state have any claim to my property? that’s your best argument. regardless, i’ll answer your question. blockchain are immutable and public. therefore the government can’t be corrupt and steal/funnel people’s property like they do in the real world now. we can all scrutinize the transactions.
      - ytpete 9y ago
        That sounds like you're arguing against the idea of the government having a judicial system... If I steal someone's car, and the police catch me and have proof it's stolen, the justice system can take the car away from me and return it to its rightful owner. How does that work in a blockchain world? If I stole the car's digital title (via hacking, coercion, etc.) and after getting caught, I refuse to cough up my private key... I can effectively prevent any transaction returning the car to its rightful owner. At that point either the ledger is broken and useless OR you need a judge to be able to force a hard fork, and system is no longer decentralized. Your second paragraph about having an immutable public record to prevent corruption seems like it could be solved more simply by just having the government continually publish a record of transactions, which anyone can archive or mirror to verify the government never tries to secretly rewrite the past. I.e., a public git repo could solve that, no?
loceng 9y ago
The other part to talk about relating to trust is that do you want to be on a system with people that you are blind to knowing, and especially on a system that is designed to allow manipulation of it; there's research that could be referenced showing a few different efforts to boost the value of incentivized crypto-assets.
donmatito 9y ago
Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful within a company, even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability across an industry, it becomes almost impossible. I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe. An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors). I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !
- m00n 9y ago
  I never quite got my head around the value proposition for distributed ledgers in logistics ('smart warehouses / supply chains') and manufacturing ('industry 4.0'). Say you want to trace eco paper rolls around the globe. What could the blockchain do for you? Who are the nodes/miners/coins in this application? When you suspect some intermediate in the paper chain to exchange eco paper for cheaper ordinary paper, how does distributing the information that he has X rolls on store prevent this scenario.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    I think the OP stated that blockchains would alleviate the bureaucratic pains of international trade considerably. As bureaucracy requires labour, which is costly, I feel the value proposition is plausible. Another feature is not related to inventory. Ledgers that have acute accountability features attached, where some stakeholders may have incentives to fake the records. Like, for example transport truck driving schedules. Drivers are allowed only to drive so much, and there are penalties involved if the drivers don't rest enough. The main accountability measure here is the driving ledger. Whose maintainer has incentives to fudge it (the driver or the employer of the driver).
lt 9y ago
In this context, it mostly means private, permissioned distributed ledgers serving as a fancy distributed, shared database with some business logic built in. The cost and complexity makes some sense when you have several assorted players taking part in various parts of a value stream. Tradionally each has its own slightly unique copy of the data, lots of legacy, integration and conciliation between them. Some scenarios a company appears whose sole purpose is to be a mediator and custodian of this data, adding complexity and cost to the process. This shared database solution allows everyone to have consensus on the rules, the transactions, and the current state of the data, removing lots of complexity and some intermediaries. This shared database could be a mysql, oracle or whatever instance, but blockchain characteristics make it interesting for this use case, when each member of the consortium doesn't necessarily trust each other, you want equal shared ownership of this distributed database instance, and so on. More generally, modern blockchain technology brings a lot of capabilities besides this replicated, ownerless consensus that personally I see as building blocks for your architecture. Most of them are not necessarily exclusive to blockchain, in fact lots are cryptography capabilities, but are enabled or facilitated by blockchain architecture or by each other. These are things like: - Immutability, which is the guarantee that you have a historical record of data stored, and it won't be further changed, accidentally or maliciously. - Notarization, which is the ability to record and identify the authencity of the originator of the information, even if you don't want to reveal the infromation or the originator identity. - The balance between transparency, anonimity and privacy: you have tools when designing your solution to make all transactions and information trackable or not. For example you can design it so you can record transactions without revealing sender, receiver and values and still guarantee the consistency of the whole, that there's no double spending or creation of resources. Or you can design it so you can track the whole history of a resource from its creation to its consumption. - And the coins/tokens per se, particularly when you are not looking at them as general currency or toll tokens that you simply buy and spend somewhere but when you look at them as incentives where you can control how they are created, distributed, deposited, what it means to hold/deposit them, and how to spend them. You can change who the stakeholder is and monetize user's attention, his data, behaviour. I don't think people quite figured it out yet how to properly apply this for things like social networks, journalism or creative work ("patreonism"), but it's being explored and moving along. Everything is still quite immature and moving at breakneck speed with uncountable new projects and ideas appearing all the time, which I see them as proof of concepts of the capabilities above, variations of them, of even new different ones. And lots of scams or profiteers wanting to get into the blockchain/ICO hype. It's quite hard to find the balance between the exagerated hype and the naysayers (which I feel lots are just an exagerated reaction against the hype), but I assure you, it's way more than just what anyone with a CS background can come up with.
endorphone 9y ago
"If we strip away the consensus mechanism, all that is left is a trivial data structure that anyone with a CS background could come up with. So, the question becomes where the real value proposition is in "blockchain technology" outside of the realm of crypto currencies. What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology?" To paraphrase -- "if you discount everything a blockchain does, what can you only do with a blockchain". This is not a reasonable approach. Yes, blockchains are (now, at least), trivial. A merkle tree or simile distributed database with multiple writers and time-based consensus...a lot like git, really. There are an enormous number of potential uses of such a technology -- security and land ownership, contracts, etc. Virtually anything where you want an auditable, immutable historical record and where the data has many interested parties. This historically was accomplished via a centralized trusted database, but that doesn't mean that's the only solution. HN, in many ways, is overly cynical at times, and is too eager to try to knock down the hypesters, throwing the baby out with the bath water to make a point.
- netheril96 9y ago
  You do not answer the question: What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology? The things you mention can already be done with centralized trusted databases, just as you said.
  - harlanji 9y ago
    GP means to say that git can cover most use cases via Merkle operations/properties. What Merkle does is give a trustless distributed ledger. Mining/PoW allow fully trustless+anonymous while other methods are trustless in the sense you can create rules and identites leveraging signatures atop the Merkle in various ways and audit changes before voting, eg. PKI in my experience.
pandalicious 9y ago
It's funny how all these replies are almost an answer in an of themselves. You laid down a basic truth: the only thing technically distinctive about a blockchain is the trustless consensus algorithm. The rest of it is perfectly run of the mill tech. And yet the deluge of replies is completely focused on the run of the mill tech like merkle trees and distributed datastores. Some good ideas maybe but nothing to do with blockchains.

