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You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

• nathan_long 8y ago
  Main point: any statement about world outside of computers can be cryptographically signed and stored in a decentralized immutable store yet still be false. Also, crypto guarantees cut both ways. Which is more likely, that your account will be illegally taken from you, or that you'll lose your account password? In normal banking systems, the former is very unlikely and the latter is fixable. In crypto coins, the former is impossible (assuming nobody can steal your password, which is untrue) and the latter is unfixable.
• satoshisvision 8y ago
  Blockchain not needed Bitcoin/metanet/blacknet is needed
• eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Anyone have any good counter arguments to articles like this? That there is a use case that makes sense? I’ve been trying to find one and can’t, but it hasn’t stopped major corporations like IBM, who I would expect to jump on the hype train, but even AWS is embracing it to a degree with their latest announcements.
  • melkiaur 8y ago
    There's one I like: the farmer has a veal and introduces its date of birth on the blockchain. The veterinary that comes to check it posts a validation mark on the blockchain. If you trust the veterinary, you should trust the birthdate. The veal grows up to become a cow, and is sent for slaughter. The farmer stores an event on the blockchain and sends it to be cut into meat. The slaughterhouse stores an event (with the weight) on the blockchain and sends it for distribution. The butcher creates the packets of meat, with a QR-code which lets you check the whole list of events, with their dates and places, and of course, you can check that the same part of beef doesn't end up in two different shops. You have complete traceability of your meat despite all the actors not knowing each-others.
    • Tomte 8y ago
      And you need to trust each and every one of these people not to lie. That's the key issue: Bitcoin works, because Bitcoins are "born" on the blockchain. Anytime you need to relate real-world concepts to the blockchain, you need trust again. As you said: "if you trust the veterinary".
      • melkiaur 8y ago
        No, I think you "only" need to trust the veterinary, and make sure that all animals are tracked (which is the case in Europe, which is why the Lasagna scandal came to be a scandal). Both things are already true here. The anti-double-spend features of blockchains is what matters after that: your cow cannot be sent to slaughterhouse 1 and 2 at the same time. Slaugher house cannot ship it to butcher A and butcher B. And it's fairly easy to check that the butcher doesn't sell it twice. Though as I said in another comment, this can all be solved very easily if you give the DB hosting to the veterinary authorities, and very likely to be much cheaper too.
    • ajkjk 8y ago
      None of those seem to require a blockchain at all; a trusted authority database would accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost and complexity.
      • h1d 8y ago
        The point is you don't need a central authority. And I'm sure running a central authority costs some too which could also gain power that no one in the industry can resist.
        • danielmg 8y ago
          but in most countries there is a central authority in the shape of a government agency responsible for agriculture.
        • ajkjk 8y ago
          Yes, that's the point: pay lots of money and make your system incredibly complicated, in exchange for not having a central authority when you literally already have one you could just use, for a worse and less-maintainable version of the same technical result.
  • homero 8y ago
    The only application i can think of is proving something existed at a certain date by putting the hash in the blockchain. Op says it won't help authorship since earlier real author can claim he didn't use the blockchain but it's still helpful to prove something simply existed.
    • lawn 8y ago
      For example: You find a security vulnerability in some applications. You want to make an anonymous disclosure but you want to be able to prove you knew about it at a certain time. So you create the message "I John Doe has found the vulnerability ..." and add the hash to the blockchain. You can now definitely prove that you knew about it and had documented it at a certain timestamp before the disclosure.
      • homero 8y ago
        Exactly, only thing a blockchain is good at and very hard to do without a blockchain. Even if you tell a lawyer or something, you can never prove it 100%.
  • pdpi 8y ago
    Blockchain-the-datastructure is incredibly useful and widely deployed — e.g. Git histories are blockchains (well, a slightly extended version of a blockchain that allows you to represent a DAG, same difference). Blockchain-the-trustless-consensus-protocol has a fundamental challenge that makes it completely and utterly pointless for most applications — the oracle problem. You build up a whole system around a secure trustless chain-of-custody, but then require trust in some sort of outside entity for adding resources into the system. If you're willing to trust that entity, there's many simpler ways to sort out your chain-of-custody problems. Cryptocurrencies "work" precisely because they don't need an oracle. They don't track anything that exists outside the chain.
    • UncleMeat 8y ago
      Only in a crazy loose sense. Git histories do not have enforced immutability or trustlessness. And they are really merkle trees, which have been around for decades. If blockchains (as described in this manner) are so amazing, why wasn't there hype for merkle trees in 1995?
      • pdpi 8y ago
        I think you misunderstood my point — The reason I distinguished between blockchain-the-data-structure and blockchain-the-trustless-consensus-protocol is precisely because the word used to mean specifically the former but got coopted to refer to the latter. The blockchain data structure has been around for decades, and a Merkle tree is precisely the tree analogue to a blockchain's linked list. Trustlessness is a property of Nakamoto consensus, not of the blockchain data structure, but the combination of the two (or something that bears passing resemblance to that combination) is what usually gets called a "blockchain". Unfortunately this usage of the word is borderline useless because people keep loosening the requirements of the system so as to allow their harebrained setups to count as a "blockchain".
  • h1d 8y ago
    I think they always fail because they try to use it inside a known party where there's always a better centralized solution because they already have some trust built for it to work. Cross parties or even industries may be a better target.
