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Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

• iuguy 6y ago
  Usually it's when you want decentralized validation of time-series data. E.g. The egg industry adopts a solution whereby the chicken are tracked on a blockchain so people know which chickens are kept outdoors and which are indoors. The eggs are then tracked and checked in at each quality gate and the consumer then gets a QR code for an app that tells them where the egg came from and where it was checked for tampering etc. A blockchain isn't the only solution available, and it doesn't require a public blockchain. A blockchain could work in this space for storing decentralized time-series signatures.
  • Tomte 6y ago
    > the chicken are tracked on a blockchain so people know which chickens are kept outdoors and which are indoors. A blockchain does nothing to ensure that an indoor chicken isn't marked as outside. How an untruthful information is distributed or secured doesn't matter. All those blockchain logistics tracking ideas fail at the same point: where the blockchain meets the real, physical world.
    • mattkevan 6y ago
      Probably missing something big here, but that’s the problem I see with all crypto/blockchain/smart contract stuff. They’re supposed to remove the need for trust, but they don’t, they just shift the need along a bit. There always needs to be an element of trust somewhere or it all falls apart. For blockchain logistics, you have to trust that the information entered is correct in the first place. For smart contracts, if you don’t trust the legal system or the other party enough to use standard contract law, you still have to trust that they will abide by the contract (and if the legal system is in such poor shape that you don’t trust it, or the transaction is by nature illegal, then the other party has even less incentive to follow the rules). It’s not possible to create a purely technological solution to what is essentially a people problem. Our entire civilisation is built on trust, our systems are built to reinforce trust and to provide consequences when it’s broken. Things go badly fast when trust fails and no amount of clever sums can change that.
    • jarofgreen 6y ago
      I think this is referred to as "the oracle problem" in Blockchain
  • cheeze 6y ago
    This is a poor example IMO. You're talking about something that can easily be handled by a database... you don't have trust issues or a byzantine generals problem to solve when it comes to egg tracking. Blockchain does nothing to ensure that the data is truthful.
    • iuguy 6y ago
      Yes it's absolutely a poor example, that's why I wrote this: > A blockchain isn't the only solution available, and it doesn't require a public blockchain. You are right that Blockchain does nothing to ensure that the data is truthful. Neither does a centralized database.
• zubairq 6y ago
  Timestamping documents via their hash
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    I know there exist uses for timestamping, but I don't know how often this actually comes up in practice. Have you ever gone to a notary to timestamp something before Bitcoin came along? The options are posting it to something like Twitter, including a newspaper headline in your cryptographic signature if you want to prove an after date rather than a before date, or indeed a notary. While I agree blockchain is a more elegant solution, it's the only solution I see in this thread so far where blockchain has an extra advantage, and I'm curious whether we need to have an extra country on this planet in terms of power consumption just to avoid going to a notary on occasion.
    • detaro 6y ago
      The interesting cases are much more companies wanting to timestamp dozens to thousands of documents or events per day. But there the "notary" solution is a common one - many companies offer timestamping as a service with an API, and in most cases you can probably find one all involved parties can trust (e.g. some CAs run such services)
      • lucb1e 6y ago
        What are these companies timestamping though? That's what I meant to ask. I know there is a need for the service or there wouldn't be parties offering it, I just don't really know specific examples of uses for it because I never came across any myself. It appears to be a rare need to me, but you make it sound like some companies would want to do this so much that it's worth automating, but then I still don't know what those companies do or want timestamped by a third party (be that a notary or a blockchain). The two Wikipedia articles I found on timestamping aren't really about timestamping of this kind. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timestamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timestamp and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timestamping_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timestamping_(computing))
• semicolonandson 6y ago
  I know this question is probably intended as a technical one, but from a pragmatic/empirical perspective, the number one use-case of the blockchain is to raise money in a way that side-steps traditional causes of friction (e.g. financial regulations). (I make no judgement on whether these sources of friction are worthwhile or not.)
  • Geee 6y ago
    That's an use-case for cryptocurrency, not blockchain. The title asked use-cases that are not currency.
    • xchaotic 6y ago
      you misunderstood - it's not limited to cryptocurrency or even DLT - in making the whole scheme elaborate you bypass the traditional AML/KYC regulations - anyone can buy your 'token' without setting up a legal account or using a legal source of funding such as a credit card.
      • jedimastert 6y ago
        If you're buying and selling "tokens" that don't do anything other than provide proof that you've added or subtracted an appropriate amount of value into the system, you've just created a currency. That's basically the definition
• Geee 6y ago
  Decentralized and private cloud data storage: https://sia.tech https://sia.tech The benefit from using blockchain is that your data will be safely replicated and accessible from the cloud, and at the same time you are the sole owner of the data. Only your private key can access the data. In this case, blockchain also facilitates a decentralized marketplace for sellers and buyers of data storage.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    > your data will be safely replicated and accessible from the cloud, and at the same time you are the sole owner of the data. Only your private key can access the data. So it's like an FTP drive where the hosting company makes backups and you encrypt the files before uploading, like Tarsnap? Trying to come up with any difference (advantageous or no) I guess the point is that there isn't a single owner? Nobody liable to keep your data available, but also not a single party that can go bankrupt or some such?
    • Geee 6y ago
      Yes, it's similar to just encrypting yourself and then using AWS S3 or something. That's not a differentiator, but usually people object decentralized solutions because they fear that anybody could access the data. So it's built into the protocol itself, and you can't accidentally send unencrypted data to the network. For most users, the real benefit is price. Also, there might be users who can't use AWS S3 for example, because it's not available in their country for some reason. There is liability, but it's handled through smart contracts. The hosts have to insert collateral to the system, which they lose if they can't hold their end of the data contract. The data is also replicated to multiple hosts, and encoded with erasure correcting code (with user selected redundancy) which protects against host failures.
      • lucb1e 6y ago
        Thanks for the reply! I hadn't thought of that this might drive down costs due to making competition way easier, censorship is definitely another consideration, and smart contracts for liability could also totally work with deposits. I'm not switching just yet because it's not solving a problem I'm having, but fair is fair: you've convinced me this is another legitimate use case for blockchain technology. That's very rare so I'm happy :)
• root_axis 6y ago
  Cryptocurrncies. That's it. Edit: lots of downvotes for this comment but the evidence speaks for itself.
  • jkepler 6y ago
    Perhaps you were down-voted due the the decentralized non-monetary innovations already existing on open public blockchains: protocol-level private cloud storage[1], decentralized identity[2], censorship resistant permissionless chat[3], and decentralized project governance[4]. [1] https://tardigrave.io https://tardigrave.io, https://sia.tech https://sia.tech [2] ION protocol developed by Microsoft as an open protocol, see https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion) [3] https://www.getjuggernaut.com/ https://www.getjuggernaut.com/, https://gethaven.app/faq/ https://gethaven.app/faq/) [4] https://bisq.network/dao/ https://bisq.network/dao/, running a project, paying for software & protocol development and supporting end-users with no one entity in charge since April 2019.
