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In other news, water is wet. Obviously!!!! Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. Blockchain is a

• chadash 6y ago
  This. How many real use cases are there where you really need to distribute trust? For currency, there's some sense in it. But when i hear things like using blockchain for contracts or for keeping track of supply chain... it always seems like what people really want is just a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff. Does anyone have any specific examples where blockchain would be a better solution?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • whitepaint 6y ago
    Defi
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      [deleted]
  • phailhaus 6y ago
    Filecoin appears to be an appropriate use case for distributed trust. Haven't really looked into it though.
  • throwaway3699 6y ago
    Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really trust any part of it.
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really trust any part of it But the part you can't trust is in the physical realm. The fanciest blockchain won't tell you if the package's contents have been tampered with or pilfered.
    • chewzerita 6y ago
      From my limited knowledge (basically 0) of supply chains, I disagree. (Though I am neutral on the statement "you can't really trust any part of it.") The anecdote I heard was that say you have a blockchain to keep track of your goods shipping on trucks. When the trucks leave and enter a facility their payload is entered into the blockchain. The idea is that it will make sure that every party along the supply chain can say "well I got the next person what they needed" so you can easily put blame on and correct for missing/failing items. Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that some of the items were stolen from a truck (whether by an employee or otherwise). The truck arrives at the next facility, scans in and certifies that they have the proper items and none are the wiser! Hold on, can't they just physically check at each stop to actually make sure that they have the right cargo? Bingo! At that point, what problem does the blockchain actually solve? Blockchain works okay-ish for digital goods (cryptocurrency), but completely falls apart for physical goods.
    • lottin 6y ago
      You can't trust it but somehow your entire business already depends on it?
      • hef19898 6y ago
        You can very much trust it. Mostly, that is. The issues usually occur when data flows and physical flows get disconnected. No way blockchain will solve that.
      • throwaway3699 6y ago
        Most companies aren't completely aligned with all their suppliers. Just look at Apple trying to root out child labour. A formally verified supply chain has some limited use cases because you can prove some pieces aren't lying to you (e.g. that you're actually not sourcing your parts from conflict materials, and they are coming from somebody reputable).
  • tal8d 6y ago
    Property deeds. It is amazing how bad counties are at such a simple charge, I know three people (in three different counties) who had to deal with the local government losing records - one of them only learning this after a neighbor tried to annex a chunk of his land.
    • robin_reala 6y ago
      OK, but you don’t need blockchain for that, any sort of Merkle tree will work.
      • Tenoke 6y ago
        You don't need a blockchain but a blockchain can potentially give the public guarantees that an opaque government solution usually does not.
        • robin_reala 6y ago
          How about a transparent government solution? https://www.registers.service.gov.uk/ https://www.registers.service.gov.uk/
      • tal8d 6y ago
        The question wasn't "What is the ideal data structure?"
    • GavinMcG 6y ago
      Is it really that amazing when getting funding for anything takes pulling teeth? Voters have been convinced that investing in government operations is theft.
      • tal8d 6y ago
        > Voters Just the two? Because it has been a while since I heard anyone ask "Who is John Galt?"
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  • allie1 6y ago
    Govt records, registries of people born, death certificates, deeds on land, swift for banking, any sort of info of public interest like procurement agreements, notary documents, licenses (govt level, like drivers license etc)
    • eterm 6y ago
      The very first thing in your list is literally a central authority.
      • allie1 6y ago
        It certainly should be, and this is no problem in developed democracies. Not so much in the developing world - leaves room for corruption. and btw look at Estonia - implemented blockchain for most of its govt stuff - including judiciary, and they are among the fastest in the world in terms of time to resolve matters once they reach the courts ref: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/security-and-safety/e-justice/ https://e-estonia.com/solutions/security-and-safety/e-justic...
        • hertzrat 6y ago
          Imagine how impossible it becomes fix a wrongful conviction. You could never fully clear that persons name because the “crime” would forever be on the books publicly
          • allie1 6y ago
            True, it’s not something you can apply everywhere. But there are use cases where the downside is virtually nil.
