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They can and do. What's most useful about blockchain tech is the eventually immutable chronological ordering bit. As an example, 2 parties can enter into a con

They can and do. What's most useful about blockchain tech is the eventually immutable chronological ordering bit. As an example, 2 parties can enter into a contract. The contract details are signed by both parties. The contract is placed on a blockchain that's visible to both parties and any interested regulators etc. You can even use the same chain for multiple competing parties simply by encrypting the contracts. Note, this isn't acting as a transaction in the Bitcoin sense. It's simply using the basic mechanism of linked, hashed blocks to establish a permanent time-ordered ledger. Time passes. Now, if there's any dispute, all parties have a shared view of exactly what occurred when. It's not practical to manipulate it as the parties know who they all are and can easily resort to external measures. But it does solve a huge, very expensive problem that financial institutions and regulators have: a single, shared version of the truth. This is a multi-million dollar problem and blockchain tech can definitely be part of the solution.

askmike 8y ago
Very true, in my experience talking with lawyers is that blockchains are still very far away from having any type of legal meaning: if there is a problem down the line you can't refer to the blockchain in a lawsuit (IANAL).
- dboreham 8y ago
  This seems a little hard to believe given that in today's lawsuits the parties are often referring to emails. What's the fundamental difference between an email and a txn in a block?
  - askmike 8y ago
    In my understanding you can definitely point to some tx and say that has something to do with the other party. But if there is a "contract" between two companies, like company A should give this in these circumstances to company B. If there is then a dispute about these circumstances, it matters whether the contract was on paper with actual signatures (a document designed to be able to be enforced by law) or a "smart contract" on a blockchain system somewhere. In case of the latter you cannot say "I want my money because the contract says so" if the contract only exists as a smart contract on a blockchain. If it's on paper the decision might be based on the actual wording (in English or another language) - this is all very hard when you're dealing with a programming language (or set of instructions). But as I said, IANAL.
wolfgke 8y ago
> They can and do. What's most useful about blockchain tech is the eventually immutable chronological ordering bit. > As an example, 2 parties can enter into a contract. The contract details are signed by both parties. The contract is placed on a blockchain that's visible to both parties and any interested regulators etc. You can even use the same chain for multiple competing parties simply by encrypting the contracts. > Note, this isn't acting as a transaction in the Bitcoin sense. It's simply using the basic mechanism of linked, hashed blocks to establish a permanent time-ordered ledger. For this, you do not need a blockchain. Instead hashed and signed non-cyclic data structures suffice (e.g. hash lists [1], hash chains [2], hash trees). Note that the Merkle trees ([3]) that are used in Bitcoin are special cases of hash trees. According to [3], "[t]he concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle who patented it in 1979.". What do blockchains solve that cannot be solved by these data structures that are 40 years old? The answer is: decentral consensus when the parties cannot trust each other. This was the missing building block that was necessary to build a decentral cryptocurrency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hash_list&oldid=816273346 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hash_list&oldid=8... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Merkle_tree&oldid=856193562 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Merkle_tree&oldid...
- lucozade 8y ago
  > This was the missing building block that was necessary to build a decentral cryptocurrency. Indeed. But if that's not what you want then you can drop that bit and use the rest. If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). What Bitcoin did was publicize the techniques and, crucially, show that the interesting bits work well. Of course, if you choose to use a definition of blockchain that involves trustlessness then the usage I described isn't blockchain, by definition. By I tend to use Satoshi's definition, more or less, which is orthogonal to the idea of trust.
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. > But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). My opinion on this topic rather is: everything (except how to build decentralized trust) has been known for a long time. It is also known for a very long time that these techniques work well (otherwise Satoshi Nakamoto would never have come up with the idea to make them a central piece of Bitcoin). The central reason why it wasn't implemented before rather was that the people who knew about it did not have the charisma to convince "the people with money" that they should finance an implementation. For example, already in 1989, there was an attempt to build a digital anonymous (though not decentral as far as I know) currency called DigiCash by David Chaum: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=838558773 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=83... What happened to them? This company simply went bankrupt in 1998.
0x0 8y ago
Could this be solved with a git repository and signed commits?

askmike 8y ago

Very true, in my experience talking with lawyers is that blockchains are still very far away from having any type of legal meaning: if there is a problem down the line you can't refer to the blockchain in a lawsuit (IANAL).

dboreham 8y ago
This seems a little hard to believe given that in today's lawsuits the parties are often referring to emails. What's the fundamental difference between an email and a txn in a block?
- askmike 8y ago
  In my understanding you can definitely point to some tx and say that has something to do with the other party. But if there is a "contract" between two companies, like company A should give this in these circumstances to company B. If there is then a dispute about these circumstances, it matters whether the contract was on paper with actual signatures (a document designed to be able to be enforced by law) or a "smart contract" on a blockchain system somewhere. In case of the latter you cannot say "I want my money because the contract says so" if the contract only exists as a smart contract on a blockchain. If it's on paper the decision might be based on the actual wording (in English or another language) - this is all very hard when you're dealing with a programming language (or set of instructions). But as I said, IANAL.

wolfgke 8y ago

> They can and do. What's most useful about blockchain tech is the eventually immutable chronological ordering bit. > As an example, 2 parties can enter into a contract. The contract details are signed by both parties. The contract is placed on a blockchain that's visible to both parties and any interested regulators etc. You can even use the same chain for multiple competing parties simply by encrypting the contracts. > Note, this isn't acting as a transaction in the Bitcoin sense. It's simply using the basic mechanism of linked, hashed blocks to establish a permanent time-ordered ledger. For this, you do not need a blockchain. Instead hashed and signed non-cyclic data structures suffice (e.g. hash lists [1], hash chains [2], hash trees). Note that the Merkle trees ([3]) that are used in Bitcoin are special cases of hash trees. According to [3], "[t]he concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle who patented it in 1979.". What do blockchains solve that cannot be solved by these data structures that are 40 years old? The answer is: decentral consensus when the parties cannot trust each other. This was the missing building block that was necessary to build a decentral cryptocurrency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hash_list&oldid=816273346 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hash_list&oldid=8... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Merkle_tree&oldid=856193562 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Merkle_tree&oldid...

lucozade 8y ago
> This was the missing building block that was necessary to build a decentral cryptocurrency. Indeed. But if that's not what you want then you can drop that bit and use the rest. If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). What Bitcoin did was publicize the techniques and, crucially, show that the interesting bits work well. Of course, if you choose to use a definition of blockchain that involves trustlessness then the usage I described isn't blockchain, by definition. By I tend to use Satoshi's definition, more or less, which is orthogonal to the idea of trust.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. > But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). My opinion on this topic rather is: everything (except how to build decentralized trust) has been known for a long time. It is also known for a very long time that these techniques work well (otherwise Satoshi Nakamoto would never have come up with the idea to make them a central piece of Bitcoin). The central reason why it wasn't implemented before rather was that the people who knew about it did not have the charisma to convince "the people with money" that they should finance an implementation. For example, already in 1989, there was an attempt to build a digital anonymous (though not decentral as far as I know) currency called DigiCash by David Chaum: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=838558773 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=83... What happened to them? This company simply went bankrupt in 1998.

0x0 8y ago

Could this be solved with a git repository and signed commits?