toomuchtodo 9y ago

Blockchain is simply a sexy term for a distributed ledger, which has its place in a limited set of use cases.

RyanShook 9y ago
The question that no one bothers to ask is, "What problem is this technology solving that can't be solved cheaper and just as effectively with 'traditional' technology?" When you look at it this way I think the realistic use cases go way down.
- throwawaylolx 9y ago
  People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head: - Seamless global payments - Store of value - File storage - Decentralized exchanges - DNS lookup - Prediction markets - International contracts - Untraceable payments - e-Voting - Copyright or proof of ownership - Distributed computing It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with every non-believer.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Distributed ledgers are overengineering for most of these use cases.
    - throwawaylolx 9y ago
      How so?
  - acdha 9y ago
    Those are commonly copy-pasted claims but the reason why it keeps coming up is that the question of what makes it better is either unanswered or, in cases like voting or storage, known to be worse. Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
    - throwawaylolx 9y ago
      >voting https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf Also, https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf Section 4.4.2 >storage https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf https://storj.io/storj.pdf https://storj.io/storj.pdf ^ Detailed analyses that explain why blockchain is an appropriate solution But please do elaborate how they are "known to be worse." By whom and can you cite the analysis that proved so? Certainly not known by Google if they invested in a blockchain-based storage solution? >well understood tradeoffs That's definitely not the case if you take the time to read any blockchain-related thread on HN. But, please, feel free to tell me what are better solutions for the cases I mentioned.
      - acdha 9y ago
        Your second link discusses the problems with voting and correctly votes that they are unsolved, which was the entire point. Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion, so it’s dishonest to claim that as anything other than an area which could become not-worse if future fundamental breakthroughs occur. File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
- tibyat 9y ago
  yeah...because nobody has asked this.........
throwawaylolx 9y ago
There exists non-blockchain distributed ledger technology such as the ledger implemented by the IOTA team.

