6 ms·

Regarding your claim that blockchain has almost no good use cases, I see news every week which disagrees. Here is the first article I could find from just toda

Regarding your claim that blockchain has almost no good use cases, I see news every week which disagrees. Here is the first article I could find from just today which shows a great use case. Coca Cola is expanding their blockchain trial project to a $21 billion-a-year supply chain because they found very significant savings. https://www.coindesk.com/coca-cola-supply-chain-firm-to-expand-blockchain-effort-to-70-partners https://www.coindesk.com/coca-cola-supply-chain-firm-to-expa...

whatshisface 7y ago
Why would Coca-Cola need to use a block chain? They can run their own code on their own servers.
- spir 7y ago
  Because while the core innovation of blockchain is a trusted database a context without trust, the core benefit of blockchain is reduced transaction costs. A blockchain is a singleton global computer of program code and data. It turns out this is sufficient to represent capital (money) on that computer. In practice this results in dramatically reduced transaction costs. For example you can transfer money with an API call. Another example is that an API can be "implemented with money". The https://uniswap.io/ https://uniswap.io/ API allows you to exchange currencies without any API keys or middlemen. But, the Uniswap API only works because there's a large amount of liquidity deposited by 3rd parties into its system, much like an inventory of food in a grocery store that shoppers can then access. "What's the big deal?", you might say. "Uniswap sounds just like a bank. Who cares?". Well as I understand it Uniswap was built by a dude in a basement over a few months, not a multi-million dollar bank project. And you can integrate your app with Uniswap in an afternoon. If you don't think that's going to change the world then you might consider spending a few dozen hours reading https://weekinethereumnews.com/ https://weekinethereumnews.com/ and see if your opinion is stable :)
  - pron 7y ago
    > the core benefit of blockchain is reduced transaction costs. No, this is not true. It might incidentally currently be the case with, say, Bitcoin vs. $US, but there's nothing technical that inherently makes it so. In fact, as this article and countless others reiterate, from a technical perspective blockchain is almost always more costly.
    - frenchyatwork 7y ago
      Indeed. The main reason why a given bitcoin transaction might be cheaper is because nobody's checking to make sure it's actually legal. It's the same reason why AirBnB is often cheaper: hosts don't pay business fees and don't follow other regulatory requirements like safety inspections.
      - carapace 7y ago
        You just reminded me: A friend of a friend who worked at Autodesk told me once that their inter-office "mail" system was international and didn't go through customs.
      - spir 7y ago
        Yes, I'd agree that, today, typically nobody is checking to make sure that an Ethereum transaction is legal. But, it's important to understand that Ethereum is not a replacement for or opponent of KYC, AML, or checking if transactions are legal. Ethereum is a starting point, a base layer. It is necessary to rebuild all kinds of monetary controls into Ethereum's app layer. I support this development. Within 5-10 years all of the traditional controls will become available on various parts of Ethereum -- KYC, ability for government to freeze accounts, etc.
    - spir 7y ago
      Blockchain (ie. Ethereum) is, overall, a reducer of monetary and non-monetary transaction costs. Example of reduced monetary transaction costs: The current Ethereum gas price for a token transfer is $0.04 (https://ethgasstation.info/ https://ethgasstation.info/). Operations on Ethereum are relatively inexpensive and will become much cheaper with Ethereum v2 in a couple of years. The cost of Ethereum operations is orthogonal to the value of the money being manipulated. You can transfer $100M for $0.04. Example of reduced non-monetary transaction costs: Say you wanted to launch an eBay-type app with a single market for a dozen countries. Some customers may bring Euros, others Swiss Francs, some USD. Each market auction selects a currency from a whitelist. All bids for that auction must be in its selected currency. On Ethereum you can bid Swiss Francs which will be dynamically exchanged for USD. Unlike using your VISA for forex, this currency exchange is at the same price that whales and banks get; you pay no spread fee for being an end consumer. The non-monetary transaction cost part is that this Ethereum-based currency exchange API can be permissionlessly integrated in an afternoon. 