  • ajkjk 8y ago
    For blockchain to be valuable there needs to be an otherwise unsolvable coordination problem. One way the problem can be unsolvable is not to be literally unsolvable but philosophically unsolvable, which is why bitcoin itself is probably a legitimately good application of the idea. The anarchic ideal is to not trust anyone in particular with controlling money, and any actor who says "no trust me, I'll do it right" is probably less trustworthy for having said that, so it seems unsolvable. So a 'self-organizing' coordination is somewhat necessary, essentially for the same reasons we like democracies more than autocracies. (uh but proof of work is evil, so, just cause it's a good usecase doesn't mean it should exist.) Besides that, most of the 'coordination problems' that people purport to want blockchains for seem to be simple cases of glaciation and incompetence. If you can't reconcile accounts across banks / supply chains / etc efficiently, your industry just sucks technologically and needs to get it together, and it'll still suck when you have a blockchain making your IT more expensive, but at least then you don't have to reach consensus on protocols so good for you I guess? I would love to hear of other useful cases of otherwise-unsolvable coordination problems, but I really can't remember any right now. On the other hand, ETH-like cases are completely legitimate uses of blockchain-like things ('running code in the ether' is not something you can do any other way, basically by definition, and is also just _cool_), but they are rather different and not directly comparable.
  • Vinnl 8y ago
    As I understand it, blockchain is only a solution if your problem is of the shape: I need to record statements, but I cannot/do not want to trust a central authority to not tamper with those statements. So bitcoin solves the problem of not wanting governments being able to print extra money. The sibling comment [1] about timestamping the date of birth of veal is not a good use case, because it's perfectly possible and easier to set up a central authority that the veterinarian can report to. Which, according to a response [2], is exactly what happened, and solves the problem of timestamping veal just fine. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19226935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19226935 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19226997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19226997
  • stale2002 8y ago
    People are over complicating what a *Blockchain" really is. All a Blockchain is, is a public, append only database. That's it. And no, it does not require "proof of work". People have released lots of Blockchains that do not have proof of work. They might even use a central authority to sign their blockchain transactions. Public append only databases have existed for a long time, and are quite useful. Someone else gave the example of git. Yes git is a Blockchain. Really. There are a lot of reasons to use a public append only database, as opposed to a private database, hidden behind a central authority.
  • sp332 8y ago
    Blockchain is useful in a narrow set of cases: when you need a distributed network with no trusted central party, and at the same time you need to prevent double-spending. Usually when you have something valuable and want to prevent double-spending, there is a central authority like a bank or a physical item like cash which will authoritatively answer who holds what. And usually for distributed systems like bittorrent, lying on the network has relatively little risk to other people.
  • doubletgl 8y ago
    The supply chain management use case from the article might not really work in the sense that the oracles/involved parties can tamper with the their input sensors, but it still offers other parties plausible deniability. Let's say you get meat delivered by cooling trucks and this is mirrored in a public block chain. You publicly claim that all your meat is sufficiently cooled and every single delivery is tracked. If this data is in a public block chain, there is no doubt that you didn't input this data, it was in fact the delivery company, and if they cheated with their cooling sensors, the liability is on them. With a privately hosted database under control of the corporation (you), there would be suspicion that you manipulated it. So it doesn't actually solve the problem, but you can legitimately claim that you did as much as you could (as far as using technology goes at least) to ensure the quality of the delivered meat.
• melkiaur 8y ago
  I hate the blockchain hype. I think most uses can be solved by a simple database hosted by a trusted authority. Yet, just reading the first two samples, I already disagree with them. Re the 1st one: it's true only if the transporter doesn't risk anything if the sensor is tampered with. As soon as you introduce strong fines and/or consequences if a validating authority randomly checks your goods and discover some tampering, the system is a bit more likely to be trusted. But of course, in such a case, you might as well just host the temperature log with the validating authority (like it's done for Concrete, or in the Auto industry). The second one is even more compelling: of course the trust chain stops when the trust chains stops ! But if every luxury Louis Vuitton handbag is tracked and you know precisely whether it's been sold or whether it's supposed to be sitting on a shop shelf somewhere, you have zero risk of double sell (or at least, within the same limits as a bitcoin double-spend).
  • treis 8y ago
    > I think most uses can be solved by a simple database hosted by a trusted authority People say this in every blockchain related thing that pops up on HN but it excludes literally the only legitimate use case for a blockchain. That being the scenario where you don't have or don't want to rely on a trusted authority.
    • schoen 8y ago
      This seems clearly true for applications related to censorship resistance and certain properties of money and financial systems (if you explicitly don't want a government to make certain decisions in the systems), but maybe not for many other applications. For example, is it likely that people don't trust Louis Vuitton to decide whether Louis Vuitton handbags are genuine? Isn't that the definition of a Louis Vuitton handbag being genuine? In most cases where an institution is empowered to make a decision of some sort, the risk that they will later change their mind arbitrarily doesn't seem to loom very large. (I'd agree that it's great to have mechanisms for detecting this, although regular digital signatures and Merkle trees may suffice.)
    • AndrewKemendo 8y ago
• maratd 8y ago
  Not every engineering solution needs to make sense exclusively within the engineering domain. Some engineering solutions have purely business justifications. For example, take a look at the Tesla Model X and its Falcon Wing Door. It is very clearly a stupid design from an engineering perspective, but is sufficiently unique to have its own name. It also very obviously draws everyones attention when used and draws attention to the product which further promotes it. So while everyone else has normal doors ... you have special doors. On top of that, the owner can say that they have an SUV without those pesky mini-van doors which obviously work better, but then you're driving a mini-van. Similarly, while everyone else is using a vanilla database that does its job and warrants no special attention ... we're using blockchain! We're new, we're special, etc. It's marketing, not engineering.
