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Does anybody know some good real life examples of projects using blockchain? (other than cryptocurrencies of course) Whenever I tried to find some all I can fi

Does anybody know some good real life examples of projects using blockchain? (other than cryptocurrencies of course) Whenever I tried to find some all I can find is proof of concepts, or new projects to evaluate the technology, but they never seem to consolidate. I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising.

dmitriid 5y ago
> I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising. Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... And the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
accurrent 5y ago
Where I live, the tertiary institutions place your degree on a blockchain. TBH I have know idea why a simple digital signature would not suffice but I guess blockchain sounds cooler.
naraga 5y ago
Microsoft ION - Decentralized identity anchored in Bitcoin ledger. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-blog/ion-we-have-liftoff/ba-p/1441555 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-bl...
- muyuu 5y ago
  yea but it's built on top of bitcoin, so basically not its own blockchain
  - naraga 5y ago
    true. i think that many of these L1 theoretical usecases should move to L2s of existing blockchain(s). this way you dont have to built your own incentive structure (mining) and you inherit security of base layer. anyway, still think that most usecases dont really need decentralised structure at all. definitelly anything that is natively non-digital.
    - 2cb 5y ago
      > true. i think that many of these L1 theoretical usecases should move to L2s of existing blockchain(s). This is basically the current trend. DApps being developed on existing blockchains instead of new blockchains being invented for each use case. The only reason L2 blockchains are even so big (e.g. Matic) is because of Ethereum's insane gas fees and the never ending delays in rolling out Eth2. Otherwise there'd be no real need to even have L2 blockchains, you can just run your smart contract directly on the L1 blockchain if it's efficient enough to scale properly.
johnnycerberus 5y ago
Trust in people cannot be replaced. Blockchain is achieving exactly the opposite of that, it tells us that trust and legal arrangements should be encoded into software instead of being put into effect with software.
- cyanydeez 5y ago
  eg, NFTs are fungible in so much that machines care about precision, whereas only an autist would notice of you modified a few pixels to change a hash. people based products need more fuzzy logic than hashes.
jyriand 5y ago
Not sure what do you mean by blockchain exactly, but maybe how about this: https://guardtime.com/ https://guardtime.com/
2cb 5y ago
There's a load of DApps using the blockchain. These are obviously built on top of cryptocurrency blockchain platforms, but they are not themselves cryptocurrencies and do run on top of blockchains. The most obvious (because it's currently very well publicised) example is NFTs and the markets they're sold on through smart contracts. I'm not making any comment on the value of NFTs themselves here, simply pointing out they have become a popular use case for blockchain technology that isn't cryptocurrency. I've also read about blockchain managed supply chain solutions including in distribution of Covid vaccines. Currently this isn't a common use case but it seems to be one that's getting pushed hard recently.
mikkel 5y ago
lbry is a blockchain of assets with an example of odyssey, a youtube competitor. It is a censorship resistant way to share information. defi is recreating traditional banking. Plenty of ways to stake USD & get loans. nfts allow artists to monetize their efforts. bat redefines how internet monetization can work, based on swarm intelligence and micropayments. audius is enabling musicians to share their creation. tokenization is a way to represent any divisible effort. Perfect for sharing ownership in a company, home, etc. There are a bunch more, way more than I'm able to keep track of. But the biggest use case of blockchain is still, imo, p2p electronic cash.
- gbronner 5y ago
  Seems to be cryptoransoms
qayxc 5y ago
IBM has their "TradeLens" [0] (ironically unreachable at the time of posting) product [1], which was developed for Maersk and seems to have been adopted by a few global logistics providers. [0] https://www.tradelens.com https://www.tradelens.com [1] https://docs.tradelens.com https://docs.tradelens.com
- messutied 5y ago
  This looks interesting, logistics and supply chain seems to be one of the few recurring use cases I see that looks somewhat promising.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    Doesn't require blockchain and doesn't solve the actual problem these companies have: that the records are correct as entered.
    - 3np 5y ago
      Have you worked in these industries? Irrevocable timestamps and ordering for cryptographic signatures provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before. History can be rewritten opaquely in non-blockchain ledger systems. If all stakeholders can fully trust everyone involved (and their security), your point may hold, but that is not always the case.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > History can be rewritten opaquely in non-blockchain ledger systems. Ah yes. As if re-writing history was the primary major concern. Let's say I'm a malicious actor. I say I shipped 1 ton of gold bricks, and entered that on the blockchain that "provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before". Only one single brick reaches the final destination. No history was overwritten. So, how does blockchain help?
        qayxc 5y ago
dspillett 5y ago