      • Sargos 6y ago
        Well yeah, blockchains are inherently doing what governments historically have done but in a safer, more scalable way. Anything that is just a public record that needs to be kept is a slam dunk for blockchains.
  • rglullis 6y ago
    As another pointed out: supply chain does make sense. There are plenty of cases where it's better to not have to trust on any particular entity. Examples: - Marketing and advertisement campaigns. How much ad fraud exist and how much money is spent by advertisers without knowing if they are actually reaching their customers. Do you trust Google to actually mitigate these problems? - Health care: remember Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault? Nowadays Apple/Google/Samsung wants to collect that data. Wouldn't you rather have it in a way that only doctors had access to it?
    • detaro 6y ago
      > Wouldn't you rather have it in a way that only doctors had access to it? How is a blockchain the answer here? The "distribute all data" and "keep history forever" attributes seem actively bad for healthcare use cases.
      • rglullis 6y ago
        That is a good question. The answer is that you don't put the data in the blockchain, you just keep the log of who is interacting with the patient and who needs access to the records. ;)
        • detaro 6y ago
          Even which doctor someone visited is confidential data one ideally would not preserve when not needed anymore (and "ideally" might very well be law). Health data is messy, and I have trouble imagining a solution that puts it on a blockchain but allows only private access to everything and has a chance of fixing instances of leaked credentials while still getting value from the fact that there is a blockchain. (If there is prior work on this that actually goes into detail I'd be happy about pointers - sadly a lot of this stuff seems to end at the stage of whitepapers when it comes to public information)
          • willcipriano 6y ago
            >Even which doctor someone visited is confidential data one ideally would not preserve when not needed anymore. Indeed, for example "John Smith went to see a HIV specialist on Monday" is protected information and would be a HIPAA violation if leaked. Its much simpler to throw it in a relational database and only let the HIV specialist and staff see the appointment.
  • duxup 6y ago
    Even beyond that, how often do you want to do business with / complete a transaction with someone who you trust THAT little? I suspect there is a lot more trust involved in every day things than maybe Blockchain assumes.
    • Tenoke 6y ago
      >Even beyond that, how often do you want to do business with / complete a transaction with someone who you trust THAT little? Not often precisely because of the risks but if those risks are minimized it can expand your range of potential business partners.
      • duxup 6y ago
        I'm not sure there would be a desire to do so. I think that often trust to some extent is a baseline requirement for most people to do business in the first place.
        • Tenoke 6y ago
          It isn't. One of the reasons why e.g. the stock market is so huge is that participants rarely need to trust each other as the guarantees are provided elsewhere. Imagine if every buyer had to trust every seller (and vice versa) on every transaction.
          • duxup 6y ago
            Because they trust the exchange who does more than blockchain though. That example seems off.
            • Tenoke 6y ago
              ..And here you can trust the blockchain instead of the other party.
              • 6y ago
  • rebuilder 6y ago
    Storing contracts on the blockchain does seem a bit pointless. Smart contracts, OTOH, would actually enable new kinds of business if they can beade workable. That's a pretty big if, IMO, but in theory at least they seem like a valid use of blockchain.
  • PaulHoule 6y ago
    If you had a few traders who sit underneath a buttonwood tree and don't trade with anyone else (e.g. the founders of the New York Stock Exchange) it might be OK. Say you have a consortium of five banks: 5 copies of the database is not a crazy price to pay for a high level of resilience. Make that 5000 banks and you are paying 1000x as much but not getting 1000x the resilience. So many people are obsessed with peer-to-peer solutions, I could also see a blockchain as an answer to (say) having a book lending database for a few friends.