  • maehwasu 8y ago
    +1 I've had success selling corporations "blockchain," but really what I'm selling is products/systems to improve badly outdated infrastructure. "Blockchain" is just what they need to tell their bosses in order to get approval for badly needed improvements.
  • SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Good points, as it were, in 10 years when your "Falcon Wing Door" breaks because it's got a fraction the engineering time and lessons learned over 100 years of car door mechanisms you're going to be envious of people with those boring old regular doors. In 10 years when your blockchain is no longer supported by the developers and your new team has no idea how to manage it, it's showing it's age, it's breaking, you're going to be envious of people with those boring old databases.
    • doubletgl 8y ago
      Well that might or might not align with the short-term business goals of someone. I agree that's stupid und not sustainable, but people have different goals. Like quaterly sales on Falcon Wing Doors and the bonus at the end of the year, and then you move on.
    • 8y ago
• czr 8y ago
  I'm reminded of the helpful "How to decide if blockchain is right for your project" flowchart (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPFvZuqU8AAeU0C?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPFvZuqU8AAeU0C?format=jpg) from @MalwareTechBlog.
  • discovan 8y ago
    Actually, I come to a similar conclusion in the article) Just trying to be less categorical and give them a chance)
  • grumpopotamus 8y ago
    I also recommend Andreas Antonopoulos's talk "Blockchain vs Bullshit" which can be found on YouTube.
  • dmitriid 8y ago
    Also these two articles: - Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain, https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... - and the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
    • vocatus_gate 8y ago
      Literally the only use is digital monetary instruments. Maybe "smart contracts." Everything else? Nope.
  • DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    James Mickens Blockchains are a bad idea also is a good one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI
  • SolarNet 8y ago
    I mean, I would like if they said use a public cryptographic ledger as the no path with another split. But yea pretty much. Unless you are making money, you don't need a block chain, a public cryptographic ledger will do ya just fine.
• berbec 8y ago
  9. Currency.
  • danielmg 8y ago
    has worked for literally millennia without it.
    • danablast2 8y ago
      traditional money can be readily stolen via taxation and inflation. Digital fiat can be frozen arbitrarily and is not private. So it has not worked.
    • bluejellybean 8y ago
      I dislike this reasoning, lots of things worked for millennia but that doesn't mean the modern version is somehow useless. Phone networks? Communication has worked for literally millennia without it.
    • lawn 8y ago
      Why did we ever move away from sea shells then?
      • seattle_spring 8y ago
        When I was young, taking the ferry would cost you a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say.
        • berbec 8y ago
          I'm cold and their are wolves after me.
  • schoen 8y ago
    The article has a non-numbered use case for "Money" (and one for "Smart contracts") in which the author claims that blockchains are useful for these purposes. So the article is sort of "lite" blockchain skepticism: it focuses on the interfaces between blockchain-stored data and the real world, such as the oracle problem (how do we know that data that people store on a chain is accurate and that they haven't lied about it?), as well as the enforcement of blockchain-stored claims to physical assets.
• MusaTheRedGuard 8y ago
  Most people who are even a little bit serious about working/investing in crypto, are well aware of this and have been saying this for the past few years. Inb4 "you're not investing, you're speculating/gambling". I'm aware. Inb4 "blockchain is a slower database". Again, I'm aware.
  • root_axis 8y ago
    > Most people who are even a little bit serious about working/investing in crypto, are well aware of this Not really sure how you can back up this claim. After hundreds of interacts with blockchain enthusiasts, I have observed that most of them subscribe to at least one of false use cases listed in the article, especially #7 and very often #1-3 and #6 as well.
    • MusaTheRedGuard 8y ago
      Anyone can call themselves a "blockchain enthusiast" that doesn't mean they're smart or know what they're doing. Examples of good thinkers are the guys over at multicoin capital, a crypto focused hedge fund: https://multicoin.capital https://multicoin.capital I don't agree with everything they invest in, but they have clear, logical theses
      • nikanj 8y ago
        No true scots..erm. No true blockchain expert?
      • root_axis 8y ago
        Every enthusiast has their own ideas about what qualifies as "knowing what you're doing". Nobody in the enthusiast community can agree on any of it.
• dangero 8y ago
  I've spent a lot of time doing consulting around blockchains for fortune 500 companies. Most technology choices are not a need. You can use MongoDB or MySQL in most cases. There are places where MongoDB has benefits, just as there are cases where a permissioned, immutable record has benefits. It's not a silver bullet, but it can add trust. This article seems to miss that creating immutable records of intermediary attestations can serve as an audit trail later. If these audit logs are 100% immutable, that's nice. It's more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it still has some value.
  • discovan 8y ago
    I agree! I don't consider audit use case here(mostly not to make the article too big, saving this example for further reasearch and publications), as well as many other "reducing trust" use cases. Do you have any example of such systems being implemented?