SlowRobotAhead 9y ago

>What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? Mathy Database, and yea just buzzwords and hype. The next big thing, won’t have people standing around looking at it and wondering where it goes.

tacogordito 9y ago

This is my question as well. Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency, yes. But where else in the real world is it even applicable?

chiph 9y ago
Anything where you need to track serial ownership of something. One example of which might be car titles.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  In the real world, ownership is more complicated than that, which is why the law is interpreted by judges and not computers. E.g., courts can transfer ownership of your car from you to someone else for a variety of reasons, without your consent. How does this work in a blockchain world? Your answer might be that the State (or the judicial system, I suppose) should have some special private key that lets them sign transactions transferring anything to anyone, even if the previous owner doesn't consent. If so, why is that better than just having a plain old centrally controlled, publicly accessible database that the State signs with their private key? What does blockchain technology give you over that?
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    why should the state have any claim to my property? that’s your best argument. regardless, i’ll answer your question. blockchain are immutable and public. therefore the government can’t be corrupt and steal/funnel people’s property like they do in the real world now. we can all scrutinize the transactions.
    - ytpete 9y ago
      That sounds like you're arguing against the idea of the government having a judicial system... If I steal someone's car, and the police catch me and have proof it's stolen, the justice system can take the car away from me and return it to its rightful owner. How does that work in a blockchain world? If I stole the car's digital title (via hacking, coercion, etc.) and after getting caught, I refuse to cough up my private key... I can effectively prevent any transaction returning the car to its rightful owner. At that point either the ledger is broken and useless OR you need a judge to be able to force a hard fork, and system is no longer decentralized. Your second paragraph about having an immutable public record to prevent corruption seems like it could be solved more simply by just having the government continually publish a record of transactions, which anyone can archive or mirror to verify the government never tries to secretly rewrite the past. I.e., a public git repo could solve that, no?

loceng 9y ago

The other part to talk about relating to trust is that do you want to be on a system with people that you are blind to knowing, and especially on a system that is designed to allow manipulation of it; there's research that could be referenced showing a few different efforts to boost the value of incentivized crypto-assets.

donmatito 9y ago

Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful within a company, even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability across an industry, it becomes almost impossible. I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe. An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors). I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !

m00n 9y ago
I never quite got my head around the value proposition for distributed ledgers in logistics ('smart warehouses / supply chains') and manufacturing ('industry 4.0'). Say you want to trace eco paper rolls around the globe. What could the blockchain do for you? Who are the nodes/miners/coins in this application? When you suspect some intermediate in the paper chain to exchange eco paper for cheaper ordinary paper, how does distributing the information that he has X rolls on store prevent this scenario.
- fsloth 9y ago
  I think the OP stated that blockchains would alleviate the bureaucratic pains of international trade considerably. As bureaucracy requires labour, which is costly, I feel the value proposition is plausible. Another feature is not related to inventory. Ledgers that have acute accountability features attached, where some stakeholders may have incentives to fake the records. Like, for example transport truck driving schedules. Drivers are allowed only to drive so much, and there are penalties involved if the drivers don't rest enough. The main accountability measure here is the driving ledger. Whose maintainer has incentives to fudge it (the driver or the employer of the driver).

