9 ms·

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

by _pdp_ 5y ago

spydum 5y ago
Public relations, mostly.
rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
Docusign[1] has been using blockchain for a while now because it solves technical problems for their use cases. [1] https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain
- eterm 5y ago
  Did Docusign really have a problem that couldn't be solved by any other means of publishing the hash? Ultimately the hash comes from Docusign, so I'm not sure I can think of the problem case where someone doesn't trust Docusign to self publish that hash but does trust a hash that Docusign publishes to the blockchain.
  - danuker 5y ago
    I'd argue a more popular blockchain than their in-house one would provide stronger proof. For example, a Bitcoin one: https://www.proofofexistence.com/ https://www.proofofexistence.com/
    - tectec 5y ago
      It looks like that is using 0.00025 BTC per transaction, which currently is $12 USD, that seems quite steep for a single document verification.
  - bluesign 5y ago
    it is about timestamping basically nothing else. basically that cannot sign something in the past. Though you can do the same with sequence number, and publicly publishing all signed hashes.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.
  - wizeman 5y ago
    Presumably, by publishing the hash on a public blockchain they are creating a trusted record of when the hash was published, which can be verified after the fact and which cannot be modified or removed, with planet-scale proof-of-work level of cryptographic assurance. If they published the hashes on, say, their webpage or some third party's webpage, nothing would prevent them (or the third party) from redacting or removing the hash after the fact, given sufficient motivation.
    - captn3m0 5y ago
      RFC 3161 does the same, without a blockchain (public or private).
      - jsutton 5y ago
        And how would you use RFC 3161 as a company that wants that use case?
tootahe45 5y ago
Wowing govt officials and scamming public money.
- hn8788 5y ago
  Sometimes it's the government's idea in the first place. I work at a contracting company, and one of our government customers said they wanted a service that utilized blockchain technology. They didn't know what a blockchain was, or care what the blockchain powered service was, they just wanted to sound like they were responsible for acquiring cutting edge technology. Luckily that was shortly before NIST put out their research paper that said there is almost never a good reason to use a blockchain, and the government employee quickly lost interest.
  - WasimBhai 5y ago
    Link to the said paper, please?
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      Probably means this one from 2018: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf Brief quote from the conclusions: > The use of blockchain technology is still in its early stages, but it is built on widely understood and sound cryptographic principles. Currently, there is a lot of hype around the technology, and many proposed uses for it. Moving forward, it is likely that the hype will die down, and blockchain technology will become just another tool that can be used. Then there is a fairly large paragraph about limitations and choosing the right tool for the job rather than just trying to shoehorn blockchain in for its own sake.
ignoramous 5y ago
Blockchains are an irrevocable proof of record (immutability with cryptographic proof) unlike traditional databases that need to be audited to capture all updates. Amazon QLDB, though private but not a Blockchain, could be used as one: For ex, creating and maintaining customer wallets (per customer coupons and discounts specific to your service). Public blockchains could be used for accounting transparency, for example, for tracking donations and spends of a non-profit. Decentralised blockchains are of course being continually redefined and reinvented, with an alternate financial complex at the forefront of it all. There are likely many more usecases, but the ones most interesting to me are global payments infrastructure being built by stellar.org, celo.org, and diem.com. See also: https://www.hyperledger.org/ https://www.hyperledger.org/
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
  But how can a blockchain be actually and meaningfully "public" without proof of work and distributed mining establishing majority based consensus on what _is_. If you just store the equivalent of a blockchain somewhere then I don't see what benefit it provides over a database controlled by a consortium. It's all bullshit.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Presumably, there's a third party that keeps a copy of the blockchain. If you rewrite the history of your blockchain, they'll detect it. It's fair to ask why this public record needs to be in a blockchain though. You could store the record in plain HTML on a public website and have the Web Archive create periodic immutable snapshots of it.
    - 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
      Exacactly - you just need something equivalent to a certificate authority which signs states of the database and guarantees the correctness of the stored data.
      - ForHackernews 5y ago
picardo 5y ago
Permissioned blockchains can be useful in trade finance and international trade. Financial transactions across borders can be delayed to allow for clearance and settlement between several institutions, which requires multiple banking systems to verify the integrity of transaction and collect a lot of paper trail. There are several competing projects solving for that problem right now.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than just a centralized database. I'm very skeptical of these use cases.