  • danielmg 8y ago
    The big problem with these kind of arguments is that is misses the interface between the real world and the blockchain. Say I have a blockchain that tracks births and deaths. Now if I see a record on there I can be assured it hasn't been tampered with. But that tells me nothing about how it was created - was the person entering the data acting with malfeasance? All blockchain does is audit the data after its creation. It doesn't solve the issue of provenance of the original information. This seems to be where all these schemes and ideas (beyond crypto-currencies[1]) fall down when compared to current databases. [1]slow and pointless. Money transfer is solved and current systems, while lacking the assured fidelity of the transactional data, offer so much more - fraud detction, chargebacks, etc etc
    • discovan 8y ago
      That's right! "Even though blockchain does not allow for modification of data, it cannot ensure such data is correct. The only exception is on-chain transactions, when the system does not need the real world, with all necessary information already being within the blockchain, thus allowing the system to verify data (e.g. that an address has enough funds to proceed with a transaction)." However, I disagree that current money systems solve the problems solved by Bitcoin, but this is completely different discussion)
• gregschlom 8y ago
  I've said this several times before on this site but will keep repeating it: there's exactly one use case where the blockchain is a superior (and, in fact, the only) solution: when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties. In other words, anything illegal. For any other conceivable use case, a database and a contract between parties are a superior solution. Edit: To clarify what I mean by "a database and a contract": I mean the way the world does business, and as been for as long as society exists. There's trust between parties, and there's a multi-layered system in place to resolve disputes, starting from the customer support call center, reviews, bad publicity, and going all the way to the courts. Guys, this works. It's literally how the world works.
  • rhacker 8y ago
    > Guys, this works. It's literally how the world works. That's a fairly generalized statement. So just because the world works in a certain way we shouldn't change it? Have you or anyone else noticed that the way the world works is massively in favor of anyone that has money? How many tenants got cheated out of $1000 deposit and didn't have legal knowledge or a support system to get the landlord to court? How many people got fees from Wells Fargo, Sprint, Comcast, PG&E, fuck even Etsy because they had power to pull from their accounts at any time? How many of them got everything back due to them? Fairly and morally? How many people that DON'T have a massive blogger platform, podcast and wherewithal to start an _effective_ campaign against a multi-national because they simply are not well spoken. They are still cheated by the big guy but no one cares because it's not retweeted by Ariana Grande. AKA your main point might hold up to 5 to 10% of disputes but hardly supports the notion that it "works". I think your statement should rather be "That's how the world currently operates" and that by no means rules out creating additional ways to operate in the world.
  • majani 8y ago
    Funny thing is, there tends to be immense trust in the underworld because the consequence of betrayal is your life or limb.
  • spurgu 8y ago
    > there's exactly one use case where the blockchain is a superior [- illegal transactions] To start off, the reason cryptocurrencies have survived this long is probably due to the fact that the dark web thrives on it. That said it's certainly not a reason to outlaw it. What about the situations where the legal system is questionable? Off hand I've read stories about a lot of poker players who've gotten cash confiscated when flying. What about [insert stories here]? How about a means to store (and transfer) value, where you can be certain - given your measures of security is sound - that no one but you (or multisig) can access it? If I store cash at home I can get robbed. If I own property it can be destroyed (loopholes in insurance policies, betrayal of other forms, military state). I remember the feeling I had a few years back when I had my own bitcoin in a paper "wallet" (actually a master seed with my personally devised cipher), protected by the (mental) measures of my choosing, it was mine. Yes, that caters well to illegal activities but likewise also empowers individual privacy, as well as removing any political, governmental or other influences. Power to the individual. It's not the monetary system's role to regulate how people behave in society, merely to facilitate transfer of value. If that transfer method can't be trusted alternatives will spring up. On that note if there are better people on the planet the methods of value transfer matters less. If there was more trust in financial institutions there would be less need for cryptocurrencies. On HN people advocate having backups of backups, but how do you backup your money in the bank? You're trusting them. Yes, drug lords exist and have existed in the past thanks to anonymous transactions, but... there is corruption in banking systems (offshore accounts) and whatever systems and we should/could question why there are drug lords in the world in the first place. They wouldn't have a place here if things were better organized. Either by more happy people (having less want/need for stimulants, given a bleak outlook on humanity), by giving the people the freedom to explore their minds more freely (psychedelics) or simply (as a step on the way) give the state the power to regulate as opposed to making everything illegal. I would expect more of HN than to have this as a top comment. Let's just ban cash altogether because the only thing it's useful for is enabling illegal transactions. Sigh. Quite a naive way of looking at things. What you're suggesting is doing what they're doing in China (and US and other countries as well) with the credit ratings of everyone without any chance of living a normal life unless you're subscribed to the system in place. Add hyper surveillance à la mega corps and no one can escape. Please keep the beacon lit for at least some of the measures in place to insure personal freedom.
• denart2203 8y ago
  "However, this system is vulnerable to a very simple threat: a dishonest seller can make a copy of a real bottle with a token, fill it with wine of lower quality, and either steal you..." The argument around “someone that doesn’t care about tokens” is weak because that applies to any authenticity solution. The idea behind the authenticity guarantees would be that every step along the way, you add a record that the object has passed through your step. Otherwise I agree this won’t work. If someone adds a record, but does fill the bottle with cheaper wine, the first person that catches them will blacklist that actor.
  • azernik 8y ago
    At which point you're back to a centralized system - who maintains the blacklist and has authority to add people to it?
    • SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
      I don't think that follows. Email and IP addresses both have decentralized yet very effective blacklists against bad actors.