Hashed-block chains can be used to prove data history has not been tampered with, i.e. an audit log is true. If you change something in the history/audit the related blockchain from that point in time onwards becomes invalid. There needs to be some 3rd party interaction to completely believe what this chain of block hashes tells you, as someone editing history in a DB could in theory replay all other transactions and recreate the ledger from that point onwards to remove evidence of the modification. Search for "ledger tables" and "distributed ledger" for more info. The idea pre-dates cryptocurrencies by quite some time. I've seen small scale implementations of it, and talks about MS researching the area in relation to SQL Server and similar offerings. Edit: reading further down the comments, it looks like MS's work has recently left the research stage and is being offered as an alpha product in some Azure regions: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-azure-sql-database-ledger/ba-p/2200401 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-... Other comments below mention similar ledger features in other products/services too.
- 2cb 5y ago
  Honestly, that Azure Ledger SQL idea makes more sense for today's enterprise systems than a decentralised blockchain. Not because "blockchains are bad" which unfortunately is what most of the comments have turned into, but rather because it makes a lot more sense in a business context. Azure's main competition is obviously AWS. And AWS already offer a cloud-based blockchain service used by many big names.[1] Seems to me that Microsoft is just following in their footsteps with that new approach of centralising the ledger. Basically the same thing Amazon's main offering does. Most large enterprises right now are turning to centralised cloud solutions, that's just the way the market is right now, companies just want to stick their entire businesses on hyperscalers. It's simply easier and cheaper to move an on-prem database to a cloud service than it is to create and maintain a decentralised network. Taking the blockchain's data integrity features and adding them to existing cloud services therefore makes a lot more sense for actual enterprise use today when you want to compete with AWS and sell cloud subscriptions which Azure does. I do believe decentralisation in general will mature over time, and certainly many arguments can be made in its favour including for enterprise. I do find it concerning that virtually every big company and even government organisations run everything on AWS, GCP, Azure. And once you have everything running in one of those bubbles there's lock-in. I'm sure most of us would agree that's hardly ideal. But at the end of the day if you're catering to enterprise and enterprise is saying "we want to throw everything on your servers and have you manage it for us" you have to listen to the market. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/
blamestross 5y ago
Git
- blamestross 5y ago
  Downvote away, but Git is the ONLY real use case out there that is successful and uses something resembling a block chain.
  - 2cb 5y ago
    Are NFTs not successful then? Note I'm not trying to argue one way or another about intrinsic value or any type of moral value or any of the other unrelated tangents I often see discussions about NFTs turn into. But objectively, as a product that exists solely on top of blockchains, NFTs are very very successful. Something that has allowed multiple individuals to auction off artworks for upwards of $60m cannot be called a failed use case.
    - _manifold 5y ago
      If your metric for success is simply how much money is being pumped through it, then in a sense NFTs are successful (although NFT prices and volume have been plummeting recently [0]). However, I believe that the majority of people driving the popularity of NFTs fall into two overlapping camps: people who are simply trying to make money, and people who misunderstand or are otherwise oblivious to how the technology works and its limitations. To me it just seems more like a gold rush situation and does nothing to inspire confidence in the underlying technology. Certainly there are people out there trying to leverage NFTs for more legitimate purposes - such as digital rights management and virtual items for video games - and those applications may be dubious enough by themselves. In the way they are generally being used, though, I wouldn't call NFTs a "success" any more than the South Sea Bubble was. [0] https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/30/prices-nfts-dropping/ https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/30/prices-nfts-dropping/
    - Hjfrf 5y ago
      The only selling point of NFTs is that they are poorly understood, making them useful for fraud. Specifically wash trading/money laundering. Is that really a success?
atonse 5y ago
The most obvious and widespread use of the concept of block chains in my opinion is git. It’s quite literally a distributed, unforgeable crypto-ledger of changes to common codebases that can be edited by multiple untrusted parties (open source).
- ralusek 5y ago
