4 ms·

I'm not particularly pro blockchain although I think the tech is pretty neat. The only example of a blockchain being useful I've seen was Estonia's cross roads.

by codyb 8y ago

I'm not particularly pro blockchain although I think the tech is pretty neat. The only example of a blockchain being useful I've seen was Estonia's cross roads. They use it for their citizens, so things like medical records are stored on there somehow, and then every view of them is recorded. This way you can see who is looking at your info, and punish bad actors for doing so. I think they use it for other aspects too, maybe voting? Not sure. But of course that's totally centralized. No idea what the hell web 3.0 is or how that'd work.

pavlov 8y ago
Storing medical records on an immutable multi-party blockchain is not only a terrible idea but also clearly illegal in the EU (of which Estonia is a member). So most likely it's a regular database -- and then we're back to my original comment: where's the use case for "custom blockchain" over PostgreSQL?
- phillux 8y ago
  use cases that require the functionality of reaching distributed consensus on what should be added, removed, stored on that DB. in blockchains, how consensus is reached is also formalized so that there is a verifiable and distributed audit trail for every user. blockchains also automatically backup everything in a more distributed fashion, allow for higher participation, enable incentive mechanism experimentation, tokenization, useful ZK-proofs... all without the NEED to trust trust a centralized DB. if it doesn't have any of the above features, then a reason for using a centralized, private blockchain is to more easily distribute/decentralize that consensus-reaching DB in the future. ... also, blockchains aren't immutable if the consensus agrees to change something inherent in the protocol. this happens with every hard fork.
arcticbull 8y ago
I can't think of a single reason why a MySQL instance couldn't do the same thing. If you can trust a single entity, in this case the Estonian government, a blockchain is just a database but harder.

by codyb 8y ago

pavlov 8y ago

Storing medical records on an immutable multi-party blockchain is not only a terrible idea but also clearly illegal in the EU (of which Estonia is a member). So most likely it's a regular database -- and then we're back to my original comment: where's the use case for "custom blockchain" over PostgreSQL?

phillux 8y ago
use cases that require the functionality of reaching distributed consensus on what should be added, removed, stored on that DB. in blockchains, how consensus is reached is also formalized so that there is a verifiable and distributed audit trail for every user. blockchains also automatically backup everything in a more distributed fashion, allow for higher participation, enable incentive mechanism experimentation, tokenization, useful ZK-proofs... all without the NEED to trust trust a centralized DB. if it doesn't have any of the above features, then a reason for using a centralized, private blockchain is to more easily distribute/decentralize that consensus-reaching DB in the future. ... also, blockchains aren't immutable if the consensus agrees to change something inherent in the protocol. this happens with every hard fork.

arcticbull 8y ago

I can't think of a single reason why a MySQL instance couldn't do the same thing. If you can trust a single entity, in this case the Estonian government, a blockchain is just a database but harder.