  - speeder 5y ago
    The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal... US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russia and China. EDIT: common people, that was just an example, it doesn't mean future transactions between US and Iran would be done that way. It was just an easy to understand example.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      > The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. So what's the purpose of _private_ blockchains then? Grandparent comment was about "Permissioned blockchains can be useful..." not blockchain in general. How does it remain private in a trustless case? Alternatively, who keeps the blockchain private? Who manages access? If there is an impartial 3rd party, an "authority" or a "broker", a "governor" that all other parties can trust to do that, even if they don't trust each other ... can't that authority just use a database, with some checksums and signed rows if need be? What can't you get from a private github repo? Is the "private blockchain" centralised or decentralised? I feel that every time I see this discussion, the argument is shifted to a straw man whenever the wrong question is asked.
purple_ferret 5y ago
NY runs its Vaccine passport on an IBM blockchain citing privacy benefits: >special emphasis has been placed on the protection of an individual's privacy. Secure technologies, like blockchain and encryption, are woven throughout Excelsior Pass to help protect the data, making it verifiable and trusted. No private health data is stored or tracked within the apps. Excelsior Pass can be used to voluntarily show a QR code as proof of COVID-19 vaccination or negative test result via a digital smartphone wallet or printed credential without sharing underlying personal health details. https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-launch-excelsior-pass-help-fast-track-reopening-businesses-and https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-la...
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Reading through both that and IBM's site, I'm struggling to see how blockchain enables this in any way? Covid test and vaccine providers have to be trusted for any of that to work, and without the "trustless" element blockchain provides you literally zero advantages (with a huge amount of disadvantages). EDIT: I guess I could request the whitepaper from IBM and read it, I mean what's yet one more tech giant sending me spam and selling my info to advertisers going to hurt? But I don't see any way for the entire thing to work and avoid people making up fraudulent test results/vax records without trust. I mean even with trust a clinic could feasibly fake that stuff, but without trust pretty much anyone could do it. EDIT2: Requested the whitepaper from IBM and it's literally just an 11 page marketing PowerPoint. Mentions blockchain a few times but doesn't explain how it solves anything that a normal RDBMS (or even some fancy distributed one with immutable records etc. where all parties are trusted) couldn't do.
- weasel_words 5y ago
  No one, other than the city of NY, will have the full node. So in this use-case there is no distributed network in the first place. And never will be.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone. You can put information on the blockchain and others can be sure it can’t be removed. There are use cases.
- slver 5y ago
  Thing is, "without trusting anyone" isn't that relevant most times. The entire system of property rights is based on trusted notaries. Works as well as anything.
  - tnzm 5y ago
    > Works as well as anything. Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going. And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on monopoly.
    - slver 5y ago
      So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes. All right. By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.
      - tnzm 5y ago
        The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves. And it is already legal to beat up and kill each other over a property dispute. It just has to be a large enough dispute for the parties involved to be able to afford rebranding it as a "war".
        slver 5y ago
        Do you know this saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". You're that saying. Also "war" is the thing that happens between parties above which no legal frame or enforcement institution exists. Countries. There's no actual "international court" (there's the UN one, but it has no powers). This is why wars happen. So in fact, mentioning wars defeats your own point - yes, people will literally kill each other like savages when no legal repercussions exist. Wars show that. Because we have no world government, we can only apply mitigation strategies like sanctions, diplomacy, economic interdependence. These work, but only until a true scarcity occurs, where taking someone else's stuff is a solution. Then it's back to wars.
alkonaut 5y ago
Every company on the planet seems to be asking that. It’s like “AI”, one of those technologies that you can’t risk everyone else using while you don’t. So for some reason having a solution and look for the problem is suddenly acceptable. Few seem to find the problem though. If you read through typical descriptions of how blockchains can be applied in industry, you’ll notice that they are extremely vague. That should tell you something.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  Ummm Vet? Theta? Real worlds solutions to supply chain and video streaming, respectively.