  • menage 8y ago
    I don't think you even need a blacklist for this to be of real benefit - if every fancy bottle sold is expected to be accompanied by a blockchain transaction moving the bottle's certificate (originally produced by the winemaker, and unforgeable) then you'll only be able to sell a fancy bottle of wine if at some point in the past you've purchased an equivalent bottle from someone else with a certificate. There is still the chance that someone along the way consumes the real wine or sells it (at a loss?) to someone who doesn't care about authentication, and then sells on a fake bottle with the real certificate - but: - at least in that case there would be a well-defined chain of owners that should make it much simpler to figure out who's doing the counterfeiting. - you can only do this once for each real bottle that you purchase, since you can't forge the certificates.
• danablast2 8y ago
  The best use case for blockchain is smart contracts. Guaranteed continuous liquidity without a counter-party (bancor/uniswap), self collateralize loans (maker), stable coins without counter party risk (maker again), etc.
• companyhen 8y ago
  This is an interesting project with the department of defense - https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/18460/Analytics-Powered-Blockchain-to-Help-the-DOD.aspx https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/...
• momentmaker 8y ago
  This use case seems disruptive in the finance niche: https://www.lawsnap.com/smart-contracts-are-set-to-transform-the-trillion-dollar-derivatives-industry/ https://www.lawsnap.com/smart-contracts-are-set-to-transform...
  • twic 8y ago
    Nowhere in that article does it explain why smart contracts actually save costs. Yes, some derivatives contracts are simple enough to explain to a computer, but still quite complicated. Why does putting them in a smart contract on a blockchain save money over just putting them in the dealer's computer?
• nepthar 8y ago
  Based on reading a few articles like this, I think my understanding of blockchain-related tech is different from other folks and I'm kinda confused. Could some kind soul help clear things up? When I think "blockchain", I basically think of a git branch: history is verifiably immutable and using some external tools like a public rng, one can prove that a block was not created before a certain time. When I think "distributed ledger/distributed consensus" I think of the practice of using basically properties of statistics to get a bunch of nodes to agree on the state of something. Neither of those things really seem to make sense as the author's definition of "blockchain". What is he referring to?
  • jcranmer 8y ago
    Blockchain these days is mostly a hype train terminology. There are three components that come together to make a blockchain, but people will often call their technology blockchain if it meets only some of theses: 1. Merkle tree or some other cryptographic append-only technology. (This is really old, by the way). 2. Proof-of-work. (This was, to my knowledge, first proposed as an anti-spam measure, which incidentally went nowhere because most spammers "borrow" other people's computers for free, and so it doesn't inconvenience them in the slightest). 3. Achieving consensus by saying that he who did the most work is right. (This, again to my knowledge, was actually the main innovation that Bitcoin brought to the table). Many people pitch things only having the Merkle tree as being blockchain technology, because blockchain is in and Merkle trees are so 20th century technology.
    • nosuchthing 8y ago
      Proof-of-Work in effect is giving control of PoW blockchains to anyone with the most excess capital to spend on electricity and hardware, in return for the lottery tickets the software generates.
  • SolarNet 8y ago
    Blockchains have been overloaded by a bunch of people bringing modern technology to ancient industries as a sort of buzzword. So to an extent you are right the author's definition is narrow, and on the other hand the author is right in that their narrow definition is the correct one. Blockchains are generally defined by the original paper for bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf these would have a couple of key properties. They are trustless, distributed, and public through the use of cryptographic and computational algorithms. Most modern "blockchains" (that aren't currencies of some form) violate one of these properties. > When I think "blockchain", I basically think of a git branch: history is verifiably immutable and using some external tools like a public rng, one can prove that a block was not created before a certain time. The system you describe here involves trust. "Public RNG" implies we are talking about some sort of SSL certificate company's time server. Proof of work is stronger than that. It says it's impossible for someone to misrepresent the shared ledger unless they have more computational power than the entire system put together. And it's a fundamental part of how the ledger is structured (it's not external). > When I think "distributed ledger/distributed consensus" I think of the practice of using basically properties of statistics to get a bunch of nodes to agree on the state of something. Again proof of work is stronger than this. The nodes agree because the given branch is provably the strongest branch of truth. Distributed consensus is about getting the nodes to work together when you can trust they all want to, not when they are all trying to compete with each other. > Neither of those things really seem to make sense as the author's definition of "blockchain". What is he referring to? Because neither of your definitions fit a blockchain. Your definitions fit the broader cases of technology being passed off as "blockchain" in (the best light) an attempt to get these old companies to modernize (in a worse light) and take their money because they are idiots. Things like distributed version control systems, distrusted consensus systems, and cryptographic ledgers are all useful, but they involve trust. And for a lot of these applications that's fine. A company putting out a cryptographic ledger (e.g. provable) for cosmetic item transactions is an improvement, but it's not a block-chain (it's not distributed or it's not trustless). I mean the author discusses this: "Be careful! Today, digital signatures are often sold as blockchain. Perhaps a digital signature is all you really need and blockchain does not really suit your requirements." a digital signature system of arbitrary complexity (perhaps with a ledger of issued signatures, or an external time server, or agreement on which signature is the winner) is all most people in this space need. The only reason one needs a block chain is if they are making a currency.
• robryk 8y ago
  I'm confused about the terminology here. Is Certificate Transparency a blockchain in the meaning in which the article uses the word?