2nd example of reduced non-monetary transaction costs: https://www.pooltogether.us/ https://www.pooltogether.us/ is a no-loss, audited, provably fair lottery built on Ethereum. The way the lottery works is -- you always get your money back, but your money bears interest during the lottery period, and all the interest goes to a single lottery winner. So the cost of the lottery is the time value of your money. PoolTogether is built on other Ethereum projects, that's why the lottery proceeds earn interest. The non-monetary transaction cost part is that PoolTogether is able to access interest-bearing deposits as easily as you can use jQuery. Also anyone in the world can participate - reduced cost of being in another country.
- api 7y ago
  I'm sure they have plenty of cloud, Internet of Things, and AI. They might even have IoT AI in the cloud. Gotta stay buzzword compliant.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  Blockchains are genuinely pretty promising for supply chain tracking. Distributed ledgers are most famously useful when you distrust the motives of a central authority like Bitcoin, but they're also a reasonable option if you distrust the accuracy of a a central administrator. So for the purposes of supply tracking, different Coca-Cola facilities and shipments are 'individuals' which might report mistaken or dishonest results to the central server. And once somebody screws up, that trusted authority becomes a problem for others facilities to work around. For sufficiently large and restrictive systems (like US military supplies), correcting an error can become functionally impossible. At that point, you start resorting to awful two-wrongs-make-a-right solutions like entering fictional shipments which "move" a misdirected item from the listed location to the real one, or even redoing needless part replacements to match reality to documentation. Obviously you can track supplies without a blockchain, and I'm sure a lot of Coke's actual gains came from tearing out a bad system and replacing it, but a blockchain does at least encourage good tracking design (one authoritative record per item, transactions are assessed by peers rather than immediately accepted by an authority). And if the goods in question have individual identifiers, "proof of work" is actually a great addition. It doesn't have to be computationally hard if you trust all the users, but you still get a system where "I am holding this and hitting it with an RFID scanner" is allowed to overrule any number of past errors regarding that object. (Did Coke get all those gains? No idea. They probably just scrapped some legacy nonsense for a not-too-stupidly designed system.)
bwblabs 7y ago
Read tip: https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-popular-use-cases-and-why-they-do-not-work-f2ecc6cc2129 https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p... previous HN talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19225857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19225857
osrec 7y ago
The "efficiency savings" are probably because they've rejigged their processes to make them cleaner as part of the new initiative - NOT because of blockchain. If you control and trust your data source, blockchain is a really silly choice for storing your data. And the fact that SAP is the provider says it all really - them and their like are purveyors of superfluous hokum, sold to corporate managers that don't know any better.
syllable_studio 7y ago
Wow, I'm surprised by the downvotes. There are more details in this BI article mentioned in the coindesk one. I would have linked to it directly, but they have a paywall. https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-bottlers-sap-scaling-up-a-major-blockchain-project-2019-10?international=true&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-bottlers-sap-scali... As the article explains, they're expanding their test because it's demonstrated that they could reduce order-reconciliation duration from 50 days to just a few days. That's a big deal for a $21 billion-a-year supply chain. So, for those of you who are so sure that blockchain is pointless end-of-story, it seems like you're not taking into account how messy and expensive it is to manage data and legal contracts with many small business entities throughout supply chains. But I'll read more into the links you sent with your arguments, thanks for that.