    • jkepler 6y ago
      Also time stamping, as mentioned multiple times in comments above. See opentimestamps.org for a self-hostable implementation that can run on bitcoin or litecoin's networks.
• sebmellen 6y ago
  The biggest use case I have found of blockchain tech is timestamping, especially in a case where the timestamping party cannot be trusted to act honestly because of conflicting interests. I'll give you an example, from one of my startup's enterprise customers. This company needs to ensure that their high-end auto inventory remains in the same state through transport — the mileage, the car body, etc. They've had issues with transporters taking these high-end cars for joyrides, and it's hard to detect when this happens. Our solution lets the transporter timestamp the odometer reading and car body with photos at time of pickup, on a blockchain. When the car is dropped off, it's just a matter of comparing the blockchain record with the car's actual state. Our system lets many parties who don't know or trust each other view the same "shared state" on a public blockchain ledger (Stellar), enforcing between these parties. We provide a similar service for researchers who want to prove they were the first ones to make a discovery. You can read more about that at https://assembl.net https://assembl.net. Edit: You can try our timestamping app (still in beta so excuse some kinks) online at https://app.assembl.net https://app.assembl.net. I would love to hear your thoughts!
  • xchaotic 6y ago
    why does it need a distributed blockchain though? Why not just put it in a database?
    • sebmellen 6y ago
      Because many companies with many conflicting interests need to be able to trust each other. If we put this data in a database, our enterprise customer can tweak the system to their advantage if they make a deal with us. The global, open database provided by a blockchain solves this problem, and also allows anybody to read the state without relying on our company to maintain the database or for uptime.
      • dasudasu 6y ago
        So the customer set up an IT service with multiple servers to sync with yours so that both can sync to the ledger? How does that work in practice? Is someone also monitoring that nobody is doing a 50% attack? Are both parties present when something is inserted into the blockchain?
• rch 6y ago
  The encrypted memo field of Zcash could lend itself to some interesting use-cases outside of transaction processing. https://electriccoin.co/blog/encrypted-memo-field/ https://electriccoin.co/blog/encrypted-memo-field/ It looks like this capability is being expanded with in-band secret distribution: https://zips.z.cash/protocol/canopy.pdf https://zips.z.cash/protocol/canopy.pdf
• puranjay 6y ago
  One good use case I've found is file authentication. If a file is signed and it can be matched against a distributed ledger, it can help ensure the authenticity of the file. I can imagine uses for this everywhere from piracy prevention to checking authenticity of documents, records, etc. Imagine that all land records are in a distributed ledger. The land owner has a signed certificate that can be verified anytime for authenticity. The only way to access the certificate is with a 12 word passkey.
  • sthnblllII 6y ago
    Either if that passkey is forgotten no one can own the land anymore, or there is a central authority (court) that can reallocate land, at which point there is no need for the decentralized trust of a blockchain.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      The central authority is useful in reaching disputes, but is not omniscient. Registration of deeds is a fairly inconsistent and non-centralized process. Still. So this record would be useful in the case of disputes.
    • mpfundstein 6y ago
      ever heard of corruption?
      • sthnblllII 6y ago
        Yes. Thats why courts need to be able to intervene, which they cant do in the case of a truly decentralized blockchain. Which is why a blockchain is a poor fit for recording the ownership of non-digital assets.
        • mpfundstein 6y ago
          what about corrupt courts? or at least biased courts?
• jedimastert 6y ago
  I tend to mentally repl
• dgrin91 6y ago
  Broadly speaking blockchain only solves a singular problem: Trust. If there is some work that needs to be done between parties and you don't trust the parties involved then you can use blockchain to do the work in a trust-less setting. This is why money has been the first and most prominent use case; people are less trusting with their own money. For a specific non-money potential use case of blockchain I would say identity services. For example, currently the internet runs based on implicitly trusting a set of root CAs (hundreds just counting the big ones!). The CAs certify that a site is what it claims to be. But if the CA becomes malicious (either through intent or hack) there are limited mechanisms for combatting this. If you decentralize the certification process you can have a trust-less system. This also works beyond CAs - any sort of identity management falls under the same principle: Credit scores, citizenship, etc
  • slickrick216 6y ago
    Not exactly what you are talking about but unstoppable domains .crypto are pretty neat how it’s implemented. I wonder could you do CA issues certs for such domains that live on chain at a specific address or is such a concept even needed if it’s on chain.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    > If you decentralize the certification process you can have a trust-less system. Okay so with a bit of hand-wavey stuff I'm sure we can make a parallel where you also solve world hunger with blockchain and trustless systems where there are no centralized parties that can do bad things. But realistically, how would this work? Whose key will end up signing the TLS certificate for my website? You're not really proposing anything more concrete than "let's move CAs to a blockchain".
    • dgrin91 6y ago
      You're totally right, I basically just said put a CA on a blockchain. There is a lot of handwaving in my short HN comment as I wasn't planning on writing out my full RFC here :). Here is some general thoughts I had on the matter - Placing things on a blockchain is a paradigm shift. Yes you can 'just' do it on a blockchain, but you're likely not taking full advantage of the capabilities you receive. Looking at the TLS signing example - why do we actually need to sign the TLS cert? The purpose of a CA signing a cert today is so that the CA can say a cert is what the CA saw and has not been modified. Well if we put it on a blockchain we know it cant be modified (as this is an inherent property of a blockchain). Instead of asking 'can I verify this cert with the CA pub key' I ask 'can I find this cert on the blockchain'.
• tomp 6y ago
  There are none. Git (with post-commit hooks) is always a superior solution.
• cynusx 6y ago
  I have only heard of one good use-case and I have been in fintech for the past 6 years. Swift GPI allows banks to credit the receiving parties' account in 10 minutes rather than overnight. It's an example where the existing party (swift) already had accumulated all the trust necessary and the consolidated ledgers were updated overnight. Swift GPI allows a bank to track any inbound payments and recognize it to clients before it is formally received by the batch process. In my mind it also sets the only way to successfully launch a blockchain solution... by the incumbents who already have the trust centralized and are interfacing with a very large amount of parties (8k banks in the swift network). The best solutions in my opinion should come from governments as they often act as notaries often act as trust providers. Examples here are real-estate titles, assets and potential liens on those. Hell, we should require the whole federal budget to be spend in crypto-dollars so citizens have full transparency of what happens with their taxes. Governments that grasp cryptocurrency could remove so much transaction inefficiencies caused by the current registration processes and uncertainties around ownership. Other potential solutions would be for multinationals their accounting. Their accounting of every subsidiary is in a different system and creating consolidations is usually done periodically (and expensively). Allowing an open accounting architecture for multinationals could boost innovation and kill companies like SAP who really is the only player in town that can handle the complexities multinationals face. A company like facebook or google could develop this and open-source it
  • sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    A centralized messaging platform using blockchain? You may be kidding. SWIFT has been playing with blockchain for years, always backing off. They had a partnership with Ripple once, some hackatons, a lab dedicated to blockchain. Former CEO even bragged about making bitcoin transactions himself. There was one corner use case around GPI and R3 Corda announced in 2019, but I doubt it ever was used in production.