• tempestn 8y ago
  Can someone explain this line to me? "Is it a good idea to put a hash of student diploma digitally signed by several professors on Bitcoin blockchain? Yes." How exactly would one do that? Is the idea to send a tiny transaction to a made-up wallet, with your hash embedded in the wallet id? Seems like it would need to be pretty small, and would be somewhat of an abuse of the system. Or if that's not it, what exactly is meant by "put a hash of __ on the bitcoin blockchain"?
  • fortenforge 8y ago
    You probably want to read https://www.blockcerts.org/guide/ https://www.blockcerts.org/guide/
    • tempestn 8y ago
      Thanks. After digging into the FAQ there, the answer is that the data is stored in the 'OP_RETURN' code of an unspendable transaction. (Although some bitcoin is still spent on processing the transaction.) The OP_RETURN code was introduced by the Bitcoin core developers to address (but not necessarily endorse) the increasing desire of people to store non-financial data. The code signifies that an output is provably unspendable, allowing transactions to be pruned from the UTXO database.
  • twic 8y ago
    Why does the signed hash need to be on a blockchain? Why not on the university's website? Or on some national or international clearinghouse's website, or all three and more. The hash is already signed, then so as long as you can trust the keys used to sign it (a problem not solved by blockchain), then you can get it from anywhere, any untrusted source, because the trustability is inherent in the object itself.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• platz 8y ago
  NISTIR 8202 Blockchain Technology Overview https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf
• jondubois 8y ago
  Blockchain is a fractional reserve system which can be used as a payment layer. That's it. The whole point of blockchain tech is to create hype and incentivise collaboration towards a shared financially beneficial goal. Saying that blockchain has no use cases is like saying that money has no use cases. It incentivizes, it corrupts, it buys loyalties, it buys positive news coverage - These are the most important use cases of all and blockchain is great at that. Potential value is real value, even speculative value is real value. People should not diregard the benefits of Blockchain any more than they should disregard the benefits of VC money. They're both mechanisms of mass collaborative incentivization and corruption. The only way to beat corruption is by democratizing it so that anyone can do it.
  • Zaskoda 8y ago
    I believe you are saying "blockchain" here when what you are meaning is "cryptocurrency" such as Bitcoin.
    • jondubois 8y ago
      My implicit point is that it's like trying to make the distinction between money and currency. There is a difference but since currency is basically the only meaningful use case for money, it doesn't really matter.
  • UncleEntity 8y ago
    > Blockchain is a fractional reserve system... I'd argue that it is the opposite since you can't receive 1 bitcoin and produce 10 bitcoins through the magic of a fractional reserve system (unless, of course, you run one of the exchanges and keep the transactions local). If you have 1 bitcoin you can only spend/loan/destroy 1 bitcoin as the blockchain prevents double spending.
    • jondubois 8y ago
      But it's a fractional reserve system with respect to fiat currency. The price of Bitcoin is supported only by a fraction of its market cap in real fiat money. If everyone decided to sell all Bitcoins in existence on the open market, the total amount of fiat that they would get for it would not match the total market cap of all Bitcoins before the selloff started.
• Zaskoda 8y ago
  I've recently been thinking about a blockchain use case that I have not seen mentioned: security. It seems like log obfuscation is a common tactic used to cover tracks after a break in. Thus it seems like a blockchain could be used in a logging system so that a falsified log would trigger an alert.
  • twic 8y ago
    systemd's log subsystem has been doing exactly that since 2012: https://lwn.net/Articles/512895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/512895/ Although here's a detail i didn't know: The algorithm for FSS is based on "Forward Secure Pseudo Random Generators" (FSPRG), which comes from some post-doctoral research by Poettering's brother Bertram. So that's just peachy.
    • Zaskoda 8y ago
      Hah, of course.
• miguelmota 8y ago
  With blockchain, like a database, if you put garbage in you get garbage out. There's no good way to tie physical world assets to blockchain because you can't fingerprint these things like you can with digital assets.
• arisAlexis 8y ago
  Just read this from the people that built Silicon Valley https://a16zcrypto.com/ https://a16zcrypto.com/
• ziont 8y ago
  the only real use for blockchain are people shilling and pumping it. This is a violaton of US security laws and I've been crawling various crypto pump & dump channels and groups to submit as evidence to US whistleblower program. So far I've been able to link many HN accounts with these pump & dump groups, it's quite surprising how poor infosec is amongst these crypto enthusiasts, while knowingly or unknowingly partake in a classic pump & dump scheme with US SEC & DOJ posturing to label all ICO as securities fraud according to an insider.... I'm about to get a fat paycheck for my work....it was quite rewarding since I never bought into crypto and have been just annoyed for the past 5 years hearing idiocy being shilled everywhere. If you are reading this and your heart is racing, you know the crimes you've committed against society and you will be punished accordingly.
• ataturk 8y ago
  A guy I know believes himself to be an Ethereum millionaire. He's one of those guys that can't help injecting it into every conversation. It is completely insufferable. I. Don't. Give. A. Shit. About. Ethereum. I don't think blockchain is worth a Tinker's damn and this guy would bellow "smart contracts" all the time without even understanding why his Spring Boot app failed to start up. Good luck with your millions. I stopped talking to him. Problem solved, problem staying solved.
• arisAlexis 8y ago
  can someone explain how Y Combinator and many other SV innovation leaders are openly endorsing blockchain but every other day here there are haters posting links about how useless it is?