  That's not a block chain, though. A distributed ledger is one thing. A block chain is a specific technology to implement a distributed ledger. A block chain is specifically a linked-list-esque data structure with immutability through some irreproducible "cost," e.g. proof of work, proof of stake, etc, which in turn serves as the mechanism for arriving at a distributed consensus. Git histories are fully mutable, and adding to the ledger is still controlled by gatekeepers. I guess you could argue that forks allow it to bypass gatekeepers, but it really just moves gatekeepers from one place to another.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Git histories are only as immutable as the signatures applied to them. There are plenty of git repositories that follow rebase only "linked-list" history policies and require commits to be signed and through distributed consensus agree on what is the most recent commit to next commit against to keep the history a straight line. On the other side, forks happen in block chains all the time and it is an illusion that a block chain is only ever a "linked-list". It's just as much of a DAG at a technical level. The "cost" mechanics create a marketplace distinction between forks (branches in the DAG) far more than any technical distinction between them can possibly exist.
  - atonse 5y ago
    Well you cannot change a git history without completely changing the hashes. Which is similar to blockchain. I see it as similar to CBC in crypto, where the previous block’s value plays a huge role in the next block’s encrypted value. Change one and you change the entire chain after that “block”
- leifg 5y ago
  This is a good example of the debate about the definition of a blockchain. Undoubtedly git's implementation is very similar to current blockchains but it's missing a reward function (PoS, PoW). So I would argue it's not a blockchain because of that.
3np 5y ago
There are multiple large entities who use it for industry manufacturing and supply chain in production (under NDA and don't want to ask if I can name any names but you'd recognize some) Also oil and gas.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  And if looked at carefully, none of those projects require blockchain and blockchain solves none of the problems they have. > Also oil and gas What about oil and gas?
  - 3np 5y ago
    Tracking and tracing it from procurement as it's flowing (transported) through containers and vehicles. There are multiple companies involved and prior to this, trust issues have made any kind of automated, efficient and consistent end-to-end tracking system difficult to introduce. Whose servers would a non-blockchain solution run on and how could all stakeholders trust the design, implementation and operations? Blockchain makes this transparent, trustless, and auditable for everyone involved. With the new system, feedback times goes from weeks to minutes. I mean, technically, the industry got by fine prior to IT as well, relying on pen and paper and telephone. Real problems are being solved, though. You seem a bit antagonistic/skeptic; I'm just answering the question for some examples of use-cases the technology is applied to today. Consider distributed databases - unless you hit a certain scale or availability requirements, you could argue that a single centralized Postgres can solve anything and that they provide no value. You could have a successful and advanced career as a data engineer never having to touch one. Yet, in certain organizations and scenarios they are a game-changer and enabler. Just because you don't see value in them does not mean that the people who do are deluded.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > Whose servers would a non-blockchain solution run on and how could all stakeholders trust the design, implementation and operations? Ah yes, unlike with blockchain where they have to trust the design and implementation of a blockchain by some third-party. > Blockchain makes this transparent, trustless, and auditable for everyone involved. Until someone comes along and says "we don't like TransportBlockhain designed and implemented by IBM, we are forming a separate coalition that uses ProcurementBlockchain designed and implemented by Tencent". Then what? > I mean, technically, the industry got by fine prior to IT as well, relying on pen and paper and telephone. Real problems are being solved, though. Ah yes. How could I forget: there are only two steps in the evolution of industry: pen-and-paper and blockchain (where blockchain somehow equals all of IT). > You seem a bit antagonistic/skeptic I am. Because every single argument for blockchain immediately devolves into heavy handwaving and "this will work because blockchain", while completely ignoring all of reality. > Yet, in certain organizations and scenarios they are a game-changer and enabler. Why is it when you ask people how exactly they change the game and enable anything, all descriptions are, at best, "there's no info, but it works because blockchain". And any available info shows that blockchain brings literally nothing to the table and solves none of the listed problems.
matlin 5y ago
The best/only one I can come up with is DNS. It requires complete global state, benefits from having a history of changes, increased distribution/decentralization makes it faster and more reliable, and it could encapsulate the economic parts of buying and selling domain names.
- junon 5y ago
  This is theoretical. DNS as it is implemented today does not use blockchain (at least, not as a standard).
  - 2cb 5y ago
    It's not hypothetical. Although you are correct it's not standard, there are multiple projects doing exactly this at various stages of development, some of which have been around for years. Handshake [1] is still very much beta but aims to replace DNS with decentralised nodes. There are also projects like Unstoppable Domains [2] and Ethereum Name Service [3] which work right now if the browser supports them. They both use the Ethereum blockchain to sell domains as NFTs. In fact the ENS was around long before the NFT hype of today. [1] https://handshake.org https://handshake.org [2] https://unstoppabledomains.com https://unstoppabledomains.com [3] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains
    - junon 5y ago
      I meant theoretical in the sense that it's not the global way of doing it. Also, decentralized != blockchain.

