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> The example with the email in the court is a bad example because it is not the court's job to prove whether or not an email is fraudulent. But it’s good beca

> The example with the email in the court is a bad example because it is not the court's job to prove whether or not an email is fraudulent. But it’s good because it is acceptable, predictable, durable, and low cost. Blockchain is solving for a problem that doesn’t exist as there aren’t a ton of fraud cases in this area (accused nor proven). So perhaps there’s an argument for the new uses that would be possible without the risk of fraud but they aren’t brought up. Blockchain is more expensive than PKI and digital signatures so why propose it over a simple government PKI issuer? If the goal is to be useful in courts then certainly a government issuer is better as it’s trusted. In this case blockchain is inferior to just including PKI with every drivers license, passport, and government id. > A better example would be real estate transactions. It would be best for everyone involved to move real estate transactions to the blockchain. Not better for the consumer who has to pay more for this new feature. This is already done by closing attorneys and title search companies. Forcing local counties in the US to provide APIs is much more effective than a blockchain because the county deed office is the legal authority. The issue isn’t trust, the issue is assess. In a world where counties aren’t the source of truth for deeds a blockchain would be nice, although having a single, National registrar would be better. But since you have to ask the county if John Doe is the real owner, blockchains don’t help with this. A simple free, http, unencrypted, rest api is needed. As an engineer this bugs me because these problems are better solved with technologies other than blockchain.

Nursie 4y ago
You've run into a person here who has confused "a blockchain would fix this" with "better systems, standards and openness would fix this, the exact implementation doesn't matter so much". I ran into one last week talking about concert tickets. Apparently we could fix the problems of ticketmaster dominance by using a blockchain. When I proposed that an API+DB system would do the job just as well, and we have an authority in the picture already (the venue operator) so distributed trust was overkill, I was told "good luck getting ticketmaster to use your API system". Because apparently the data-structure and trust model now dictate how the market works, and if we just chant "blockchain" loud enough, that'll magically fix monopoly issues. It's very weird thinking. I mean, sure, if we force ticket issuing, or the land registry or whatever onto a public blockchain solution, that would address some of the issues. But the improvement comes from the forcing, not the specific tech...
- prepend 4y ago
  I’d love to see Tickmaster’s blockchain+NFT system for how horrible and anti-user it would be. I agree with both points. For a while it seemed like small venues were using indie $1 ticket processing services that would basically just generate a QR code and keep everything cheap. But those seem to be going away as Ticketmaster just takes over and turns a $1 transaction into a $20 transaction. If venues just used Shopify then they’d have their db+api solution. But I think vendors like being able to 1) reduce their work, 2) blame Ticketmaster for all fees, and 3) make more money. For the same reason vendors don’t use api+db, I don’t see them using a blockchain. Another reason is that blockchains are forever and I don’t see the value in a huge blockchain with mostly garbage data of tickets sold 50 years ago. This seems like a really unnecessary expense for something simple like temporal transactions that are meaningless after the event. An api+db can be flushed out so the storage costs are very low.

Nursie 4y ago

You've run into a person here who has confused "a blockchain would fix this" with "better systems, standards and openness would fix this, the exact implementation doesn't matter so much". I ran into one last week talking about concert tickets. Apparently we could fix the problems of ticketmaster dominance by using a blockchain. When I proposed that an API+DB system would do the job just as well, and we have an authority in the picture already (the venue operator) so distributed trust was overkill, I was told "good luck getting ticketmaster to use your API system". Because apparently the data-structure and trust model now dictate how the market works, and if we just chant "blockchain" loud enough, that'll magically fix monopoly issues. It's very weird thinking. I mean, sure, if we force ticket issuing, or the land registry or whatever onto a public blockchain solution, that would address some of the issues. But the improvement comes from the forcing, not the specific tech...

prepend 4y ago
I’d love to see Tickmaster’s blockchain+NFT system for how horrible and anti-user it would be. I agree with both points. For a while it seemed like small venues were using indie $1 ticket processing services that would basically just generate a QR code and keep everything cheap. But those seem to be going away as Ticketmaster just takes over and turns a $1 transaction into a $20 transaction. If venues just used Shopify then they’d have their db+api solution. But I think vendors like being able to 1) reduce their work, 2) blame Ticketmaster for all fees, and 3) make more money. For the same reason vendors don’t use api+db, I don’t see them using a blockchain. Another reason is that blockchains are forever and I don’t see the value in a huge blockchain with mostly garbage data of tickets sold 50 years ago. This seems like a really unnecessary expense for something simple like temporal transactions that are meaningless after the event. An api+db can be flushed out so the storage costs are very low.