    • rglullis 6y ago
      You might be interested in https://trustlines.network https://trustlines.network
  • Xelbair 6y ago
    Real estate deed ownership database - immutable distributed database spread around regional government offices. Speaking from my experience, the records are being kept horribly over here, there were many projects to cenralize it but the original data is in such sorry state that it is basically impossible. Not to mention that it is very profitable for some that it is in such sorry state. They key idea is that you are unable to modify who owned what in the past, only change ownership in the current time, and the records, as per current system, are spread all over the local government entities. Same thing for financial ledgers - immutable record of transactions to which only banks can write to. I think that stocks are too volatile, but it is a such shock to me that you can only find out who actually owns a specific stock at T-2 .. In both cases there is no competition for who solves the next block faster, so costs of computation costs can be kept low. I'm more attached to immutability of such databases, than distributed trust, but one cannot exist without other in blockchain.
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > you are unable to modify who owned what in the past So we throw out the entire body of law around fraudulent conveyance?
      • sandworm101 6y ago
        Yes. Many proponents of blockchain speak with glee at how doing so will "cut lawyers out of the process". Lol. In every generation there is someone who thinks they can do away with the legal profession. Lawyers have walked the earth for thousands of years and shall continue to do so for many more.
        • tehlike 6y ago
          This very much like the back and forth we have on microservices vs monolith. Every generation likes the cool thing only to revert back to mean. People will go decentralized, then centralized, then decentralized, etc. We built centralized government bodies for a reason. The aspect of blockchain + bitcoin that's pretty appealing is limited supply & formulated inflation & cryptographic guarantees. Applying this to all other domains is stretching it a bit.
  • honest_guy 6y ago
    > Does anyone have any specific examples where blockchain would be a better solution? Currency, payment processing and banking are definitely the primary use cases - which is nothing short of revolutionary, in my opinion. In less stable/poorer societies, access to banking, trustless payments, and an immutable ledger are immensely valuable. Even here in the west, I would kill for an alternative to PayPal for international payments. I was recently forced to receive payment via PayPal. Between their 'generous' exchange rates and fees, I lost out on hundreds of dollars. Shortly after, they locked my funds for 25 days while they reviewed my account. I had zero recourse and just had to wait them out. The same transaction on Cardano would've cost 7c plus the cost of exchanging it back to fiat.
  • totalZero 6y ago
    > a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff You hit the nail on the head. In the US we can trust our third parties. Europe too. But that's not always the case elsewhere. I am reminded of a friend who told me he wanted to sell some stock held in a bank in his country in Latin America, but the bank refused to process his transaction for a few weeks. By the time he was finally able to sell, the price had fallen greatly. It later turned out that the owner of the bank was selling his own shares during that time. Blockchain is good for systems where there are few transactions and energy is cheap, but there is no one single trustworthy actor. That's often the case in the third world. Third world equities exchanges (not places like Brazil and Chile but other countries with very undeveloped financial markets) would benefit from blockchain. There's not much liquidity there and the individual investor ends up getting pushed to the side when the large players want to trade. Even if you have a central clearinghouse and a liquid exchange, corruption is a factor. I don't pretend to know how best to implement blockchain for electronic exchanges, but I suppose the starting point would be to build a settlement system that has the imprimatur of a coalition of different governments (like Mercosur or Comunidad Andina), hold the shares in trust somewhere, and use the settlement system to process exchange-traded transactions from the constituent countries. Eventually, exchanges don't have to be the origination points of transactions, and you could presumably just get bids and offers directly from other participants over the internet. No guarantees that you are getting the best ones, but that doesn't matter as much for third world markets because the prices are wide and slow-moving anyway.
    • redisman 6y ago
      If you can't trust the government then what are the chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes away their corruption powers? The only way you could adopt it is if it's developed in a trusted country, but then you'd be pitching your corrupt government to use a (possibly) hostile countries system to manage property. Or that they will actually use the blockchain to resolve disputes rather than just telling you to piss off?