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

by _pdp_ 5y ago

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

spydum 5y ago

Public relations, mostly.

rm_-rf_slash 5y ago

Docusign[1] has been using blockchain for a while now because it solves technical problems for their use cases. [1] https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain

eterm 5y ago
Did Docusign really have a problem that couldn't be solved by any other means of publishing the hash? Ultimately the hash comes from Docusign, so I'm not sure I can think of the problem case where someone doesn't trust Docusign to self publish that hash but does trust a hash that Docusign publishes to the blockchain.
- danuker 5y ago
  I'd argue a more popular blockchain than their in-house one would provide stronger proof. For example, a Bitcoin one: https://www.proofofexistence.com/ https://www.proofofexistence.com/
  - tectec 5y ago
    It looks like that is using 0.00025 BTC per transaction, which currently is $12 USD, that seems quite steep for a single document verification.
- bluesign 5y ago
  it is about timestamping basically nothing else. basically that cannot sign something in the past. Though you can do the same with sequence number, and publicly publishing all signed hashes.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.
- wizeman 5y ago
  Presumably, by publishing the hash on a public blockchain they are creating a trusted record of when the hash was published, which can be verified after the fact and which cannot be modified or removed, with planet-scale proof-of-work level of cryptographic assurance. If they published the hashes on, say, their webpage or some third party's webpage, nothing would prevent them (or the third party) from redacting or removing the hash after the fact, given sufficient motivation.
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    RFC 3161 does the same, without a blockchain (public or private).
    - jsutton 5y ago
      And how would you use RFC 3161 as a company that wants that use case?

tootahe45 5y ago

Wowing govt officials and scamming public money.

hn8788 5y ago
Sometimes it's the government's idea in the first place. I work at a contracting company, and one of our government customers said they wanted a service that utilized blockchain technology. They didn't know what a blockchain was, or care what the blockchain powered service was, they just wanted to sound like they were responsible for acquiring cutting edge technology. Luckily that was shortly before NIST put out their research paper that said there is almost never a good reason to use a blockchain, and the government employee quickly lost interest.
- WasimBhai 5y ago
  Link to the said paper, please?
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Probably means this one from 2018: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf Brief quote from the conclusions: > The use of blockchain technology is still in its early stages, but it is built on widely understood and sound cryptographic principles. Currently, there is a lot of hype around the technology, and many proposed uses for it. Moving forward, it is likely that the hype will die down, and blockchain technology will become just another tool that can be used. Then there is a fairly large paragraph about limitations and choosing the right tool for the job rather than just trying to shoehorn blockchain in for its own sake.

ignoramous 5y ago

Blockchains are an irrevocable proof of record (immutability with cryptographic proof) unlike traditional databases that need to be audited to capture all updates. Amazon QLDB, though private but not a Blockchain, could be used as one: For ex, creating and maintaining customer wallets (per customer coupons and discounts specific to your service). Public blockchains could be used for accounting transparency, for example, for tracking donations and spends of a non-profit. Decentralised blockchains are of course being continually redefined and reinvented, with an alternate financial complex at the forefront of it all. There are likely many more usecases, but the ones most interesting to me are global payments infrastructure being built by stellar.org, celo.org, and diem.com. See also: https://www.hyperledger.org/ https://www.hyperledger.org/

74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
But how can a blockchain be actually and meaningfully "public" without proof of work and distributed mining establishing majority based consensus on what _is_. If you just store the equivalent of a blockchain somewhere then I don't see what benefit it provides over a database controlled by a consortium. It's all bullshit.
- nindalf 5y ago
  Presumably, there's a third party that keeps a copy of the blockchain. If you rewrite the history of your blockchain, they'll detect it. It's fair to ask why this public record needs to be in a blockchain though. You could store the record in plain HTML on a public website and have the Web Archive create periodic immutable snapshots of it.
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
    Exacactly - you just need something equivalent to a certificate authority which signs states of the database and guarantees the correctness of the stored data.
    - ForHackernews 5y ago

picardo 5y ago

Permissioned blockchains can be useful in trade finance and international trade. Financial transactions across borders can be delayed to allow for clearance and settlement between several institutions, which requires multiple banking systems to verify the integrity of transaction and collect a lot of paper trail. There are several competing projects solving for that problem right now.