    • cynusx 6y ago
      Hmm, my impression was that it was blockchain based. Well, I guess that brings the useful applications I know of to 0
• mgraczyk 6y ago
  This hasn't really been done, but one possibility is credibly committing to a promise about future product behavior. Imagine a company with a negative reputation for whimsically changing product goals and functionality (cough, Google). Using a blockchain allows the company to commit to a certain set of rules for product logic, regardless of which PMs take over the product 2 years and 4 PSC cycles later.
  • AlexandrB 6y ago
    This doesn't make sense. What are the repercussions if they change product direction? They can just ditch the blockchain along with the parts of the product they committed to.
    • mgraczyk 6y ago
      The cost of changing direction is higher.
• ghaff 6y ago
  A general use case is where there's a group of agencies or a group of business partners who may be all reasonably trustworthy but they are in separate trust domains. It can be generally useful for all those entities to have access to a single source of truth that can't be altered without the alteration being obvious. You can do this by appointing someone as a trusted authority. But, in practice, this has overhead and no one is completely trustworthy at least absent a lot of overhead. You also often have to deal with reconciliation when there are a bunch of different data stores scattered around. BTW, Hyperledger is the overall foundation of projects. Hyperledger Fabric is the most popular blockchain platform under the foundation. (There are also various libraries and so forth.)
  • geofft 6y ago
    If the group of agencies is relatively small, this can be done just fine by having all the entities sign each change in state, no need for blockchain. (And if one of the agencies has the ability to acquire more computing power than the others are currently contributing to the blockchain - which is almost always true in this era of cloud computing - they can attack the blockchain just fine. Yes, it will be "obvious" in that it won't match anyone else's records, but the whole point here is that you're not trusting the majority's records, you're trusting the blockchain, right? Who is to say the majority are not lying?)
• omginternets 6y ago
  DNS! Namecoin (despite its cringe name) is pretty cool, and a marked improvement over DNS.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Why do you think it hasn't caught on? Not sure how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound suggestive. I don't mean it suggestively at all, I'm just curious why I heard of it at its inception but then never heard of anyone actually using it. You say it's a marked improvement so I would expect people to jump on it and stop paying the random companies running our TLDs?
    • rictic 6y ago
      The momentum of an existing mostly-working system. Namecoin is dead but there are a few projects pushing forward, including ENS and Unstoppable Domains. There's opportunity for a significant privacy and authentication improvement over DNS. Two key advantages: 1. One can run one's own node, reducing or eliminating DNS privacy leakage. Today your ISP can't read your traffic with https://secret-newsletter.example.com/ https://secret-newsletter.example.com/ but they do know that you looked up the IP address of secret-newsletter.example.com. which is about as bad. DoH is somewhat better because you can choose your DoH provider, but in practice people will probably use one of a few major offerings, which they'll have to trust. 2. Info about a name can be authenticated, so in response to query you could receive both the ip address corresponding to a name, and a hash of the TLS certificate that ip address should use, removing the ugly hack of certificate authorities. There's lots of details to get right here, but the potential advantages are enormous. IMO those are the key advantages of DNS on the blockchain. But there's a big gap between having an idea and executing on it. There's tons of existing DNS infrastructure, and it's not going away overnight, so work is needed for interop, and there are complex questions to resolve around regulation and trademarks etc. As the saying goes, it takes years to be an overnight success.
    • omginternets 6y ago
      The biggest issue for me has been the need to install the namecoin daemon. This basically means namecoin can only be used by technical folk.
• sthnblllII 6y ago
  What is one good use case for ice cream scoops other than scooping ice cream? One might exist, but the real question is "who is the obsession of killing digital currencies coming from?"
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    The topic is much more analogous to "what ever happened to all of the hype about ice cream scoops revolutionizing the food industry" and explicitly not about cryptocurrency (ice cream shops) yet this response is explicitly about cryptocurrency and acts like there was never any other hype around blockchain use cases. Do you actually hold the position blockchain was never hyped beyond what it could do for currency or are you just talking about a completely different topic than this post entirely?
  • jonsno56 6y ago
    Scoop melons instead of slicing them
• oneplane 6y ago
  Distributed non-repudiation; useful for inter-org or inter-political timestamping/handshaking and maybe even intention/confirmation registration. In can do some of the things you'd use a notary for.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    So in a word, timestamping right? Because if you want to have non-renegable contracts then any digital signature will do, and you can sign a commonly agreed timestamp into it like "I will provide service X as of 2020-10-24T21:57:14+0200 <insert signature>". The only thing you can't prove is when it really was signed, sent, published, that sort of thing, and for that a timestamping service can be used (which other comments already mentioned).
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    In can do some of the things you'd use a notary for. Or, just use an entirely conventional database, operated by the notary.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      Finding a notary trusted by all parties may prove an issue, especially in international contexts. A blockchain may be cheaper.
      • goatinaboat 6y ago
        True, but it depends on the lifetime of the contract. A century-old family-run law firm in Liechtenstein has much less risk associated with it than any technical solution. TCO rather than upfront cost, in other words.
      • FridgeSeal 6y ago
        We’ve operated and trust escrow’s right? Isn’t it more of a business opportunity for a tech-savvy escrow firm instead of a blockchain specific problem?
    • oneplane 6y ago
• ghayes 6y ago
  For what it’s worth, you might not get great answers here. HackerNews readers tend to have a relatively negative view on crypto, and many people involved in the space thus tend to avoid discussing crypto here to avoid accidentally getting into a flame war. If you’re interested, I might suggest reading Coindesk or visiting the Discord or Telegram of interesting projects.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    I find that there is a reasonable percentage of people here that look at what problems it actually solves versus handwavey marketing magic. It's fanboy chat groups where I would expect the discussion of whether it's actually useful to be avoided (or be overwhelmed by those with skin in various kinds of blockchain game), but I'd be happy to be wrong. Why not link them if you say there is better content available elsewhere?
  • seibelj 6y ago
    Correct. There is a core group here that advocates the positive elements, I know many prominent people who occasionally comment here but get downvoted a lot. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vbuterin https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vbuterin Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, occasionally posts here. I myself am the head of all blockchain engineering at Poloniex, a large and old crypto currency exchange. I try and advocate for this industry but it is very difficult vs. all other technologies.
  • gge 6y ago
    Twitter is also good for crypto discussion.
• Canada 6y ago
  The use case is money. That's it. All valid use cases involve a transfer of stored value. (eg. money, securities, collectable stuff) For everything else there's a much cheaper option, even for time stamping. Anything involving "proving" something, meaning making some assertion at some time is not a good case. For those look at certificate transparency for a better example of how to handle that. When people say "storage", I say no. All valid cases which involve that are really about the handling of payment for storage, not the storage itself.
