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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'
by 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 agoOnce it is digital isn't the money use-case really about proving the transfer of wealth?
- Canada 6y agoYes, 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 agoTimestamping 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 agoI 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.
- jkepler 6y agoMoney is the first and obvious use case when you have a decentralized trust machine. But since money is only our shared language for communicating value, censorship resistant publishing won't be far behind.
- tupputuppu 6y agoIt's 12 years since the advent of blockchain yet there isn't a single good example of such censorship resistant publish ng. What gives? I'd imagine you must be wrong.
- Canada 6y agoCensorship resistant publishing can be bought for a price like any other service. Blockchains need only provide a medium for buying and selling of that, not actually publish the data itself. Case in point: Storage coins are designed to reward with money those who make available data they were given for the duration of time they agreed to make it available for, or conversely punishing them with losses if they renege on that agreement. Some things money can't buy, but for everything else a blockchain can organize payment for it.