lt 9y ago

In this context, it mostly means private, permissioned distributed ledgers serving as a fancy distributed, shared database with some business logic built in. The cost and complexity makes some sense when you have several assorted players taking part in various parts of a value stream. Tradionally each has its own slightly unique copy of the data, lots of legacy, integration and conciliation between them. Some scenarios a company appears whose sole purpose is to be a mediator and custodian of this data, adding complexity and cost to the process. This shared database solution allows everyone to have consensus on the rules, the transactions, and the current state of the data, removing lots of complexity and some intermediaries. This shared database could be a mysql, oracle or whatever instance, but blockchain characteristics make it interesting for this use case, when each member of the consortium doesn't necessarily trust each other, you want equal shared ownership of this distributed database instance, and so on. More generally, modern blockchain technology brings a lot of capabilities besides this replicated, ownerless consensus that personally I see as building blocks for your architecture. Most of them are not necessarily exclusive to blockchain, in fact lots are cryptography capabilities, but are enabled or facilitated by blockchain architecture or by each other. These are things like: - Immutability, which is the guarantee that you have a historical record of data stored, and it won't be further changed, accidentally or maliciously. - Notarization, which is the ability to record and identify the authencity of the originator of the information, even if you don't want to reveal the infromation or the originator identity. - The balance between transparency, anonimity and privacy: you have tools when designing your solution to make all transactions and information trackable or not. For example you can design it so you can record transactions without revealing sender, receiver and values and still guarantee the consistency of the whole, that there's no double spending or creation of resources. Or you can design it so you can track the whole history of a resource from its creation to its consumption. - And the coins/tokens per se, particularly when you are not looking at them as general currency or toll tokens that you simply buy and spend somewhere but when you look at them as incentives where you can control how they are created, distributed, deposited, what it means to hold/deposit them, and how to spend them. You can change who the stakeholder is and monetize user's attention, his data, behaviour. I don't think people quite figured it out yet how to properly apply this for things like social networks, journalism or creative work ("patreonism"), but it's being explored and moving along. Everything is still quite immature and moving at breakneck speed with uncountable new projects and ideas appearing all the time, which I see them as proof of concepts of the capabilities above, variations of them, of even new different ones. And lots of scams or profiteers wanting to get into the blockchain/ICO hype. It's quite hard to find the balance between the exagerated hype and the naysayers (which I feel lots are just an exagerated reaction against the hype), but I assure you, it's way more than just what anyone with a CS background can come up with.

endorphone 9y ago

"If we strip away the consensus mechanism, all that is left is a trivial data structure that anyone with a CS background could come up with. So, the question becomes where the real value proposition is in "blockchain technology" outside of the realm of crypto currencies. What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology?" To paraphrase -- "if you discount everything a blockchain does, what can you only do with a blockchain". This is not a reasonable approach. Yes, blockchains are (now, at least), trivial. A merkle tree or simile distributed database with multiple writers and time-based consensus...a lot like git, really. There are an enormous number of potential uses of such a technology -- security and land ownership, contracts, etc. Virtually anything where you want an auditable, immutable historical record and where the data has many interested parties. This historically was accomplished via a centralized trusted database, but that doesn't mean that's the only solution. HN, in many ways, is overly cynical at times, and is too eager to try to knock down the hypesters, throwing the baby out with the bath water to make a point.

netheril96 9y ago
You do not answer the question: What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology? The things you mention can already be done with centralized trusted databases, just as you said.
- harlanji 9y ago
  GP means to say that git can cover most use cases via Merkle operations/properties. What Merkle does is give a trustless distributed ledger. Mining/PoW allow fully trustless+anonymous while other methods are trustless in the sense you can create rules and identites leveraging signatures atop the Merkle in various ways and audit changes before voting, eg. PKI in my experience.

pandalicious 9y ago

It's funny how all these replies are almost an answer in an of themselves. You laid down a basic truth: the only thing technically distinctive about a blockchain is the trustless consensus algorithm. The rest of it is perfectly run of the mill tech. And yet the deluge of replies is completely focused on the run of the mill tech like merkle trees and distributed datastores. Some good ideas maybe but nothing to do with blockchains.