  • aerojoe23 6y ago
    Once it is digital isn't the money use-case really about proving the transfer of wealth?
    • Canada 6y ago
      Yes, that's the entire point. It's a digital thing that, at significant expense to run the system, nobody can forge a copy of.
  • udfalkso 6y ago
    Timestamping can be accomplished cheaply by piggy backing on a secure blockchain that’s already being used for the purpose of money (Bitcoin). No need to start from scratch for each use case.
    • Canada 6y ago
      I agree that if you are doing a one off that nobody is likely to care about until some much later date it's probably worth while to OP_RETURN some proof on Bitcoin or something like that as it would be less ambiguous to prove that you knew something at that point. On the other hand you could encode whatever you like in some field of a fake PGP key and upload that to key servers.. and at the same time post it here in HN in a comment and tweet it, and that's really good enough to satisfy almost everyone as it is. There's just so many ways to get arbitrary data written into logs that can be used as evidence later. We're already drowning in distributed systems that log our every move. For anything that involves timestamping some assertion that many parties care about on an ongoing basis it's much cheaper to have a distributed system of watchers. See certificate transparency. There's a lot of commercial inventive to want to falsify that, but is anyone able to in practice? There's no blockchain there.
• usr1106 6y ago
  I believe certificate transparency http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ is based on blockchain technology. (Haven't studied it in detail, just happened to notice this new SCT field in my Let's Encrypt certificate recently.)
  • tialaramex 6y ago
    Certificate Transparency is mostly built out of a Merkle tree hash which is a 1979 idea from Ralph Merkle (also the M in MD5 and various other things) and ordinary digital signature technology of the same sort used in those certificates. An observer can verify that the log remains consistent (thus nothing can be retrospectively inserted or removed as opposed to appended - without an observer detecting this) and that specific things that carry SCTs saying they were logged were, in fact, appended to the log. This isn't a blockchain. If you want to call it "blockchain technology" you can probably squint hard enough to do that, see also various "Internet technology" companies from the turn of the century that just consisted of a normal company plus a web site most of which were failures - but I don't think you learn anything from it. And in fact not all of CT is actually finished and deployed. There ought to be a Gossip system, which would allow clients to er, gossip about things they'd learned, and thus discover any inconsistencies which they can't see individually. e.g if from Turkey the log seems to show one entry for this www.google.com certificate but when seen from France the entry is different, Gossip potentially allows a Turkish client to tell a French client what it saw and the alarm is sounded. Gossip is necessary to ensure logs can't deliver a split horizon view and to loop back the trust from SCTs to actual log records, but it's fraught to do this in a privacy-preserving manner. The actual deployed system works for two reasons, which I've no doubt would horrify Blockchain proponents who worship at the altar of distributed consensus: 1. The actors (root Certificate Authorities, trust stores) are basically honest. They're not always competent or diligent or open but they mostly don't deliberately spread falsehoods, so the records in CT would probably be almost as useful even if it was just a huge text file or something with no cryptographic basis of trust. 2. The main clients mandating CT are Safari and Chrome and both of them require that certificates are logged with Google (and somebody else, but you can pick who). So attacks that require falsifying the logs can't work unless Google does them. If you're Google this is enough. If you're not Google it's still pretty satisfying, why would Google build this complicated and relatively expensive system just to lie to me about something I otherwise would have no way to know about in the first place?
• throw0101a 6y ago
  NISTIR 8202 in Figure 6 (p.42) has a nice yes/no flowchart to determine if blockchain or something else is more appropriate (PDF): * https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf * https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8202 https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8202 The DHS originally created it, but I can't find a definitive DHS source. Also here, at bottom: * https://www.fedscoop.com/blockchain-for-government-technology-hate/ https://www.fedscoop.com/blockchain-for-government-technolog...
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    To save everyone having to scroll through ¾ of the document before finding it, the flowchart OP means is on page 53 of the PDF (labeled "page 42" at the bottom of the page), figure 6.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• ayewo 6y ago
  In the long-term, I think blockchains will make a major showing in the design of self-driving vehicles (SDVs). For SDVs to really take off, it needs to surpass the safety of a human driver but the only way to do this reliably in a way that avoids the high costs and ugly protrusion of roof-mounted LIDARs is for SDVs to use low-cost internal sensor inputs and fallback on low-cost external sensor outputs from nearby vehicles[§] and road infrastructure. Essentially, what I think is missing from all SDVs currently in development today is an important ingredient behind why Internet-use is so widespread today: a common communication protocol between SDVs from different manufacturers. Once a common protocol is adopted/legislated, all SDVs will be expected to record any accidents encountered during any trips in a partial copy of the “road blockchain”. Stated differently, details of accidents and near misses will be recorded with timestamps on the partial blockchain maintained by each SDV in a way that the exact position of all SDVs within the vicinity of a car crash can easily be reconstructed. Of course this will mean SDVs will use clocks that are network synced. If 6 cars are in the vicinity of a crash between 2 cars, the trajectory of all cars before and after the crash could be reconstructed using the blockchain data from those 2 cars. If the 2 cars’ “black box” are lost due to them exploding on impact, the data could still be reconstructed using the partial blockchain data from the 6 SDVs proximate to the crash. The “road blockchain” would be especially useful in accident investigations but its privacy implications would need to be properly thought out. §: If a SDV has front sensors that start to return conflicting inputs while in operation due to inclement weather for instance, rather than the onboard computer aborting the ride in the middle of nowhere, it could switch to operating at partial instead of full situational awareness. In this state it could routinely query any three nearby vehicles for help: the vehicle in front, behind it & to its left to regain some level of situational awareness. Another use case would be falling back on wireless beacons when Internet access over cellular is lost. The SDV could start an adhoc network over wireless where it can broadcast a request for help from nearby SDVs. Something like: “I’m traveling from LA-SF. I need a recent copy of the point cloud from anyone traveling in the opposite direction (SF-LA)”. For this to work at scale, a common protocol that allows a SDV to start a wireless conversation with any nearby SDVs would be required.
  • geofft 6y ago
    You need a mechanism to make sure that a particular vehicle is being trustworthy about what it adds to the blockchain. A malicious entity could just report that other vehicles were at fault. One straightforward way to solve that is to say that only known car manufacturers may upload results and it must be signed by something that chains to the manufacturer's key - but at that point, you don't need a blockchain for this.
• jcfrei 6y ago
  From a previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192106
• chrisco255 6y ago
  Replacing virtually the entire financial system with code.
• 60secz 6y ago
  Proof of work solutions to byzantine fault tolerance are vulnerable to 51% attacks almost by definition, so if there's a value to the data it needs to be backed by a stronger economic incentive for "virtuous behavior". Doing this outside of money is problematic. The other option is private blockchains with limited, authenticated accounts, but then why not just use a timestamped db?