dmitriid 5y ago

> I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising. Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... And the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

accurrent 5y ago

Where I live, the tertiary institutions place your degree on a blockchain. TBH I have know idea why a simple digital signature would not suffice but I guess blockchain sounds cooler.

naraga 5y ago

Microsoft ION - Decentralized identity anchored in Bitcoin ledger. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-blog/ion-we-have-liftoff/ba-p/1441555 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/identity-standards-bl...

muyuu 5y ago
yea but it's built on top of bitcoin, so basically not its own blockchain
- naraga 5y ago
  true. i think that many of these L1 theoretical usecases should move to L2s of existing blockchain(s). this way you dont have to built your own incentive structure (mining) and you inherit security of base layer. anyway, still think that most usecases dont really need decentralised structure at all. definitelly anything that is natively non-digital.
  - 2cb 5y ago
    > true. i think that many of these L1 theoretical usecases should move to L2s of existing blockchain(s). This is basically the current trend. DApps being developed on existing blockchains instead of new blockchains being invented for each use case. The only reason L2 blockchains are even so big (e.g. Matic) is because of Ethereum's insane gas fees and the never ending delays in rolling out Eth2. Otherwise there'd be no real need to even have L2 blockchains, you can just run your smart contract directly on the L1 blockchain if it's efficient enough to scale properly.

johnnycerberus 5y ago

Trust in people cannot be replaced. Blockchain is achieving exactly the opposite of that, it tells us that trust and legal arrangements should be encoded into software instead of being put into effect with software.

cyanydeez 5y ago
eg, NFTs are fungible in so much that machines care about precision, whereas only an autist would notice of you modified a few pixels to change a hash. people based products need more fuzzy logic than hashes.

jyriand 5y ago

Not sure what do you mean by blockchain exactly, but maybe how about this: https://guardtime.com/ https://guardtime.com/

2cb 5y ago

There's a load of DApps using the blockchain. These are obviously built on top of cryptocurrency blockchain platforms, but they are not themselves cryptocurrencies and do run on top of blockchains. The most obvious (because it's currently very well publicised) example is NFTs and the markets they're sold on through smart contracts. I'm not making any comment on the value of NFTs themselves here, simply pointing out they have become a popular use case for blockchain technology that isn't cryptocurrency. I've also read about blockchain managed supply chain solutions including in distribution of Covid vaccines. Currently this isn't a common use case but it seems to be one that's getting pushed hard recently.

mikkel 5y ago

lbry is a blockchain of assets with an example of odyssey, a youtube competitor. It is a censorship resistant way to share information. defi is recreating traditional banking. Plenty of ways to stake USD & get loans. nfts allow artists to monetize their efforts. bat redefines how internet monetization can work, based on swarm intelligence and micropayments. audius is enabling musicians to share their creation. tokenization is a way to represent any divisible effort. Perfect for sharing ownership in a company, home, etc. There are a bunch more, way more than I'm able to keep track of. But the biggest use case of blockchain is still, imo, p2p electronic cash.

gbronner 5y ago
Seems to be cryptoransoms

qayxc 5y ago

IBM has their "TradeLens" [0] (ironically unreachable at the time of posting) product [1], which was developed for Maersk and seems to have been adopted by a few global logistics providers. [0] https://www.tradelens.com https://www.tradelens.com [1] https://docs.tradelens.com https://docs.tradelens.com

messutied 5y ago
This looks interesting, logistics and supply chain seems to be one of the few recurring use cases I see that looks somewhat promising.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Doesn't require blockchain and doesn't solve the actual problem these companies have: that the records are correct as entered.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Have you worked in these industries? Irrevocable timestamps and ordering for cryptographic signatures provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before. History can be rewritten opaquely in non-blockchain ledger systems. If all stakeholders can fully trust everyone involved (and their security), your point may hold, but that is not always the case.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > History can be rewritten opaquely in non-blockchain ledger systems. Ah yes. As if re-writing history was the primary major concern. Let's say I'm a malicious actor. I say I shipped 1 ton of gold bricks, and entered that on the blockchain that "provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before". Only one single brick reaches the final destination. No history was overwritten. So, how does blockchain help?
      - qayxc 5y ago

