6 ms·

Where is the money for mobile app developers in blockchain?

48 points by hammadtariq 8y ago

dane-pgp 8y ago
One of the under-explored uses of the blockchain is as a decentralised permissionless append-only log for tracking custody and authenticity of physical products. This is also an area where a mobile app is well suited, since users should be able to add to the log and check values on it wherever they are, and ideally with a quick snap of a QR code or tap of an NFC tag. Imagine that a mass-produced tech item from China came with a QR code certificate authenticity, which the end user could scan to check that the item had been made by a specific factory and a specific company. (The company could also add extra metadata to a blockchain to detail how the goods travelled and which are the approved importers). The QR code should presumably have extra information in it which ties it to a serial number baked into the silicon of the purchased item, but there are other ways (based on double-spend prevention) that you could confirm a given QR code hadn't merely been duplicated.
- Dayshine 8y ago
  That's a really cool idea, but what on earth does it have to do with blockchain? Wouldn't it work better with a trusted 3rd party centralised system? Issues I see: - Does every phone now need to store the entire log? Otherwise, who do you trust to give you the current state? - What prevents me faking a log? Why would people be doing constant work on the chain to prevent it?
  - jon_richards 8y ago
    The trusted 3rd party could be maintaining a blockchain. Blockchains don't have to be decentralized, they're just a type of db that can be decentralized.
    - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
      You can do proof-of-work without a blockchain and have a trusted 3rd-party entity, like hashcash... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
      - PKop 8y ago
        That produces a currency though, which would be the reward for the work. What is the reward for doing such proof of work in the context of custody chains?
        gm-conspiracy 8y ago
        I am assuming the value of the custody chain as a whole and its constituents. If intellectual property has value, then a hash of a particular work product could be used in a chain-of-custody for ownership of IP (transfers, licensing, etc). But, yes, if it is just for virtual kittens and their accessories, I am at a loss. Otherwise, why are you wasting compute, right?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - simonw 8y ago
      Do you mean the trusted third party could be maintaining a GitHub repository?
    - gaius 8y ago
      A blockchain controlled by a single entity is just a really crappy database
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      If you don't need a decentralized solution why does it have to be a blockchain and not an Excel spreadsheet?
  - dane-pgp 8y ago
    The advantage of using a blockchain is that you don't have to rely on hundreds of 3rd party centralised systems (one per product type you want to track). You're not just trusting these 3rd parties to not rewrite history but trusting that they maintain their infrastructure indefinitely. With a popular blockchain there are distributed financial incentives to keep the whole system running (and honest) longer than any individual actor on the network. As for how much data the phone needs to store, I was imagining running something equivalent to an SPV client: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-spv-client https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-... https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/48420/what-hardware-requirements-does-a-spv-client-have https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/48420/what-hardw... Alternatively the app can request the digitally signed proofs from the blockchain via a semi-trusted 3rd party gateway, with the advantage that you can choose your gateway at any time, and the gateway can't forge the cryptographic proofs that your client is checking for you. For example, if you buy a product from Manufacturer 1 whose web address is manufacturer1.example.com, you could visit that site and find a page with a QR code containing their public key (wallet address), which the app could scan. Once you've marked that public key as trusted, the app could check that the corresponding secret key was used to sign the data on the QR code you received on your certificate of authenticity. The tricky part is sending a transaction to the network which says "I have received the product with the following serial number...", but the QR code on the certificate could contain the secret key for a wallet which has been pre-loaded with just enough funds to send a microtransaction to the network.
- ahelwer 8y ago