      • totalZero 6y ago
        > If you can't trust the government then what are the chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes away their corruption powers? OK well I can't speak for Asia or Africa but I am familiar with the Americas... Aside from the fact that governments always look for PR campaigns that make them look fair, they also know they aren't going to be in power forever, and they suffer (get fired, thrown in jail, you name it) when power changes hands. If you can insulate the financial system from those shocks then it's beneficial for both parties because they each protect their financial downside. Also, the country as a whole grows when markets get healthier and can attract more investment. That's good for everyone. It's not that you can't get the government to set up and use a particular system. It's that individual corporations within the country affiliate with a particular faction/party and try to bend the system to take advantage of other participants. The corruption happens under the skin. You can establish a competent central actor but you can't trust him not to bend the rules, like a horny professor when an attractive student with a B asks for a low A. The third world is one big hackathon for the misuse of institutions. Look at Morales' successful efforts to wriggle out from the grasp of term limits; he went to the Supreme Court and asked his buddies there to declare him eligible due to "human rights." He didn't say "I don't care about the Constitution," even though he wanted to violate its rules. They don't want the institution to look like it's crumbling, even when they're the ones chipping away at it. If you elevate the exchange to a multinational blockchain then you have competing factions, lots of ebb and flow, and the potential for outside participants. And you get the "i don't have to trust the others" aspect of blockchain. The whole point of developing robust systems is to make them failure tolerant in the face of perturbations, so we should apply them to the perturbed applications instead of building blockchain for rideshare/dildoes/whatever that helps nobody with an actual problem.
  • coredog64 6y ago
    A former coworker has been using blockchain for seafood catch reporting in the Pacific. It’s a complicated legal situation (EEZs, treaties, illegal fishing, monitoring for habitat collapse) made more difficult by expensive/slow internet connectivity.
  • Animats 6y ago
    Even if you need to distribute trust, you may just need a system where half a dozen or so players maintain replicated databases with duplicate transaction logs and a way to compare them.
    • dnautics 6y ago
      exactly. A database with a running hash is probably good for like 99% of "blockchain" use cases.
  • worik 6y ago
    Currency? Money is a lot of things, but one of these things is it is a web of trust. What a currency needs is a central bank. Historically we have tried a lot of things, and the most stable, reliable, and trustworthy turns out to be fiat currency with a central bank. The "crypto currency", using blockchains, experiment has been a colossal failure. Trust matters, and it needs a source.
    • madmax96 6y ago
      in what ways have crypto currencies been colossal failures?
      • worik 6y ago
        Transaction capacity is far too low. Bitcoin is essentially unusable when transactions take over a hour to complete Volatility. Currency must be vaguely stable. Bitcoin is all over the place, most of the others have very low liquidity. The waste of energy. Scams galore. What in this space is not a scam? There have been so many scams. Enough?
  • bluesign 6y ago
    I think when people thinking blockchain they are thinking in line of bitcoin, so it is confusing. Better to think as "signing messages". also better to think as offline on some steps.
  • zamfi 6y ago
    > it always seems like what people really want is just a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff. And also a third party to sue when things go south, or to correct errors (at scale, humans always make errors!), or to be subpoenaed to provide information, etc. These are all advantages in some contexts, and disadvantages in others. But those specific examples of when blockchain is better should probably also be better because there's no one to sue, no changes to make ever, and an information-hiding advantage.
  • koonsolo 6y ago
    Sometimes I don't get the hackernews community. Internet moving from protocols to monopolies is bad. But when we have a cool protocol for ledgers, then no, we want a monopoly.
    • mason55 6y ago
      The problem is that the cool protocol for ledgers doesn't actually address many of the business needs while simultaneously being pitched as if it does. Very few people are arguing that blockchain has no benefit. But it also has costs and in many cases the costs outweigh the benefits. Tracking the provenance of your tomatoes on a blockchain has real costs over putting the data in a database, and you still need to have someone you trust who can vouch that the tomatoes were grown where they said they were. If you're already trusting someone to say "these tomatoes are authentic, Nebraska-grown tomatoes" then you might as well have them manage the whole supply chain. Also, I don't think many people would complain about a monopoly that had open data access and open protocols and allowed interoperability. If your tomato-supply-chain-management company told you that you couldn't export the data about your tomatoes or you could only access it via their terrible app then THAT would be the argument for moving to a blockchain. If at any time they could inflate the supply of Nebraska-grown tomatoes by clicking a button then that would be an argument for blockchain. The need for trust is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for putting something on a blockchain. Too often it's presented as sufficient.