• jMyles 8y ago
  The author concedes that smart contracts will likely find their niche one day. ...but I think that they have already found a good one: dramatically increasing the difficulty of collusion in any m-of-n scheme. Technologies which rely on m-of-n such as Shamir's Secret Sharing and Threshold Proxy Re-encryption (disclaimer: I work at NuCypher) have never found widespread use because the ease of collusion among unknown third parties is easy enough to warrant using known third parties (and once you do that, the use cases for such schemes tend to evaporate). But look at the upcoming cohort of solid blockchain projects: many of them use smart contracts for collusion resistance.
• SI_Rob 8y ago
  Blockchainism doesn't work, in the long term, for one simple reason: people want technology to give them leverage over their environment (which includes over their peers), not to undermine the leverage they already have. People pay lip service to the doctrine of decentralization, until they find an advantage to exploit that makes them the center of it.
• awrence 8y ago
  There has just been immense confusion about what blockchain technology is meant to enable because unfortunately, amidst all the hype, a ton of people who don't understand the point of it have started to peddle the absolute non sense concept that is a private blockchain. These are actually better known as databases, and are obviously not a miracle innovation, they’re just SQL wrapped up in blockchain hype. And in most cases you’re just fine with SQL et al between a few responsible counterparties that can go through the court system if they need to but generally trust each other. The only true innovation is the decentralized public ledger. A properly decentralized public ledger is actually a horribly inefficient way to maintain a ledger, but this is necessary and by construct, because the only way you can have a secure immutabl'ish ledger (no human abstract creation is truly immutable) is to make amending it or the rules it follows highly democratic and expensive to change. The united states constution is a good analogy of a properly decentralized blockchain. From an economic impact perspective there is only one absolutely major groundbreaking application for this: to create monetary digital vehicles immune from centralized manipulation (read mostly, from inflationary interventions). The market value for money in the world is between 100-300 tn USD equivalent depending on what you count which is ballpark equivalent to the amount of real wealth in the world (that's a coincidence). This is by orders of magnitude the killer use case of cryptocurrencies, which incidentally was Satoshi’s original vision. After that, you can conceive of all sorts of other applications, but mostly smart contracts which can theoretically provide immutablish programmable transfers of wealth mechanisms, free of intermediaries or corrupt legal frameworks. This has tons of downsides and risks and the max valuation down the line is a fraction of the monetary use case, but it’s a thing that does get plenty of people excited and i'm sure some of it is potentially legit, especially in disfunctional countries. In general though the second you read private and blockchain used together, you can mostly roll your eyes and move on. EG JPM coin to name but the latest example.
• WisNorCan 8y ago
  Blockchain is an incredibly elegant solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
• JohnFen 8y ago
  Indeed. While I understand how blockchain works from a technical perspective, I have yet to hear an application of it that actually makes a lot of sense to me.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  I think this article can be summed up in one phrase: Technology does not solve political problems
• thekhatribharat 8y ago
  Shameless Plug: A quick read here - https://medium.com/open-factory/to-blockchain-or-not-to-blockchain-3954223fc7b2 https://medium.com/open-factory/to-blockchain-or-not-to-bloc... A quote from the article Blockchain, in basic terms, is a shared ledger and a consensus mechanism to reconcile transactions on the shared ledger. This is the basic structure of all blockchains. In fact, the basic structure of blockchains can also be found in traditional distributed databases. The software industry is blissfully aware of this and some vendors have repackaged traditional distributed databases as blockchains to attract new markets.
• xlc0212 8y ago
  I am sad about all the hates of the blockchain technology. I do agree that most of the blockchain products are hype and have no real use cases, but that doesn't mean the blockchain technology is completely useless. Disclaimer: I work for a company building a blockchain ecosystem. It is not the silver bullet that magically solves all the problems, but it does improves few areas compare to other technologies, which are decentralization and distribution. Distribution is a mostly solved problem as we have many distributed database available so I won't go into details about it. Decentralization, is the core attribute of any blockchain technologies. No single entity needs to be trusted, instead the user have freedom to decide who to trust. In terms of currency, user do no need to trust a bank. He get to decide to choose which wallet app he trust (which itself is not an easy decision), which node implementation he trust, which blockchain protocol he trust. Or alternatively he may be able to create his own implementation if there are no reputable implementations available. This is not the case of banks. I am forced to use whatever mobile app the bank offers. I can't use an alternative implementation (at least no banks in my country allows). It have very limited (most of the time, zero) extensibility and customizability. I can't simply create a bank because I don't trust other banks. As a user, I don't have a choice. Blockchain technology does not solve the trust issue (track operator can fool the sensor to make it report false information), but it provides full transparent and allow user to choose who he trusts. No blockchain can't prevent dishonest seller make a copy of a real bottle with a token and fill with low quality wine. But user can see who issues this token and able to decide never buy wine from this sellers again. The problem is still not solved, but you cannot say blockchain does not improve the situation here. Yes centralized technology can help as well, but the user have to trust the centralized technology provider and the wine seller. In this case the centralized technology provider will have a large leverage on both the seller and customer. And we know it can be bad if a single entity have too much power (e.g. Facebook, Google). Yes, there are too many hypes on blockchain technologies. No, blockchain technologies are not useless. It gives the power back to consumer, instead of controlled by a few large entity.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• anjc 8y ago
  Any arguments like this are immediately nullified because we have real-world examples of blockchain doing astounding things which can't be done without it. E.g. cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Can you transfer value across the world without Bitcoin? Yes, you can use banks, you can use wire payments, you can stuff gold in your butt and hope it doesn't show up in Airport scanners. Can you verify that goods have been delivered without blockchain? Yes, you can insert to write-only dbs, you can hope that everyone in the supply chain is honest, etc. There being an alternative to blockchain for a task doesn't mean blockchain isn't highly suitable for that task. These same anti-Cloud-hype arguments were spewed throughout the 2000s, yet look how the world has changed because of it.