  > Imagine that a mass-produced tech item from China came with a QR code certificate authenticity, which the end user could scan to check that the item had been made by a specific factory and a specific company. Nothing stops entities from entering false or unintentionally-incorrect information into the database. Honestly, all these supply-chain or authenticity tracking use-cases must have been dreamed up by people who have never worked a simple retail job in their life. If they had, they'd know databases tracking reality very easily (and inevitably) diverge from reality - the store inventory DB says you have two items in the back, but a half hour of searching confirms that is a lie. Stores even have a painful, labor-intensive process - called "taking inventory" - to fix the errors in the DB for a single physical store! Also, this concept is absolutely not unexplored. It's so popular that Bizonacci made a parody video about it, and several billion dollars of imaginary market cap are allocated to coins working on it.
amelius 8y ago
Where is the money for mobile app developers, period? I've yet to see the first person in my personal network reaching a state of being able to make a living from mobile apps (and obviously, I'm excluding the survivor-bias stories from the media here).
- vbsteven 8y ago
  Freelancing for clients provides good money for mobile app developers. There is too much luck and handing over control to appstores or betraying your users involved to reliably make money on your own apps.
- davidmurdoch 8y ago
  I know the guy who made the unofficial Tesla app. He's doing very well now. Personally, I had an app that was on its way to allowing me to transition to focusing on mobile app development full time. But it turns out you need a license to perform money transference, which was what my app was... and luckily Google shut me down before I got into high volume and any legal trouble. To your point: my second app was a super expensive (for me) colossal failure. I know another guy who nets about $200k USD making puzzle apps, though that also includes web apps started in the mid 2000s.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    You "knowing a guy" means nothing. The point is that the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Not in useful apps, mind you, but profitable apps. Why? Competition.
- sodafountan 8y ago
  There's definitely money to be made from mobile, I had a nice little passive income stream from my Windows Phone apps before it went under. Also, developer salaries for companies that are hiring for mobile are always high
- Animats 8y ago
  Where is the money for mobile app developers, period? About four years past. That ship has sailed. The top apps are now all from the big players.
paulsutter 8y ago
The only significant business in cryptocurrency is trading cryptocurrency[1], which is huge and very profitable. Non-cryptocurrency uses for blockchains haven’t taken off (mostly ideaware around immutability). [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/ https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/
- wycs 8y ago
  Exactly, there may be non-pyramid scheme money in crypto but so far there is no evidence for it. Look at the daily average users for Dapps here:https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings They are absurdly low. Like less than 100 users a day for anything that isn’t a exchange. Many of these dapps have market caps in the hundreds of millions with a few dozen users per day.
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    The failure rate for cryptocurrency experiments will be high, but I’m glad to see people trying. We’ll collectively learn from the efforts. Whatever the number of frauds doesn’t detract from the set of smart guys who are likely inventing something significant. EDIT: I should have said "may be inventing". It's my opinion of a >50% chance that Vitalik's work will lead to something significant, for example. Some people will disagree and that's ok too.
    - pphysch 8y ago
      Why do you feel that it is "likely"?
      - Fnoord 8y ago
        The idea is that if there's 99 shots on goal, one's gonna be a lucky shot and score. Nevermind the problem being the ball is a cube, unfit for the game...
      - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
        Not the person asked, but think about what cryptos fundamentally are - decentralized trust among anybody. If it doesn't strike you as how tremendous a tool that is, consider that many things, before the clever applications are developed, sound rather less than inspiring. The internet, at its most fundamental level, is nothing but the ability to send a signal representing a 1 or a 0 to another individual connected to 'the' network. That such a thing would end up completely reshaping not only the world but every aspect of our everyday lives is something that would have seemed rather hyperbolic at one time.
gm-conspiracy 8y ago
Any good resources for proof-of-work pseudo-code? I am having trouble wrapping my head around the implementation, not theory, of blockchain (ledger entry based on previously hashed ledger entry). Like, how is the beginning of the ledger created/determined? Is that just a nonce/IV? How is each entry calculated and/or verified based on the previous entry?
- foepys 8y ago
  You create a so called Genesis block on which everything is based. Maybe include a timestamp (in case of Bitcoin a newspaper headline) to prove that you didn't pre-mine and you are done. The Genesis block is then distributed with each implementation for bootstrapping the verification process. You calculate the hash of each block (which includes the hash of the previous block) and check if it matches the hash in the next block. Each block also includes the difficulty of the network at the time to prevent mining more than x block per hour. The difficulty describes the "format" of the hash of each block, e.g. the hash in hex format needs to have 50 times 0 at the beginning.
  - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
    Thank you for the response. So, fundamentally, is everything just how many zeros prepend the "unique" hex string (for proof-of-work)?
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Yep, that's it as far as I know. Rather, the difficulty requirement sets forth how many leading zeroes the hash of the data plus the variable parameter must have.
- luckycharms810 8y ago
  Worked through this about a year ago, but at the time I wrote it, it worked interchangeably with Bitcoin blocks. https://github.com/ltavag/blocks/blob/master/block.py#L68 https://github.com/ltavag/blocks/blob/master/block.py#L68
orasis 8y ago
This author has no spine. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop chasing fads and start creating real value for people.
- econochoice 8y ago
  Plenty of entrepreneurs have made a lot of money chasing fads. Web 2.0, NoSQL, microservices, etc.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    How many of them made a lot of money chasing a literal fad -> foodie shots? My great idea is to make a blockchain version of HN and instead of karma you get HNCoin, just need a 100 million dollars and a top-100 userbase...
  - nostalgeek 8y ago
    You are mistaken, these aren't fads but buzzwords. Web 2.0 is the web of API, NoSQL existed well before the term was invented and microservices are a valid software architecture since it's not a question of size but an organizational concern. Even "severless" is just the good old worker queue system. And yes, buzzwords come and go but nothing behind these are fads.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  > stop chasing fads and start creating real value for people The two aren't mutually exclusive. The best startups combine the two: solve real problems via what's hot and attain virality and investment attention.
Itaxpica 8y ago
This article is basically a laundry list of why any legitimate money and most legitimate developers are and should be extremely wary of blockchain. Lots of buzzwords, big promises, and smoke, no real problems solved or paths to actual profit other than “I dunno, sell some tokens I guess”.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
russdpale 8y ago
I don't see many use cases for phones outside of wallets. Even that is a bad idea because phones of all varieties are so insecure. Mainly because people don't update their phones for a myriad of reasons. HN hates blockchain, so I doubt you will get a very good answer here. I am blockchain admirer but I just don't see a lot of use cases on such an insecure device outside of perhaps social media where you control your own data. Reading the blockchain, sure.. writing to the chain? Not ideal.
chatmasta 8y ago
As an entrepreneur, my problem with blockchain is that it consumes the image and focus of your company. With blockchain, it seems like it’s all or nothing. You’re either a “blockchain startup” or a “tech startup.” You can’t be a tech startup that just happens to use blockchain in a part of your product. It becomes the focus of your pitch and any hype it generates. The irony is that for a “blockchain startup” to succeed, it must be solving a problem that exists independently of blockchain, for which “blockchain” is simply an implementation detail. There is most likely a way to solve the same problem your blockchain startup is solving without blockchain. If there is not, I would suggest you might be solving a non-problem. Adopting “blockchain” in any public way forces you to focus on a deceptively non-critical aspect of your business. The more you integrate your product with blockchain, the more your company depends on the success of crypocurrency in general. For example, consider you’re building a marketplace for Wordpress themes backed by cryptocurrency. You end up creating a convoluted scheme to fit your desired solution to the problem, when a simple network of payments on existing infrastructure would suffice (and indeed has sufficed for years before blockchain). In focusing on blockchain as a payment or distribution mechanism, you are causing your product to depend on the success of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole. You need people to use cryptocurrency in general, so they can use it on your marketplace without friction. Put another way, unless your product is truly category-defining, nobody is going to learn how to pay with ethereum just to use it. The success of your product depends on the wider adoption of cryptocurrency in general. So as a blockchain startup you are betting on two things. One, that your company can succeed in solving the problem it sets out to solve (a risky bet in itself). And two, that the larger blockchain ecosystem will evolve as a wider market of people adopt it and know how to use it with your product. Your success is tied to two independent variables instead of just one. That seems like an unnecessary risk IMO.