      • deleted 6y ago
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    • HideousKojima 6y ago
      There are already technologies that work similarly to blockchain (such as Git) without needing blockchain to work. You can have distributed, immutable databases without blockchain. Blockchain's only real advantage is that it eliminates the need for trust. If your system doesn't need to be trustless, there are far more efficient (energy and otherwise) tools that already exist and accomplish everything else that blockchain does.
  • baby 6y ago
    The supply chain stuff always sounds to me like a scam, and every time I had someone pitch me a blockchain supply chain startup it was indeed a scam (and I told them so). Now maybe there’s an element I’m missing, but there’s still a fundamental problem in linking a real world object to something on the chain. Digital currency works because it is only on the chain, and we manage to agree that it has value, or we use trusted third parties to move that value to the real world in something we can tell is real USD (although the banking system is so opaque that...)
    • x86ARMsRace 6y ago
      You're not missing anything. I've developed a prototype blockchain for a supply chain before at the behest of a non-technical manager at some point. You hit the nail on the head with the problem of crossing into the real world. You can't validate the real world object mathematically, so if you lie to the blockchain, there's no way to tell. So far the only use case that I can really find for this are digital identity systems where the blockchain itself serves a double purpose as both a highly redundant system, and a byzantine fault tolerant distributed storage system. I can see the value in being able to maintain a strong ledger of ID uses. The EU looked into this from what I understand, and I think they stood up a system for this kind of thing. My big TLDR from working on chaincode and stuff like that is this: if your goal is to have a high security digital asset (eg: tokens and ID certs), then a blockchain might be useful. If your goal is to interface with the real world, then you're just going to be chaining yourself to a bulky inelegant solution that won't even address your core problem.
      • baby 6y ago
        The first time I felt like there was real potential for a blockchain, outside of digital currencies, was with DNS + PKI systems. Pretty much identity for websites. I thought it was a much sexier alternative to the current way DNS works and how certificate authorities work. Now does it scale as well? Does it work well for light clients? And is it the right system when you know people will make mistakes and lose keys?
  • koonsolo 6y ago
    History of second hand cars. (Repairs, accidents, maintenance, original options, paint, etc) Currently, there are various parties that try to collect this info, but it's still full of holes. Plus, it's not a single party, even for the same area (eg EU). It gets more complicated for import/export. Let's say you can "solve" this by having a single worldwide party that handles it. Do you really want such a monopoly? How much will you pay then to get the data? Why not solve it with a ledger protocol?
    • hectormalot 6y ago
      Since there currently is no such world-wide central party, why would a blockchain based solution be successful if the central party is (apparently) not? In this specific example: are car dealers not participating because they don't trust the central party (case for blockchain) or because (lazy|not in their interest|inconvenient|...)? If the latter, then blockchain is not solving the actual problem.
      • koonsolo 6y ago
        You have a few parties now that collect this info and sell it. They are pretty successful. But as a buyer, you pay around $50, and the amount of info highly depends on the car and the party collecting it. Right now, selling a car with an official maintenance book is always a benefit. The real benefit is of course on the buyer side, who wants to verify what he is buying. So a car with an "official" log would be more valuable than without. When this is the case, it of course is better for the seller to have such a log. I've been in this space for a short while, and I can definitely see it working.
        • ziml77 6y ago
          But if the benefit is to the buyer, what incentive is there for anyone to enter information about the car's history into this blockchain? The person who owns the car isn't going to since it has a chance to reduce the value. And the company that's selling the info wouldn't start putting the info into the blockchain if it meant not being able to sell the data anymore.
  • PHGamer 6y ago
    if the internet is to be decentralized this it should all be block chain but i digress not going to happen.