• nootropicat 8y ago
  The main argument is a logical fallacy: just because some trust is still required doesn't mean there's no value in minimizing it. The land registry argument is the best example of this fallacy >the regulatory authority can make its own record and thus rewrite yours, which means that blockchain doesn’t work. No, the value is precisely the fact that it's the regulatory authority that forcibly changes ownership, and not you. Deed fraud [1] is a serious issue. Blockchain would protect against it completely: forging a signature or a will would be impossible. Rather than a document of dubious provenance, the will's hash would be stored along with the property record. Very likely in many cases of deed fraud the clerk changing the registry knows it's fraudulent and changes it for financial gain. That would become impossible also. The only way to forcibly take the property would be a provide a cryptographically signed court order. That's only for the security side of things. Tokenized real estate would make things that are currently very hard to do trivial, like using 1% of your home in country A as collateral for a rented car in country B. It's theoretically possible right now, but arranging that would require so much effort nobody does it. With a house record on the blockchain you would first tokenize it (transfer the ownership to a smart contract with tokens) and then transfer 1% of tokens to a car rental smart contract. Same for every kind of possession. Own google stock and want to use it as collateral for X? Why not. Want to sell 1% of your rental property to an investor in another country? Easy, no paperwork needed. Maybe it's never going to happen, but I think it's going to. The blockchain revolution would do to finance what internet did to information. Everything that's being done online was technically possible before it - theoretically, I could have written this exact post and physically mailed it to everyone who's ever going to read it. [1] https://www.lifelock.com/learn-fraud-deed-fraud-losing-your-home-with-the-stroke-of-a-pen.html https://www.lifelock.com/learn-fraud-deed-fraud-losing-your-...
  • discovan 8y ago
    Thank you so much for such a detailed comment! I agree about your first point: acknowledging only trust elimination and denying trust minimization is a simplification from my side. However, I have not seen successfull examples of "trust minimization" so far though it is always suggested in the context of blockchain. Maybe the reason is that the part on which the trust can be minimized by BC is usually not the weekest link. I also agree that BC could prevent some percent of deed frauds. However, if you consider my argument about not decentralized example land registry BC maintenance you will agree that in many cases this may leed to a forgery, not possible in Bitcoin blockchain. I completely disagree on a tokenization part. Unless we have a well-described and tested business model. these are more dreams and handwaving than a real use case. It is easy to say "tokenize this and that", the devil is in the detailes.
• MildlySerious 8y ago
  The anti-blockchain sentiment seems severely short-sighted when news like Youtube coming up with new ways to push people off its platform are posted within three hours of this submission.[1] Where do we move the endless amount of unique content to, once that previously trusted party breaks down? Be it greed, bad management, economics that just won't work out or whatever. Are we just going to watch it disappear? Is that the course of action you condone and suggest? Or are we moving to the next monopoly that will ultimately fail and disappear, hoping that time won't be the one where it's all lost? The amount of data we generate only goes up, and just throwing a dart to pick which megacorp is responsible for not losing or abusing that data is clearly unsustainable. In my eyes, Blockchain and other decentralized approaches are the way to move forward in terms of owning your own data, and keeping things that are worth preserving from disappearing at the whim of some third party that couldn't care less. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227294
  • billthegeek 8y ago
    Youtube has been operating at a loss for most of its existence. The only reason it can host high bandwidth videos is because it is part of a bigger profitable entity, Google. Can crypto projects figure out a way to build a working social platform without losing money?
  • wmf 8y ago
    Most of that user-generated content only exists because the megacorps offered to host it for free. Decentralized platforms aren't going to be free so 90% of that stuff just can't be saved. But speaking of decentralization there are plenty of proposals like personal servers or federated co-ops that aren't blockchain related.
• fukbezos 8y ago
  Pretty delusional if you think a $120B Fortune couldn't benefit from blockchain
• tcrow 8y ago
  why is this comment rated so highly? it's completely niave with respect to the use cases of blockchain technology. I realize that a lot of people like here like to boohoo this stuff but there are several legitimate reasons to use a blockchain. One of the most important reasons being the ability to resist government censorship of information that would otherwise be subject to cease and desist or outright take downs. Another is the ability to transact with any other individual without relying on a system of banks and long waiting periods and their fees. And what about reward systems that remove the middle man? What about the recent scandal with Patreon? I could go on and on I hope you get the point.
  • snissn 8y ago
    i agree with you, the article is rambling and mostly sets up and attacks straw men
• karmakaze 8y ago
  This post is so bad. I generally agree that most attempted uses of blockchain are flawed. The problem is that the reasons given in this post are even more flawed. Most of the examples given could be adapted to work with blockchain if it were to solve it's core scalability issue. The repetition of "blockchain is not IoT" is a parody of the post itself. Reminds me of "MongoDB is webscale". We should instead be discussing how each case could work with blockchain given a few changes. For example the supply chain one would work if we put tamperproof temp sensors in with the produce rather than the truck. The desires of the produce supplier and receiver of it are aligned so trust shouldn't be put in the truck. Even a little thought sheds light on the other straw man examples.