dspillett 5y ago

Hashed-block chains can be used to prove data history has not been tampered with, i.e. an audit log is true. If you change something in the history/audit the related blockchain from that point in time onwards becomes invalid. There needs to be some 3rd party interaction to completely believe what this chain of block hashes tells you, as someone editing history in a DB could in theory replay all other transactions and recreate the ledger from that point onwards to remove evidence of the modification. Search for "ledger tables" and "distributed ledger" for more info. The idea pre-dates cryptocurrencies by quite some time. I've seen small scale implementations of it, and talks about MS researching the area in relation to SQL Server and similar offerings. Edit: reading further down the comments, it looks like MS's work has recently left the research stage and is being offered as an alpha product in some Azure regions: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-azure-sql-database-ledger/ba-p/2200401 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-... Other comments below mention similar ledger features in other products/services too.

2cb 5y ago
Honestly, that Azure Ledger SQL idea makes more sense for today's enterprise systems than a decentralised blockchain. Not because "blockchains are bad" which unfortunately is what most of the comments have turned into, but rather because it makes a lot more sense in a business context. Azure's main competition is obviously AWS. And AWS already offer a cloud-based blockchain service used by many big names.[1] Seems to me that Microsoft is just following in their footsteps with that new approach of centralising the ledger. Basically the same thing Amazon's main offering does. Most large enterprises right now are turning to centralised cloud solutions, that's just the way the market is right now, companies just want to stick their entire businesses on hyperscalers. It's simply easier and cheaper to move an on-prem database to a cloud service than it is to create and maintain a decentralised network. Taking the blockchain's data integrity features and adding them to existing cloud services therefore makes a lot more sense for actual enterprise use today when you want to compete with AWS and sell cloud subscriptions which Azure does. I do believe decentralisation in general will mature over time, and certainly many arguments can be made in its favour including for enterprise. I do find it concerning that virtually every big company and even government organisations run everything on AWS, GCP, Azure. And once you have everything running in one of those bubbles there's lock-in. I'm sure most of us would agree that's hardly ideal. But at the end of the day if you're catering to enterprise and enterprise is saying "we want to throw everything on your servers and have you manage it for us" you have to listen to the market. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/

blamestross 5y ago

Git

blamestross 5y ago
Downvote away, but Git is the ONLY real use case out there that is successful and uses something resembling a block chain.
- 2cb 5y ago
  Are NFTs not successful then? Note I'm not trying to argue one way or another about intrinsic value or any type of moral value or any of the other unrelated tangents I often see discussions about NFTs turn into. But objectively, as a product that exists solely on top of blockchains, NFTs are very very successful. Something that has allowed multiple individuals to auction off artworks for upwards of $60m cannot be called a failed use case.
  - _manifold 5y ago
    If your metric for success is simply how much money is being pumped through it, then in a sense NFTs are successful (although NFT prices and volume have been plummeting recently [0]). However, I believe that the majority of people driving the popularity of NFTs fall into two overlapping camps: people who are simply trying to make money, and people who misunderstand or are otherwise oblivious to how the technology works and its limitations. To me it just seems more like a gold rush situation and does nothing to inspire confidence in the underlying technology. Certainly there are people out there trying to leverage NFTs for more legitimate purposes - such as digital rights management and virtual items for video games - and those applications may be dubious enough by themselves. In the way they are generally being used, though, I wouldn't call NFTs a "success" any more than the South Sea Bubble was. [0] https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/30/prices-nfts-dropping/ https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/30/prices-nfts-dropping/
  - Hjfrf 5y ago
    The only selling point of NFTs is that they are poorly understood, making them useful for fraud. Specifically wash trading/money laundering. Is that really a success?

atonse 5y ago

The most obvious and widespread use of the concept of block chains in my opinion is git. It’s quite literally a distributed, unforgeable crypto-ledger of changes to common codebases that can be edited by multiple untrusted parties (open source).