  • 627467 6y ago
    This. People keep wanting to strip the money from the technology in blockchain but, like many have stated: blockchain as a append only log is of little innovation or value if you have to rely on courts, lawyers and other humans outside of the technology to make it work
    • quickthrower2 6y ago
      True but it does add an element of non-tamperabitiry the data. Of course if a txn is a result of some stolen key type scenario a court might be required. A correction can be added like a journal entry. But like git the history is all there and there is less to debate.
  • lisnake 6y ago
    Yes, but what if I piggyback my insignificant data on the back of some other bigger public blockchains, like bitcoin or ethereum, where cost of 51% attack is in tens of billions? That way I can get protection with their level of security.
    • 60secz 6y ago
      But at a significant price is complexity, latency, maintenance, and transaction fees. There are plenty of immutable append only databases, e.g. datomic. Why violate Occam's razor?
  • mgraczyk 6y ago
    The OP asked about hyperledger, which does not require proof of work. He/She's asking specifically about private blockchains.
• RichardHeart 6y ago
  You can put the word in your corporate press release for a price pump. Lol. As blockchains are the worlds most expensive and slow databases, that also have silent bit-rot... You must run your own computer that verifies that what you've written stays written, and doesn't get forked away, and that it even wrote in the first place, as the block could be full or your 1st block you are "in" gets orphaned. Thus, you must really, truly need censorship resistance to accept that sucktitude. So what are people censoring? Financial transaction, social media posts (but they must for moderation anyway.) Websites are also censored, which is layer down the stack from social posts, The low throughput of blockchains makes them inappropriate for this purpose. Probably also for the social posts as well. Good luck!
• 627467 6y ago
  Safeguarding nuclear parts blueprints. https://www.coindesk.com/how-the-bitcoin-blockchain-is-being-used-to-safeguard-nuclear-power-stations https://www.coindesk.com/how-the-bitcoin-blockchain-is-being...
• AdrianEGraphene 6y ago
  I use blockchain to pay people to block phone spam.[1] It's also the subject of my patented algorithm on killing phone spam by requiring a refundable cash deposit for non-contacts phone calls. [2] I wrote a short white paper on this theory too. [3] [1] https://myrobocash.com/ https://myrobocash.com/ [2] https://uspto.report/patent/app/20200304647 https://uspto.report/patent/app/20200304647 [3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c1GyiVVZFDiUuxWkBCQ63qLdJgPPBhWh/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c1GyiVVZFDiUuxWkBCQ63qLdJgP...
  • bawolff 6y ago
    How do you possibly have a patent on that. That's pretty much the oldest proposal for dealing with spam in existence. Bitcoin is even based on something called HashCash, which is roughly the same thing minus the refundability.
    • AdrianEGraphene 6y ago
      Yes, I took great inspiration from HashCash and Proof of Work in general. Re: minus the refundability The refundability is the main thing that allowed us to patent this. HashCash, and the large PoW required by Bitcoin are meant to strain any attempt to transact on the respective network. Ours only strains bad callers (monetarily) and does not strain good callers. The argument we presented was that good/bad callers can be simplified as calls that lasts more/less than some time threshold. Simple, user-friendly, intuitive, and serves the purpose of disincentivizing high volume spam calls while giving legit unknown callers a chance to bypass the blind filter.
  • black_puppydog 6y ago
    That's cool that it works. So that's one solution to that problem. Here in France, phone spam is essentially non-existant, and I'm nearly sure there are no block chains involved. I'd posit that this is a tech workaround for a political problem. Which is fine in my book, but it's not exactly a killer application for the technology that is block chain, if really you'd want (and could have) something that does the job better.
• geofft 6y ago
  A Bitcoin-style blockchain is a combination of two things: 1) A public ledger where each new entry includes the hash of the previous one, so you can efficiently attest to history and items cannot be silently removed from history, even if they're signed by the same participant. This is an old idea - Merkle trees are a slightly more advanced take on this idea. Present-day use cases, which are not blockchains in the conventional sense, include Git and Certificate Transparency. 2) A mechanism whereby the ability to add something to the blockchain requires the expenditure of computational power, as a way to solve the "double-spend" problem - namely, if you're storing financial accounts in your ledger, how do you make sure one person doesn't claim to transfer the same dollar to two different people? Bitcoin's innovation is to require some "proof of work" to record the operation and to make "miners" record operations (instead of participants adding things themselves), such that maintaining two branches of the ledger requires you to turn into the most powerful miner, which is computationally prohibitive. You only have the double-spend problem if you have an object that cannot be used twice. Git does not have the double-spend problem because there's nothing wrong with having two commits branching off the same commit (in fact, it's quite common/encouraged). Certificate Transparency does not have the double-spend problem because CAs can sign an unlimited number of certificates, so if you see two different signed claims on two branches they're both valid. The two ledgers can be trivially merged together (unlike two branches of where money went). Timestamping has the double-spend problem in its own way: either something happened or didn't happen on a day, and you don't want multiple, different records of what happened on that day. If I want to attest that something happened on June 1st, you need to be confident that I didn't make a second history that diverged at July 30 and merge it back in. Most people do not have the double-spend problem. Fundamentally, you need a finite resource (like time or money) and you need to track the resource itself on the blockchain for the double-spend problem to exist. A lot of people think a blockchain is useful for provenance tracking. But private records of provenance do not have the double-spend problem - you're not tracking the thing itself, you're tracking claims about where the thing was. If you see signed claims from me saying both "Lot X consists of high-grade steel that's been inspected" and "Lot X consists of faulty steel that needs to be discarded as scrap," you know I'm lying somehow. You don't need to arbitrarily pick one of those statements. (You actually don't want to arbitrarily pick one, because, again, the ledger here is just a record and not the thing itself: you want to get on my case for lying and find the truth. For the currency-itself use case of Bitcoin, it's fine to arbitrarily pick one.) A lot of people are interested in so-called "permissioned blockchains" / "private blockchains." For the financial use cases, these usually don't have the double-spend problem because they're just a reconciliation layer on top of a slower payments system, and given a public record, you can just hold someone responsible for their double-spending, because again the ledger is just a record and not the thing itself. (This is largely similar to how "sidechains" like Lightning Network don't need to use the full complexity of the blockchain - because what they really are are records of promises to perform transactions on the primary blockchain. If someone makes two promises, hold them accountable for both.) For the non-financial use cases, you probably don't have anything resembling the double-spend problem in the first place: what you want is, at most, something like signed commits in Git.