koheripbal 5y ago
I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than just a centralized database. I'm very skeptical of these use cases.
- speeder 5y ago
  The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal... US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russia and China. EDIT: common people, that was just an example, it doesn't mean future transactions between US and Iran would be done that way. It was just an easy to understand example.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. So what's the purpose of _private_ blockchains then? Grandparent comment was about "Permissioned blockchains can be useful..." not blockchain in general. How does it remain private in a trustless case? Alternatively, who keeps the blockchain private? Who manages access? If there is an impartial 3rd party, an "authority" or a "broker", a "governor" that all other parties can trust to do that, even if they don't trust each other ... can't that authority just use a database, with some checksums and signed rows if need be? What can't you get from a private github repo? Is the "private blockchain" centralised or decentralised? I feel that every time I see this discussion, the argument is shifted to a straw man whenever the wrong question is asked.

purple_ferret 5y ago

NY runs its Vaccine passport on an IBM blockchain citing privacy benefits: >special emphasis has been placed on the protection of an individual's privacy. Secure technologies, like blockchain and encryption, are woven throughout Excelsior Pass to help protect the data, making it verifiable and trusted. No private health data is stored or tracked within the apps. Excelsior Pass can be used to voluntarily show a QR code as proof of COVID-19 vaccination or negative test result via a digital smartphone wallet or printed credential without sharing underlying personal health details. https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-launch-excelsior-pass-help-fast-track-reopening-businesses-and https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-la...

HideousKojima 5y ago
Reading through both that and IBM's site, I'm struggling to see how blockchain enables this in any way? Covid test and vaccine providers have to be trusted for any of that to work, and without the "trustless" element blockchain provides you literally zero advantages (with a huge amount of disadvantages). EDIT: I guess I could request the whitepaper from IBM and read it, I mean what's yet one more tech giant sending me spam and selling my info to advertisers going to hurt? But I don't see any way for the entire thing to work and avoid people making up fraudulent test results/vax records without trust. I mean even with trust a clinic could feasibly fake that stuff, but without trust pretty much anyone could do it. EDIT2: Requested the whitepaper from IBM and it's literally just an 11 page marketing PowerPoint. Mentions blockchain a few times but doesn't explain how it solves anything that a normal RDBMS (or even some fancy distributed one with immutable records etc. where all parties are trusted) couldn't do.
weasel_words 5y ago
No one, other than the city of NY, will have the full node. So in this use-case there is no distributed network in the first place. And never will be.

tinus_hn 5y ago

Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone. You can put information on the blockchain and others can be sure it can’t be removed. There are use cases.

slver 5y ago
Thing is, "without trusting anyone" isn't that relevant most times. The entire system of property rights is based on trusted notaries. Works as well as anything.
- tnzm 5y ago
  > Works as well as anything. Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going. And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on monopoly.
  - slver 5y ago
    So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes. All right. By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.
    - tnzm 5y ago
      The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves. And it is already legal to beat up and kill each other over a property dispute. It just has to be a large enough dispute for the parties involved to be able to afford rebranding it as a "war".
      - slver 5y ago
        Do you know this saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". You're that saying. Also "war" is the thing that happens between parties above which no legal frame or enforcement institution exists. Countries. There's no actual "international court" (there's the UN one, but it has no powers). This is why wars happen. So in fact, mentioning wars defeats your own point - yes, people will literally kill each other like savages when no legal repercussions exist. Wars show that. Because we have no world government, we can only apply mitigation strategies like sanctions, diplomacy, economic interdependence. These work, but only until a true scarcity occurs, where taking someone else's stuff is a solution. Then it's back to wars.

alkonaut 5y ago

Every company on the planet seems to be asking that. It’s like “AI”, one of those technologies that you can’t risk everyone else using while you don’t. So for some reason having a solution and look for the problem is suddenly acceptable. Few seem to find the problem though. If you read through typical descriptions of how blockchains can be applied in industry, you’ll notice that they are extremely vague. That should tell you something.

SubiculumCode 5y ago
Ummm Vet? Theta? Real worlds solutions to supply chain and video streaming, respectively.