ralusek 5y ago
That's not a block chain, though. A distributed ledger is one thing. A block chain is a specific technology to implement a distributed ledger. A block chain is specifically a linked-list-esque data structure with immutability through some irreproducible "cost," e.g. proof of work, proof of stake, etc, which in turn serves as the mechanism for arriving at a distributed consensus. Git histories are fully mutable, and adding to the ledger is still controlled by gatekeepers. I guess you could argue that forks allow it to bypass gatekeepers, but it really just moves gatekeepers from one place to another.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Git histories are only as immutable as the signatures applied to them. There are plenty of git repositories that follow rebase only "linked-list" history policies and require commits to be signed and through distributed consensus agree on what is the most recent commit to next commit against to keep the history a straight line. On the other side, forks happen in block chains all the time and it is an illusion that a block chain is only ever a "linked-list". It's just as much of a DAG at a technical level. The "cost" mechanics create a marketplace distinction between forks (branches in the DAG) far more than any technical distinction between them can possibly exist.
- atonse 5y ago
  Well you cannot change a git history without completely changing the hashes. Which is similar to blockchain. I see it as similar to CBC in crypto, where the previous block’s value plays a huge role in the next block’s encrypted value. Change one and you change the entire chain after that “block”
leifg 5y ago
This is a good example of the debate about the definition of a blockchain. Undoubtedly git's implementation is very similar to current blockchains but it's missing a reward function (PoS, PoW). So I would argue it's not a blockchain because of that.

3np 5y ago

There are multiple large entities who use it for industry manufacturing and supply chain in production (under NDA and don't want to ask if I can name any names but you'd recognize some) Also oil and gas.

dmitriid 5y ago
And if looked at carefully, none of those projects require blockchain and blockchain solves none of the problems they have. > Also oil and gas What about oil and gas?
- 3np 5y ago
  Tracking and tracing it from procurement as it's flowing (transported) through containers and vehicles. There are multiple companies involved and prior to this, trust issues have made any kind of automated, efficient and consistent end-to-end tracking system difficult to introduce. Whose servers would a non-blockchain solution run on and how could all stakeholders trust the design, implementation and operations? Blockchain makes this transparent, trustless, and auditable for everyone involved. With the new system, feedback times goes from weeks to minutes. I mean, technically, the industry got by fine prior to IT as well, relying on pen and paper and telephone. Real problems are being solved, though. You seem a bit antagonistic/skeptic; I'm just answering the question for some examples of use-cases the technology is applied to today. Consider distributed databases - unless you hit a certain scale or availability requirements, you could argue that a single centralized Postgres can solve anything and that they provide no value. You could have a successful and advanced career as a data engineer never having to touch one. Yet, in certain organizations and scenarios they are a game-changer and enabler. Just because you don't see value in them does not mean that the people who do are deluded.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Whose servers would a non-blockchain solution run on and how could all stakeholders trust the design, implementation and operations? Ah yes, unlike with blockchain where they have to trust the design and implementation of a blockchain by some third-party. > Blockchain makes this transparent, trustless, and auditable for everyone involved. Until someone comes along and says "we don't like TransportBlockhain designed and implemented by IBM, we are forming a separate coalition that uses ProcurementBlockchain designed and implemented by Tencent". Then what? > I mean, technically, the industry got by fine prior to IT as well, relying on pen and paper and telephone. Real problems are being solved, though. Ah yes. How could I forget: there are only two steps in the evolution of industry: pen-and-paper and blockchain (where blockchain somehow equals all of IT). > You seem a bit antagonistic/skeptic I am. Because every single argument for blockchain immediately devolves into heavy handwaving and "this will work because blockchain", while completely ignoring all of reality. > Yet, in certain organizations and scenarios they are a game-changer and enabler. Why is it when you ask people how exactly they change the game and enable anything, all descriptions are, at best, "there's no info, but it works because blockchain". And any available info shows that blockchain brings literally nothing to the table and solves none of the listed problems.

matlin 5y ago

The best/only one I can come up with is DNS. It requires complete global state, benefits from having a history of changes, increased distribution/decentralization makes it faster and more reliable, and it could encapsulate the economic parts of buying and selling domain names.

junon 5y ago
This is theoretical. DNS as it is implemented today does not use blockchain (at least, not as a standard).
- 2cb 5y ago
  It's not hypothetical. Although you are correct it's not standard, there are multiple projects doing exactly this at various stages of development, some of which have been around for years. Handshake [1] is still very much beta but aims to replace DNS with decentralised nodes. There are also projects like Unstoppable Domains [2] and Ethereum Name Service [3] which work right now if the browser supports them. They both use the Ethereum blockchain to sell domains as NFTs. In fact the ENS was around long before the NFT hype of today. [1] https://handshake.org https://handshake.org [2] https://unstoppabledomains.com https://unstoppabledomains.com [3] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains
  - junon 5y ago
    I meant theoretical in the sense that it's not the global way of doing it. Also, decentralized != blockchain.