• scubbo 6y ago
  (Disclaimer - I believe myself to have a better idea of what a blockchain is and how it works than the average layman, but I'm certainly not an expert) Having recently completed a house purchase and waded my way through reams of paperwork in the process, I'm stunned that there's no "document provenance chain" implementation. At every stage of the process, I was presented with tens or hundreds of pages of paperwork that I was expected to sign, most of which was exactly the same as the paperwork I had approved in the previous round, with changes only on a page or two to reflect the renegotiated terms. However - I had no proof of that similarity, and so I had to read through every page to verify it for myself. If I could have had a programmatic way to show that a) changes only occurred in the following places, and b) the original document that I reviewed is the same as a blessed authoritative template provided by some trusted independent party, the whole process would have gone a lot faster. Actually, now I come to think of it, this wouldn't even need blockchain - it could just be Version Control, right?
  • geofft 6y ago
    Right, all you need is a hashed object that includes the hash of the previous version. Git / most DVCSes are built on this but even they are more complicated than what you need. What you actually want, I think, is a legal document that says "The parties hereby amend the contract previously agreed to on mm/dd/yy as follows: after paragraph 5, add .... For reference, a full copy of the amended contract is included. In the case of discrepancies, this description of changes, and not the following copy, is authoritative."
    • lancewiggs 6y ago
      The contracts (for any commercial transaction) are not agreed until they are finally signed. Until then the contracts are being amended by the parties, and generally with tracked changes.
  • svrtknst 6y ago
    Yeah might get away with just version control. If my understanding of blockchains is correct, which it almost certainly isn't, then the core features you're after would exist in the overlap between a distributed VCS and a block chain, i.e. a series of commits, where I can verify that my sequence is the same as yours, and that both of ours are the same as the governments.
• Fnoord 6y ago
  Blockchain is extremely useful for one thing only (and, like Unix philosophy, it does it particularly well): scamming. If you want to learn about examples, read throughout the comments. I've read about half the comments and, to no surprise, not much of substance. Distributed DB ("private Blockchain") has its uses, but it isn't publicly owned like a traditional Blockchain.
  • jkepler 6y ago
    https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion
• Pamar 6y ago
  I arrive late so maybe someone mentioned this already: https://www.deutsche-boerse.com/dbg-en/media/press-releases/Commerzbank-Credit-Suisse-and-UBS-execute-first-live-transactions-on-the-Deutsche-B-rse-HQLAx-securities-lending-platform-1631518 https://www.deutsche-boerse.com/dbg-en/media/press-releases/... (Frankfurt Stock Exchange uses a blockchain as a ledger for securities lending)
  • throwawayay02 6y ago
    It's really hard to understand from all the complex financial lingo what the benefits of using it are (as opposed to a managed DB). The word blockchain isn't even mentioned once on that press release or the website of the company that supposedely created it.
• companyhen 6y ago
  https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ is one of my favorites. A16Z, TechStars, and Coinbase all backing it. Really interesting tech.
• mareko 6y ago
  Venmo for all. We're used to Venmo in the US but many places in the world don't have an equivalent. Valora is a new Venmo-like mobile app that's built on the Celo blockchain, a new network where mobile devices can efficiency sync with the chain, with a native stable coin, and a decentralized phone number verification protocol. Check out https://valoraapp.com https://valoraapp.com and https://celo.org https://celo.org
  • FridgeSeal 6y ago
    In my country this is already fully supported: PayID will let you transfer money instantly instantly between accounts (up to some daily limit), with no fees. Similarly, an app called BeemIt, which is supported by the major banks here gives you a very similar experience, albeit with a prettier UI/UX. As it stands, there’s now no advantage that cryptocurrency offers in this space anymore IMO.
    • bawolff 6y ago
      In my country the government issues little pieces of paper with patriotic symbols on them that we pass to each other. Maybe im just a stick in the mud, but i always thought it worked pretty great.
      • jkepler 6y ago
        Works great until the government either recalls the pieces of paper (PM Modi in India, anyone?), or institutes strict capital controls while running the printing press incessantly (Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, just to name a few examples).
        • bawolff 6y ago
          True, but on the other hand, with cryptocurrencies, you're at the whim of some combination of developrs and large mining pools. There is not a whole lot preventing them from instituting an inflationary policy and pocketing the created coins, either.
    • 6y ago
• lisnake 6y ago
  Another option is gambling. With smart-contracts it's possible to build fair and auditable casinos on blockchain.
  • swiley 6y ago
    More interesting IMO are securities in etherium. The world does just fine with (for example) the options clearing corporation and courts, but I wonder if by automating it you could fix some of the scaling problems (for example, allowing people on short visas to use options in foreign markets.)
  • bccdee 6y ago
    Can't turn any fun games into reliable oracles. You could use the blockchain itself as a source of randomness, but that's a very boring way to gamble.
• netman21 6y ago
  Lotteries. Government monopolies aside, the problems with lotteries is trust. How can you be sure the organizer really pays out the winnings to the ticket holder who bought the winning number. In a public ledger you could verify all that and still keep the winner anonymous.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    This seems like a currency use case unless you're verifying non-crypto payment in which case I'm not sure how I follow verifying an anonymous ticket holder signing a blockchain as any evidence of verification of real payment to a real winner.
• josalhor 6y ago
  I have thought about this a lot. I think there exists a finite set of properties your problem needs for blockchain to be an effective solution. First of all, you need multiple sources of truth. i.e. Everyone can make transactions with money, therefore everyone is a source of truth. Second, you want to solve your problem in a distributed fashion and you need to figure out the incentives for each node that contributes. i.e. Everyone wants to participate in the economy and is okay with giving a small commission for a transaction. On top of all this, you also want to maintain some invariant. i.e. Transactions do not create money. I have thought of more properties, but they are much more boring. These are enough to throw away pretty much all the hype around blockchain. Every time someone suggests blockchain to solve a problem ask yourself if these properties apply to the problem at hand. Example: Someone suggests logistic company x could use blockchain in order to keep a log of their distribution. But then, you astute reader ask yourself: If a single company essentially holds all the information, there are no multiple sources of truth. How would this instance of blockchain be different from a centralized database? What values does it add?
• samatman 6y ago
  Urbit has been using Ethereum to distribute scarce identities for its peer to peer personal-server network. There have been some growing pains, but it works. Note: not interested in explaining what Urbit is, let alone fielding tedious political commentary about its departed founder. Just highlighting a successful non-currency use of a blockchain.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I'm not sure if it counts as a "block" "chain", but I'm using a chain of hashes to verify integrity of an online message board, so that you can more easily verify that you are all seeing the same conversation thread. And if any messages are deleted, everyone can see that something was there, and when it was deleted, and who deleted it.
• bawolff 6y ago
  Transfering (investment) money from stupid people to people telling the stupid people what they want to hear
• bawolff 6y ago
  Depending on how you define a "blockchain" there are various technologies like certificate transparency or git that share certain similarities and are pretty useful. However none of them would be caught dead calling themselves a "blockchain" Also https://xkcd.com/2267/ https://xkcd.com/2267/
• lettergram 6y ago
  Inventory management. In many cases you want this centralized so you can manage it. But the reason is really so you have a “record” of what is in storage. The blockchain keeps it decentralized (ie less risk of a user deleting it), at the same time anyone can query the inventory.