48 points by hammadtariq 8y ago

One of the under-explored uses of the blockchain is as a decentralised permissionless append-only log for tracking custody and authenticity of physical products. This is also an area where a mobile app is well suited, since users should be able to add to the log and check values on it wherever they are, and ideally with a quick snap of a QR code or tap of an NFC tag. Imagine that a mass-produced tech item from China came with a QR code certificate authenticity, which the end user could scan to check that the item had been made by a specific factory and a specific company. (The company could also add extra metadata to a blockchain to detail how the goods travelled and which are the approved importers). The QR code should presumably have extra information in it which ties it to a serial number baked into the silicon of the purchased item, but there are other ways (based on double-spend prevention) that you could confirm a given QR code hadn't merely been duplicated.

Dayshine 8y ago
That's a really cool idea, but what on earth does it have to do with blockchain? Wouldn't it work better with a trusted 3rd party centralised system? Issues I see: - Does every phone now need to store the entire log? Otherwise, who do you trust to give you the current state? - What prevents me faking a log? Why would people be doing constant work on the chain to prevent it?
- jon_richards 8y ago
  The trusted 3rd party could be maintaining a blockchain. Blockchains don't have to be decentralized, they're just a type of db that can be decentralized.
  - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
    You can do proof-of-work without a blockchain and have a trusted 3rd-party entity, like hashcash... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
    - PKop 8y ago
      That produces a currency though, which would be the reward for the work. What is the reward for doing such proof of work in the context of custody chains?
      - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
        I am assuming the value of the custody chain as a whole and its constituents. If intellectual property has value, then a hash of a particular work product could be used in a chain-of-custody for ownership of IP (transfers, licensing, etc). But, yes, if it is just for virtual kittens and their accessories, I am at a loss. Otherwise, why are you wasting compute, right?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - simonw 8y ago
    Do you mean the trusted third party could be maintaining a GitHub repository?
  - gaius 8y ago
    A blockchain controlled by a single entity is just a really crappy database
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    If you don't need a decentralized solution why does it have to be a blockchain and not an Excel spreadsheet?
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  The advantage of using a blockchain is that you don't have to rely on hundreds of 3rd party centralised systems (one per product type you want to track). You're not just trusting these 3rd parties to not rewrite history but trusting that they maintain their infrastructure indefinitely. With a popular blockchain there are distributed financial incentives to keep the whole system running (and honest) longer than any individual actor on the network. As for how much data the phone needs to store, I was imagining running something equivalent to an SPV client: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-spv-client https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-... https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/48420/what-hardware-requirements-does-a-spv-client-have https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/48420/what-hardw... Alternatively the app can request the digitally signed proofs from the blockchain via a semi-trusted 3rd party gateway, with the advantage that you can choose your gateway at any time, and the gateway can't forge the cryptographic proofs that your client is checking for you. For example, if you buy a product from Manufacturer 1 whose web address is manufacturer1.example.com, you could visit that site and find a page with a QR code containing their public key (wallet address), which the app could scan. Once you've marked that public key as trusted, the app could check that the corresponding secret key was used to sign the data on the QR code you received on your certificate of authenticity. The tricky part is sending a transaction to the network which says "I have received the product with the following serial number...", but the QR code on the certificate could contain the secret key for a wallet which has been pre-loaded with just enough funds to send a microtransaction to the network.
ahelwer 8y ago
> Imagine that a mass-produced tech item from China came with a QR code certificate authenticity, which the end user could scan to check that the item had been made by a specific factory and a specific company. Nothing stops entities from entering false or unintentionally-incorrect information into the database. Honestly, all these supply-chain or authenticity tracking use-cases must have been dreamed up by people who have never worked a simple retail job in their life. If they had, they'd know databases tracking reality very easily (and inevitably) diverge from reality - the store inventory DB says you have two items in the back, but a half hour of searching confirms that is a lie. Stores even have a painful, labor-intensive process - called "taking inventory" - to fix the errors in the DB for a single physical store! Also, this concept is absolutely not unexplored. It's so popular that Bizonacci made a parody video about it, and several billion dollars of imaginary market cap are allocated to coins working on it.