  • rapjr9 6y ago
    Seems likely there would be good uses for blockchains in decentralized systems. However, we have not built many decentralized systems so far.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  my knowledge is near none over the technicalities.. but I had this view that blockchains would be good for planet wide "unattended" data sources.
  • caogecym 6y ago
    something like storing a blog text for thousand years, especially after the author passed away where the blog could not be maintained by the author.
    • agumonkey 6y ago
      no this is not helpful for the flow of the system, more like supply tracking, logistics, farming..
      • jayd16 6y ago
        Except it has no power over the physical world. Just as one can lie on a ledger and say slave labor did not make these resources, so too can some one lie onto a block chain about where resources came from. The chains can only really enforce protection on their own currencies, no?
        • agumonkey 6y ago
          It was not about the initial data but the overall coverage and self management. How many businesses still have their own ad-hoc half manual uninteroperable process and apps ?
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  More importantly, you don’t need it if your domain effectively creates a centralized authority. All of the examples of tracking John Deere parts on the chain were stupid, because functionally there had to be a central party controlling the list of what serial numbers were valid and which weren’t; John Deere themselves.
• rukshn 6y ago
  I recently wrote about a disaster that happened to an online ticketing service which decided to use a blockchain as a database There are lessons to be learnt who try to put everyth to a blockchain https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-meant-to-be-invented-the-story-of-blockevent/ https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-meant-to-be-...
• acdha 6y ago
  > Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Bitcoin’s design meant that anyone who buys in later will be making money for early adopters, and that gave everyone a strong conflict of interest clouding their technical judgement. Subsequent blockchains might not have copied the exact deflationary model but the get-rich-quick-without-contributing-anything mentality has become universal.
  • SkyMarshal 6y ago
    > Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. > Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Not the Bitcoin community, but certainly most of the others. The Bitcoin community has been pretty clear about Bitcoin's use case since the beginning - inflation-proof digital money - and as long as it remains constrained to that scope then that's actually something it can do. Bitcoin's programmability was deliberately limited to prevent overloading the network and compromising or diluting its core use case. That also prevented the community from advertising it as a general purpose computing platform and panacea for all the world's ills. That's something all the other blockchain communities have been doing, not Bitcoin's.
    • acdha 6y ago
      Yes the Bitcoin community, more so than most others because it's built on a deflationary model which heavily favors early adopters. One of the major reasons it's failed on its goals to be a currency is that the deflationary model encourages passive speculation holding it rather than using it, but that only works as long as new money is being pumped into the system. Even cursorily following the topic will show many examples of advocates making unrealistic promises which make little sense from the perspective of building a healthy community but are entirely understandable when you realize that they are hoping to see a personal windfall from everyone they convince to use it.
• mempko 6y ago
  There are details about blockchains that are often missed. That is, not only is trust distributed, but software execution is distributed. Smart contracts in bitcoin and eth are an interesting concept. Think AWS lambda but distributed. So user centric programming abstractions where users can execute queries and directly put data in the database is interesting concept. Of course you can also do this without a blockchain too if you can deal with a trusted party.
• jpfr 6y ago
  Its even worse. In many cases blockchains still require a central authority that controls the write access to the system. A blockchain / distributed ledger can be easily flooded with spam. The only way around that is to make access expensive. That works for the "actual" blockchain because the effort to put something in the chain is the money. In applications where you don't have want expensive writes, a central gatekeeper (or at least a cabal of power-nodes) is needed to restrict access to prevent spamming.
• jayd16 6y ago
  The race to the bottom design of most blockchain tech also facilitates defacto central authorities.
• war1025 6y ago
  In my experience, when people say "blockchain" what they actually want is something closer to a Merkle tree like what Git uses for its commit hashes. It's great to be able to say "here is the list of changes, and I can re-run them and come up with the same hash, so nothing was tampered with" The "here is a random key that took a lot of work to find and when you add it to the hash chain we get X number of zeroes" part is really not that useful in most cases.
• ori_b 6y ago
  > Blockchain is a very very very inefficient database that removes the need for a central trust authority. When run at a large enough scale that 51% attacks are infeasible.