whatshisface 7y ago

Why would Coca-Cola need to use a block chain? They can run their own code on their own servers.

spir 7y ago
Because while the core innovation of blockchain is a trusted database a context without trust, the core benefit of blockchain is reduced transaction costs. A blockchain is a singleton global computer of program code and data. It turns out this is sufficient to represent capital (money) on that computer. In practice this results in dramatically reduced transaction costs. For example you can transfer money with an API call. Another example is that an API can be "implemented with money". The https://uniswap.io/ https://uniswap.io/ API allows you to exchange currencies without any API keys or middlemen. But, the Uniswap API only works because there's a large amount of liquidity deposited by 3rd parties into its system, much like an inventory of food in a grocery store that shoppers can then access. "What's the big deal?", you might say. "Uniswap sounds just like a bank. Who cares?". Well as I understand it Uniswap was built by a dude in a basement over a few months, not a multi-million dollar bank project. And you can integrate your app with Uniswap in an afternoon. If you don't think that's going to change the world then you might consider spending a few dozen hours reading https://weekinethereumnews.com/ https://weekinethereumnews.com/ and see if your opinion is stable :)
- pron 7y ago
  > the core benefit of blockchain is reduced transaction costs. No, this is not true. It might incidentally currently be the case with, say, Bitcoin vs. $US, but there's nothing technical that inherently makes it so. In fact, as this article and countless others reiterate, from a technical perspective blockchain is almost always more costly.
  - frenchyatwork 7y ago
    Indeed. The main reason why a given bitcoin transaction might be cheaper is because nobody's checking to make sure it's actually legal. It's the same reason why AirBnB is often cheaper: hosts don't pay business fees and don't follow other regulatory requirements like safety inspections.
    - carapace 7y ago
      You just reminded me: A friend of a friend who worked at Autodesk told me once that their inter-office "mail" system was international and didn't go through customs.
    - spir 7y ago
      Yes, I'd agree that, today, typically nobody is checking to make sure that an Ethereum transaction is legal. But, it's important to understand that Ethereum is not a replacement for or opponent of KYC, AML, or checking if transactions are legal. Ethereum is a starting point, a base layer. It is necessary to rebuild all kinds of monetary controls into Ethereum's app layer. I support this development. Within 5-10 years all of the traditional controls will become available on various parts of Ethereum -- KYC, ability for government to freeze accounts, etc.
  - spir 7y ago
    Blockchain (ie. Ethereum) is, overall, a reducer of monetary and non-monetary transaction costs. Example of reduced monetary transaction costs: The current Ethereum gas price for a token transfer is $0.04 (https://ethgasstation.info/ https://ethgasstation.info/). Operations on Ethereum are relatively inexpensive and will become much cheaper with Ethereum v2 in a couple of years. The cost of Ethereum operations is orthogonal to the value of the money being manipulated. You can transfer $100M for $0.04. Example of reduced non-monetary transaction costs: Say you wanted to launch an eBay-type app with a single market for a dozen countries. Some customers may bring Euros, others Swiss Francs, some USD. Each market auction selects a currency from a whitelist. All bids for that auction must be in its selected currency. On Ethereum you can bid Swiss Francs which will be dynamically exchanged for USD. Unlike using your VISA for forex, this currency exchange is at the same price that whales and banks get; you pay no spread fee for being an end consumer. The non-monetary transaction cost part is that this Ethereum-based currency exchange API can be permissionlessly integrated in an afternoon. 2nd example of reduced non-monetary transaction costs: https://www.pooltogether.us/ https://www.pooltogether.us/ is a no-loss, audited, provably fair lottery built on Ethereum. The way the lottery works is -- you always get your money back, but your money bears interest during the lottery period, and all the interest goes to a single lottery winner. So the cost of the lottery is the time value of your money. PoolTogether is built on other Ethereum projects, that's why the lottery proceeds earn interest. The non-monetary transaction cost part is that PoolTogether is able to access interest-bearing deposits as easily as you can use jQuery. Also anyone in the world can participate - reduced cost of being in another country.
api 7y ago
I'm sure they have plenty of cloud, Internet of Things, and AI. They might even have IoT AI in the cloud. Gotta stay buzzword compliant.
Bartweiss 7y ago
Blockchains are genuinely pretty promising for supply chain tracking. Distributed ledgers are most famously useful when you distrust the motives of a central authority like Bitcoin, but they're also a reasonable option if you distrust the accuracy of a a central administrator. So for the purposes of supply tracking, different Coca-Cola facilities and shipments are 'individuals' which might report mistaken or dishonest results to the central server. And once somebody screws up, that trusted authority becomes a problem for others facilities to work around. For sufficiently large and restrictive systems (like US military supplies), correcting an error can become functionally impossible. At that point, you start resorting to awful two-wrongs-make-a-right solutions like entering fictional shipments which "move" a misdirected item from the listed location to the real one, or even redoing needless part replacements to match reality to documentation. Obviously you can track supplies without a blockchain, and I'm sure a lot of Coke's actual gains came from tearing out a bad system and replacing it, but a blockchain does at least encourage good tracking design (one authoritative record per item, transactions are assessed by peers rather than immediately accepted by an authority). And if the goods in question have individual identifiers, "proof of work" is actually a great addition. It doesn't have to be computationally hard if you trust all the users, but you still get a system where "I am holding this and hitting it with an RFID scanner" is allowed to overrule any number of past errors regarding that object. (Did Coke get all those gains? No idea. They probably just scrapped some legacy nonsense for a not-too-stupidly designed system.)

bwblabs 7y ago

Read tip: https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-popular-use-cases-and-why-they-do-not-work-f2ecc6cc2129 https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p... previous HN talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19225857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19225857

osrec 7y ago

The "efficiency savings" are probably because they've rejigged their processes to make them cleaner as part of the new initiative - NOT because of blockchain. If you control and trust your data source, blockchain is a really silly choice for storing your data. And the fact that SAP is the provider says it all really - them and their like are purveyors of superfluous hokum, sold to corporate managers that don't know any better.

syllable_studio 7y ago

Wow, I'm surprised by the downvotes. There are more details in this BI article mentioned in the coindesk one. I would have linked to it directly, but they have a paywall. https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-bottlers-sap-scaling-up-a-major-blockchain-project-2019-10?international=true&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-bottlers-sap-scali... As the article explains, they're expanding their test because it's demonstrated that they could reduce order-reconciliation duration from 50 days to just a few days. That's a big deal for a $21 billion-a-year supply chain. So, for those of you who are so sure that blockchain is pointless end-of-story, it seems like you're not taking into account how messy and expensive it is to manage data and legal contracts with many small business entities throughout supply chains. But I'll read more into the links you sent with your arguments, thanks for that.