amelius 8y ago

Where is the money for mobile app developers, period? I've yet to see the first person in my personal network reaching a state of being able to make a living from mobile apps (and obviously, I'm excluding the survivor-bias stories from the media here).

vbsteven 8y ago
Freelancing for clients provides good money for mobile app developers. There is too much luck and handing over control to appstores or betraying your users involved to reliably make money on your own apps.
davidmurdoch 8y ago
I know the guy who made the unofficial Tesla app. He's doing very well now. Personally, I had an app that was on its way to allowing me to transition to focusing on mobile app development full time. But it turns out you need a license to perform money transference, which was what my app was... and luckily Google shut me down before I got into high volume and any legal trouble. To your point: my second app was a super expensive (for me) colossal failure. I know another guy who nets about $200k USD making puzzle apps, though that also includes web apps started in the mid 2000s.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  You "knowing a guy" means nothing. The point is that the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Not in useful apps, mind you, but profitable apps. Why? Competition.
sodafountan 8y ago
There's definitely money to be made from mobile, I had a nice little passive income stream from my Windows Phone apps before it went under. Also, developer salaries for companies that are hiring for mobile are always high
Animats 8y ago
Where is the money for mobile app developers, period? About four years past. That ship has sailed. The top apps are now all from the big players.

paulsutter 8y ago

The only significant business in cryptocurrency is trading cryptocurrency[1], which is huge and very profitable. Non-cryptocurrency uses for blockchains haven’t taken off (mostly ideaware around immutability). [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/ https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

wycs 8y ago
Exactly, there may be non-pyramid scheme money in crypto but so far there is no evidence for it. Look at the daily average users for Dapps here:https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings They are absurdly low. Like less than 100 users a day for anything that isn’t a exchange. Many of these dapps have market caps in the hundreds of millions with a few dozen users per day.
- paulsutter 8y ago
  The failure rate for cryptocurrency experiments will be high, but I’m glad to see people trying. We’ll collectively learn from the efforts. Whatever the number of frauds doesn’t detract from the set of smart guys who are likely inventing something significant. EDIT: I should have said "may be inventing". It's my opinion of a >50% chance that Vitalik's work will lead to something significant, for example. Some people will disagree and that's ok too.
  - pphysch 8y ago
    Why do you feel that it is "likely"?
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      The idea is that if there's 99 shots on goal, one's gonna be a lucky shot and score. Nevermind the problem being the ball is a cube, unfit for the game...
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      Not the person asked, but think about what cryptos fundamentally are - decentralized trust among anybody. If it doesn't strike you as how tremendous a tool that is, consider that many things, before the clever applications are developed, sound rather less than inspiring. The internet, at its most fundamental level, is nothing but the ability to send a signal representing a 1 or a 0 to another individual connected to 'the' network. That such a thing would end up completely reshaping not only the world but every aspect of our everyday lives is something that would have seemed rather hyperbolic at one time.

gm-conspiracy 8y ago

Any good resources for proof-of-work pseudo-code? I am having trouble wrapping my head around the implementation, not theory, of blockchain (ledger entry based on previously hashed ledger entry). Like, how is the beginning of the ledger created/determined? Is that just a nonce/IV? How is each entry calculated and/or verified based on the previous entry?