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    What kind of inventory receives benefit from this though? The users still have to trust whatever the group that maintains the inventory says is being added and the group that maintains the inventory can already expose what's in their inventory to whoever they want without making it a blockchain.
• dpc_pw 6y ago
  Blockchain as a data-structure gives you tamper-evident, append only database. Blockchain as a system (datastructure + PoW) solves consensus & trust between agents in a trust-less and censorship-resistant way (without introducing a trusted party).
• asymptotically3 6y ago
  Blockchains are totally useless without a token as an incentive to mint new blocks.
• GartzenDeHaes 6y ago
  The biggest use would be for Automated Clearing House (ACH) funds transfers. Right now, banks receive and send money by sending flat files through a distributed processing system with no database transactions, verification, or transfer history. Some big bank robberies were committed a few years ago by compromising the banking systems that create and process these files. Once the file is sent to the ACH network, reversing transactions is a manual process and is nearly impossible after the funds leave the destination to a 3rd party.
  • quesera 6y ago
    Wouldn't it be simpler for the ACH file creator to cryptographically sign the contents of the file? Attaching a signature to the end of the file (a la PGP) after the padding rows seems workable.
    • GartzenDeHaes 6y ago
      The goal of using block chain here would be to reverse individual transactions (a row in the file) after then money has moved through several files/institutions.
• alex_young 6y ago
  All the timestamp implementations seem oddly complicated for an append only filesystem. We’ve had write once media for thousands of years haven’t we?
  • tomcam 6y ago
    We have, and that is the basis of our startup hyperTablet (YC W21). We preserve long-lasting transactions using lasers on microscopically thin wafers of purified porcelain, basing it on a recipe from early Mesopotamia; cuneiform tablets have been a high resolution medium with MTBF estimated at 10,000 years. The base clay is ethically sourced using only well educated, adult laborers 21 and older. It is then refined using processes first developed by the French military. Obviously the market is primarily enterprise, legal, and insurance companies. We hope to get the cost per transaction (CPT) under €100 sometime in the next five years. Early adoption has still been surprisingly strong, surpassing projections by about 40% per year compounded.
• zalkota 6y ago
  Decentralized finance
• breatheoften 6y ago
  I'm not sure what specific technologies "blockchain databases" is limited to -- but one use case that has been bandying around me head ... I think there could be a very powerful set of regulatory technologies created on top of blockchain style databases when used in conjunction with legally binding agreements intended to limit access to reads of the data. Imagine a data lake for "enforcing" audit-ability of reads -- 1. you may "store" some data in the lake -- say for example P2 2. if you "store" data in the lake you agree that you will not store that data anywhere else "store" above would in actual implementation be something like storing a key for decrypting the data -- which could be stored wherever in an encrypted form and the agreement would mean "i'm not storing the key anywhere and i'm not storing the decrypting contents in any form other than as encrypted by the key". You would leverage blockchain to ensure that all reads of the data are observable. Obviously you can't "enforce" that the data being protected is not stored in other places or in other forms -- however the agreement "i will not store anywhere else" can be given legal or regulatory force to provide a way to punish violators. The goal tho is to build a platform for explicitly acknowledging and communicating to both external auditors and the developers that "i'm not supposed to store this in other places". That's a technology problem which a lot of good faith implementors need help with solving ...
• rogerdickey 6y ago
  Probably none or we would have seen one already after 10k smart people spent 10 years looking.
  • jkepler 6y ago
    https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion
• neilv 6y ago
  The overwhelming evidence is that the primary application of blockchain is investment scams.
• bluedevil2k 6y ago
  Amazon’s QLDB solves a lot of issues people think they need blockchain for
• 9985479945_ 6y ago
  You might as well be asking “What are some real life use cases for square dancing, that are not dancing related?” Solve problems with the best solution, don’t start with a solution and then find problems
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  I like the idea of DNS based on blockchain. Obviously money is involved there.
• vmception 6y ago
  The consensus models without the payment mechanism all undermine the utility of a blockchain. Proof of Work and currency are inseparable, it is all interrelated to the design of any application using the blockchain. I used hyperledger and even the example projects from the instructor were talking about all the threaded operations it can do, if there is no cost to the computation then randoms are DDOSing all the nodes in the system for no reason, which is exactly what happenes in real world hyperledger consortiums. Its dumb. Either accept that speculation is a use case or move on.
• nradov 6y ago
  Synaptic Health Alliance https://www.synaptichealthalliance.com/ https://www.synaptichealthalliance.com/ Medical insurance companies have a huge problem just keeping their contact databases of healthcare providers up to date. Doctors move offices or retire or stop accepting new patients and never bother to inform the insurers they work with. This system allows competitors to share that data in a fair way which reduces healthcare costs for everyone.
• CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Using the blockchain is extremely expensive relative to using a traditional database. The most widely used public blockchain, Ethereum, could be millions of times more expensive than AWS per ledger entry. This is because it is designed to have its state stored permanently by thousands of computers, with any entry becoming part of a permanent canonical shared history of the network going forward. What all of that distribution and synchronization gives you is unparalleled immutability, data permanence and uptime. So the applications best suited to this highly constrained and highly reliable/accessible computing environment are those which require relatively small data transfer/storage, where the data operations are of extremely high value relative to the computing resources they consume. So far these applications have been currency, marketplaces and financial contracts, which all benefit from being on an open platform that is effectively resistant to capture by any party. You're also seeing very large markets emerge in digital collectibles.
• solresol 6y ago
  Mid-market insurance has a sort-of-a use case, but I've not quite been able to make it work (yet). If you are a large-ish business, you will talk to your insurance broker to insure it. This will probably turn into a multi-thousand page document describing all the assets that you want protected, and what events you want them protected from. The broker then does "marketing" which means nothing like what marketing means in any other context. It means that they are going out to the underwriters and asking them what parts of that whole package they are willing to underwrite, and at what costs. The broker then cherrypicks whatever is best for their client by piecing together underwritings for different parts. ("Allianz is underwriting the buildings for the first $800m, Lloyds will do everything beyond that up to $3B, SwissRe had the best weather insurance...") The client wants to know that the broker genuinely did approach as many underwriters as they claim and validate that the underwriters did reply with the quotes that the broker claims were replied. (This is how the client makes sure that the broker and the underwriter aren't colluding.) The end result is that across the industry there is a many-to-many broadcast and scatter and gather that needs to happen and be notarised. (The broker sending stuff out, the underwriters responding.) At the moment, there is usually a third party hub through which these documents flow who essentially notarises the communications, but also has no incentive to allow collusion between parties. So everyone trusts that third party. The only problem is, there is no incentive for the third party to be efficient, and so in every country / state / market where this kind of system operates, the third party inevitably takes a large cut of fees and provides quite remarkably terrible service. (Case in point: "of course it's secure, it's on port 443". "Umm, you are actually just making an HTTP connection on port 443, there's no SSL happening on this connection, as can be seen in this packet trace.") The brokers hate how it has played out, the underwriters hate it even more. With a bit of handwaving, this is something that can be solved by a blockchain. Although the unencrypted documents themselves probably can't be on the blockchain, the checksums can be, and maybe there's a scheme where the encrypted versions of documents can be there too. It's one of those situations that blockchains are good for: distributed system, no trust required, the users of the blockchain can afford the appropriate technical skills to keep the system running, can't be replaced by an independent 3rd party, etc. etc. But it's not likely to happen. The main problem is that there's no monetary incentive for any individual party to build the system. It's a tragedy of the commons problem: once it is in place, it will get used, but no-one wants to pay for it because if someone else can pay for it first then that's a better arrangement. So yeah, five years of discussions and learning about the market, and everyone wants it to exist but no-one wants to pay.
• squabble 6y ago
  Uncensorable Twitter
• lironmo 6y ago
  Blockchain technology has made headlines mainly due to the interest and attention that Bitcoin, the pioneer of digital currencies, is based on it. The technology enables registration and tracking of the money in the system, including balances and transactions, for all users of the system at the same time. It is important to understand that if until recently the prevailing explanation was that blockchain technology has a right to exist only because of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on it, then the picture is much more rosy in terms of technology - it seems to accompany us in various walks of life. Along with voices claiming that many resources are invested in the development of blockchain technology without the certainty that this technology will survive over time, there are many other voices heard across the globe, arguing that using blockchain technology is bringing the future to us and taking part in a revolution that will change our lives significantly . Blockchain for food, real estate and health Thus, alongside cryptocurrencies, new uses for blockchain technology are currently being developed in various industries. In the US, Walmart, the giant retail chain, has filed a patent application based on the use of blockchain technology that will allow the company to improve tracking of shipments in various aspects, including: location, temperature and delivery content. Sensitivity of some of the products shipped. Other food giants, such as Nestle, Kroger and other companies in the food industry, have partnered with computing giant IBM to develop use of a blockchain system to improve food tracking. The applications in the world also slide into the field of real estate and digital health, where developments leading to change have recently been presented, mainly in the way in which medical information will pass between the various factors. In Israel, there are a number of companies, in various industries, that are looking to develop services and products based on blockchain technology - Wave is developing a system that will make it possible to transfer and confirm bills of lading digitally, thus overcoming the need to bring the original document from the bank to the shipping company, as required today (a wider move is currently being made by IBM and logistics and shipping giant Marsk). Maritime trade). QED-IT is developing a system that allows a claim to be tested in a database without revealing the content of the information itself. This allows the defense industry, for example, to test components without knowing their specific use. BloxTax is developing a system that allows anyone to know exactly how much they have earned or lost on tokens or cryptocurrencies and to report to the tax authorities in accordance with the law, by collecting and weighting the data from the blockchain network.
• sebbyBinx 6y ago
  Jewelry. Digital assets will have their place alongside gold and diamonds in jewelry, and perhaps even entirely replace them. A significant issue with gold and diamonds in jewelry is that the value is destroyed if the jewelry is lost or stolen. However, Bitcoin and other digital assets do not have this issue since a pointer to the value can be worn, not the value itself. I made a site which promotes this idea in an open way: thebtcring.com https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-21-a-bitcoin-engagement-ring.html https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-21-a-bitcoin-engagement-rin... https://m.imgur.com/kX9i80Q https://m.imgur.com/kX9i80Q
• jkepler 6y ago
  Censorship resistant chat based on the lightning network. See https://www.getjuggernaut.com/ https://www.getjuggernaut.com/, https://sphinx.chat/ https://sphinx.chat/, or chat function integrated in OpenBazaar's Haven app (https://gethaven.app/faq/ https://gethaven.app/faq/). This tech can run on bitcoin or lightcoin's networks, if I understand correctly. Another example would be decentralized governance. The bisq.io project has built a system on top of bitcoin to incentivize and pay for their project's future development. They chose their model for censorship resistance (as they have concern that nation-states might not take kindly to a peer-to-peer permission-less bitcoin to fiat exchange) and its been functioning since April 2019. In historical perspective, the bisq network has innovated a new way for humans to work together that rivals the invention of the joint stock corporations by the English and Dutch at the start of the 17th century. There's lots of talk of decentralized governance on top of Ethereum, but so far the only really resilient and decentralized project I've seen in the space is the bisq network. Bisq is the sort of new thing that can be built on top of bitcoin's trust-decentralizing monetary technology.
• neillyons 6y ago
  It is useful for scamming people.
• BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
  Blockchain is just a database that is 1) public 2) append only If you don't have mining, anyone can append to such blockchain at no cost, so it's defenseless against bad actors, so it must have a set of trusted appenders. If you want trustless public database, you must have mining. Mining is costly, so you must have a currency.
• kevinStorj 6y ago
  decentralized storage (storj.io) is a great use case
• biolurker1 6y ago
  Decentralized prediction markets and derivative markets for anything. Commodities futures etc. Also tokenizing real world assets think of shares of ordinary homes.
• steindavidb 6y ago
  Do you mean blockchain or technology inspired by blockchain? Lots of cool merkle tree stuff (trillion, certificate transparency); also several international shipping supply chains use blockchain for chain-of-custody (txns are irrevocable cosigned transfer of custody with no trusted overseer). I would love to see criminal evidence and deeds of ownership move onto a similar framework. I expect digital ID will also benifit from an auditable, immutable log (e.g. sovrin)
• car 6y ago
  Check out Ubirch.com. They use firmware for IoT sensors writing to the blockchain to make data tamper proof, for example. One possible application could be the signing and blockchain anchoring (Bitcoin or Ethereum) of video from body cams, making manipulations impossible.
• wpdev_63 6y ago
  Filecoin comes immediately up. Decentralized github on filecoin would be killer.
• mectors 6y ago
  At Legal and General we use hyperleder to power Estuare, the first pension risk transfer reinsurance in production. Our reinsurer is based in Bermuda and given the population is only 64K and has very few unemployed actuaries, it is hard to scale the reinsurance business via hiring people. Thanks to Estuare monthly operations related to high value contracts with insurers can be fully automated and allow the business to scale. Given that the insurer and reinsurer can both introduce new data and eiter sides used to do extremely complex calculations in a spreadsheet to validate how much money needs to flow in which direction each month, the process would take weeks due to often human error. With Estuare the process now takes minutes and is fully auditable, which for contracts that can run 50 years is important, as well as allowing previous data updates to be incorporated immediately instead of once a year.
  • tupputuppu 6y ago
    Apologies but I fail to see how blockchain is relevant to your need? Are there lots of other parties besides Estuare involved in the blockchain or is Estuare just using it as a backend system which might as well be replace by an SQL server with PKI.