foepys 8y ago
You create a so called Genesis block on which everything is based. Maybe include a timestamp (in case of Bitcoin a newspaper headline) to prove that you didn't pre-mine and you are done. The Genesis block is then distributed with each implementation for bootstrapping the verification process. You calculate the hash of each block (which includes the hash of the previous block) and check if it matches the hash in the next block. Each block also includes the difficulty of the network at the time to prevent mining more than x block per hour. The difficulty describes the "format" of the hash of each block, e.g. the hash in hex format needs to have 50 times 0 at the beginning.
- gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  Thank you for the response. So, fundamentally, is everything just how many zeros prepend the "unique" hex string (for proof-of-work)?
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Yep, that's it as far as I know. Rather, the difficulty requirement sets forth how many leading zeroes the hash of the data plus the variable parameter must have.
luckycharms810 8y ago
Worked through this about a year ago, but at the time I wrote it, it worked interchangeably with Bitcoin blocks. https://github.com/ltavag/blocks/blob/master/block.py#L68 https://github.com/ltavag/blocks/blob/master/block.py#L68

orasis 8y ago

This author has no spine. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop chasing fads and start creating real value for people.

econochoice 8y ago
Plenty of entrepreneurs have made a lot of money chasing fads. Web 2.0, NoSQL, microservices, etc.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  How many of them made a lot of money chasing a literal fad -> foodie shots? My great idea is to make a blockchain version of HN and instead of karma you get HNCoin, just need a 100 million dollars and a top-100 userbase...
- nostalgeek 8y ago
  You are mistaken, these aren't fads but buzzwords. Web 2.0 is the web of API, NoSQL existed well before the term was invented and microservices are a valid software architecture since it's not a question of size but an organizational concern. Even "severless" is just the good old worker queue system. And yes, buzzwords come and go but nothing behind these are fads.
bdcravens 8y ago
> stop chasing fads and start creating real value for people The two aren't mutually exclusive. The best startups combine the two: solve real problems via what's hot and attain virality and investment attention.

Itaxpica 8y ago

This article is basically a laundry list of why any legitimate money and most legitimate developers are and should be extremely wary of blockchain. Lots of buzzwords, big promises, and smoke, no real problems solved or paths to actual profit other than “I dunno, sell some tokens I guess”.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

russdpale 8y ago

I don't see many use cases for phones outside of wallets. Even that is a bad idea because phones of all varieties are so insecure. Mainly because people don't update their phones for a myriad of reasons. HN hates blockchain, so I doubt you will get a very good answer here. I am blockchain admirer but I just don't see a lot of use cases on such an insecure device outside of perhaps social media where you control your own data. Reading the blockchain, sure.. writing to the chain? Not ideal.

chatmasta 8y ago

As an entrepreneur, my problem with blockchain is that it consumes the image and focus of your company. With blockchain, it seems like it’s all or nothing. You’re either a “blockchain startup” or a “tech startup.” You can’t be a tech startup that just happens to use blockchain in a part of your product. It becomes the focus of your pitch and any hype it generates. The irony is that for a “blockchain startup” to succeed, it must be solving a problem that exists independently of blockchain, for which “blockchain” is simply an implementation detail. There is most likely a way to solve the same problem your blockchain startup is solving without blockchain. If there is not, I would suggest you might be solving a non-problem. Adopting “blockchain” in any public way forces you to focus on a deceptively non-critical aspect of your business. The more you integrate your product with blockchain, the more your company depends on the success of crypocurrency in general. For example, consider you’re building a marketplace for Wordpress themes backed by cryptocurrency. You end up creating a convoluted scheme to fit your desired solution to the problem, when a simple network of payments on existing infrastructure would suffice (and indeed has sufficed for years before blockchain). In focusing on blockchain as a payment or distribution mechanism, you are causing your product to depend on the success of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole. You need people to use cryptocurrency in general, so they can use it on your marketplace without friction. Put another way, unless your product is truly category-defining, nobody is going to learn how to pay with ethereum just to use it. The success of your product depends on the wider adoption of cryptocurrency in general. So as a blockchain startup you are betting on two things. One, that your company can succeed in solving the problem it sets out to solve (a risky bet in itself). And two, that the larger blockchain ecosystem will evolve as a wider market of people adopt it and know how to use it with your product. Your success is tied to two independent variables instead of just one. That seems like an unnecessary risk IMO.